Go Up
“Now help us climb with our souls into our burnurns. See us tight in.” Lily-yo said firmly, “Then carry us to the cable and stick us to it. And then good-bye. We Go Up, and leave the group in your hands. You are the living now.”
“As they finished their work, a shadow fell over them. A mile long body drifted down towards them. A traverser, that gross vegetable equivalent of a spider was descending to the Tips…”
From “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss © 1962
Technical aspects: Xfrog 3.5 was used to create the entire traverser, the traverser’s web strands and the foreground ivy. Rhino3D was used to create the things like the branch and the flying “rayplanes”. Poser 4.01 was used to pose and create the human figure. The same custom texture maps for “Suckerbird ambush” were used for the these figures.
Everything was imported, combined and rendered in Bryce 5.01, using a custom Sky Lab setting with deep, thick green haze to add of distance blurring. Achieving a realistic sense of scale was the most difficult aspect of this image. The rayplanes were placed carefully and visual lines within the composition were used to solve this and finally a slight depth of field applied.
Post-production work in Corel PhotoPaint 10 consisted of correcting the figure joints and cleaning up the traverser web strands. Bryce-created masks controlling a Gaussian Blur and Flaming Pear’s Melancolytron plugin filter finished up the image.