The last straw
“The last faint echoes of Manfred’s shot had all but died in the huge empty temple hall. Crystal turned to Manfred who had an idiotic lopsided grin on his face, an incredulous scowl on her brow. “That was the solid gold statue of Sekhmet-Hathor lost for 4000 years”, she snarled, “a priceless treasure, and you have just destroyed it! You trigger-happy oaf!”
“But it is only a statue, liebchen” he crooned, “I thought it vos a bandit hiding in ze shadows! Anivey dis iz such a typical female emotional react…!”
His words ceased suddenly with a dull crack and thud and the whoosh of his breath being pummeled out of his lungs as Crystal Steele’s ice-cool temper flared white-hot and she brought up her knee in a bone-crunching blow deep into his solar plexus. He was lifted off his feet by the blow and his gun tumbled out of his grasp. He dropped like a sack of coal to the floor…
“That, von Högenbüsem” she snapped, “is the last straw!”
Technical aspects: The final “planned” image in the series of Manfred von Högenbüsem and Crystal Steele.
Again DAZ3D’s Stephanie and Michael 2.0 were used with extensive morphs and magnets. Victoria 2 with the “Rulers of Egypt” clothing (both DAZ3D products) created the basis of the golden statue. The 2 main figures were posed in Poser 4.01 and exported to Bryce 5 in Wavefront .OBJ format. The statue was exported first as a DXF file and then “faceted” in Rhino3D before exporting to Bryce 5.
The entire temple was created as a set in Rhino3D using reference photos of various archeological sites in Egypt. A number of volumetric spotlights and one volumetric parallel light was used in the scene with the Sun switched off in the Skylab. A few small filler spots were placed to add detail to an overall dark image.
Corel Photopaint 10 was used to fix a few glitches in the final render mainly on Crystal’s hair Manfred’s mustache and to add softer folds to his trenchcoat. My new Wacom tablet helped a lot here! A slight Gamma and Aetherize filter was applied to the image to add a bit of “glow” to finish off.