The two mysteries

“Gorillas are not hostile, dangerous creatures. They are wild animals – yes – but actually peaceful and shy – unlike the image conjured up by Hollywood, popular fiction writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, and humankind’s own natural distrust of all things wild and “untamed”.

Anyone seeing “Gorillas in the Mist” will see that the human ape is in fact the most dangerous and deadly creature on the face of this planet, and not the shy mountain gorilla.”

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Technical aspects: DAZ 3D‘s two “Mystery Models”, Stephanie and the Gorilla LE were posed in Poser 4 inspired by an imaginary scene where a woman encounters a huge ape in the jungle. The more I worked on getting a confrontation scene, the more I found it not to work, and a tender moment emerged. Once again, the image had its own plans.

The Stephanie character was morphed with Extreme Morph 3D. The DAZ 3D Gorilla uses the DAZ standard textures for their Gorilla LE. The figures were exported into Bryce 4.0. The background was created using vertical terrains with transparency mapped textures from an old CD I had from Digarts called Jungle 3D. The foreground leaves were also added in similar fashion. (There is an old, but good tutorial at GardenHose.com that helped me.) There was a single volumetric light to light the overall scene to give a misty jungle feel. There was also a couple of small radial lights to give a bit of modelling to the foreground figures. After the final render – (a 13 hour ordeal!) a distance matte was rendered in Bryce to be used later in Corel PhotoPaint to give a depth-of-field to isolate the figures from the background.

(26 January, 2003 “The Two Mysteries” has been awarded the prestigious 2003 Golden Tori Award for the “Best use of Poser”.).

Worlds in the Making