Making ready
“Sandwiched between the high canyonlands of the Rakta’M Wastelands and the scarp of Varu’Mandira where her clan’s water shrine was hidden, lay the Ashman’Rak’Sh, the “Devil’s Anvil” a flat featureless plateau of sandblasted basalt, feared and respected by the Sadusi as the hottest, harshest and most terrifying region of the whole of Wesdraken IV.
The dromas where docile after their daytime hibernation but once the suns had set, they could swiftly cover vast distances before the next day’s dawn. Malena quickly checked the seals on her moisture suit and took a bearing on the setting suns to confirm their current position before night fell.”
Technical aspects: An enormous amount of time was spent creating this picture. The “dromas” took 56 hour alone to create! The texture and bump maps for Malena and her male companion were totally recreated as well to be compatible with the new Poser 4 figures.
The droma creatures were modeled using sPatch to create the basic body shape, and then Amorphium was used to add the musculature and body armour. The harness was created using sPatch objects and Bryce 4.1 primtives.
The moisture suit’s headgear were modeled as well with sPatch and converted to Wavefront .OBJs with 3DWin, a freeware file converter. Steven Cox’s UVMapper was used to create the texture mappings and Corel Photo Paint 8 for the texture maps and final post-production.
Post-production consisted of general cleanups of the texture maps, removal of modelling and rendering artifacts and a 25% adaptive unsharp filter.
The composition was based on a small pencil sketch. The image had to communicate a vast open plain and elements were carefully placed to lead the viewers eye across the picture from closeup (right) to infinity (left).