The chamber of Mazarbul
“…a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber; behind him his followers clustered in the doorway. His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear. With a thrust of his huge hide shield he turned Boromir’s sword and bore him backwards, throwing him to the ground. Diving under Aragorn’s blow with the speed of a striking snake he charged into the Company and thrust with his spear straight at Frodo…”
The Bridge of Khazad-Dum – Book 2 – Fellowship of the Ring
Technical aspects: Another scene I have always wanted to do from “Lord of the Rings”
As in “Last Stand at Parth Galen” and “Ride to Gondor”, I wanted to give the image my own unique interpretation rather than imitating Peter Jackson, so no cave troll this time, but the proper orc-chieftain!
DAZ’s Michael 3 was used to create Frodo, Boromir and the orc-chieftain, and most of the armor, shields and weapons were created from scratch with Rhino3D. DAZ’s Troll did make a small cameo but in the shadows off to the left along with some good old P4 Dorks heavily morphed to look like nasty little Moria orcs!
The POV (Point Of View) was very important here in order to capture the action and the claustrophobic feeling of the scene. The entire chamber was built using Rhino3D, not just a few elements. (I still to this day don’t know why I went to this effort as you can barely see on small corner of it and even that is pretty dimly lit.) Again I guess I had to have it complete to have it visualized in my mind.
The end result was a mammoth 2 Gb file that was bought into Bryce 5.5. My new Poser (Poser 6) was then used to pose each character separately and then with importing and careful placing in Bryce 5.5, 7 separately-rendered files were then composited into the final image. One of my own baggy “pirate” shirts with me posing in it with some careful lighting and a digital camera provided the raw material for Frodo’s shirt as the DAZ’s Poet’s Shirt just lacks the volume and the softness of a real shirt.
Corel PhotoPaint 12, was used to composite the images on top of the rendered shirt to give more volume and realism. Frodo’s sword “Sting” was enhanced with some of the “Jepe’s FlameZ” package just to give some “elvish fire”. Finally a few tweaks with Corel Painter 8 and some cleanup with PhotoPaint 12 resulted in the image you see. This time the image only took 4 months to complete unlike the last one which took 13 months!