- The cow picture is a royalties-free photograph taken from the
CD-ROM Corel "Barnyard Animals" (1994). It is used as a texture on a plane and
displayed so that its flat nature is not revealed.
- The cow texture on the wall is a bozo texture. Its colours
were sampled in the cow photograph.
- Urk is a small fishermen village in the Netherlands. I spent
an afternoon there in 1996. The sky and the sea had those beautiful colours that I tried
to render here.
- The cow and the dolphins were obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- An improved version of the grass code can be found in here.
- The cow was obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- The "brain" is a blob object. It will remind the
fans of the French comics artist Moebius of one of his lesser-known strips called
"Escale à Pharagonescia".
- The V-2 idea in the story is borrowed (and adapted) from the
surrealistic American writer Thomas Pynchon, who wrote about such a strange correspondence
in his 1973 novel "Gravity's Rainbow".
- In the original French version, the title "Prions"
means both the prion protein itself, that is held responsible for the so-called "Mad
Cow" disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) and "Let's pray".
- The cows and bull were obtained at the 3D cafe.
- An improved version of the grass code can be found in here.
- The story of the 7 sleek and fat cows and 7 ugly and gaunt
ones can be found in the Bible (Genesis, 41).
- The cow was obtained at the 3D cafe.
- The devil is a Poser character whose human head was replaced
by an Anubis-like head made of a blob object. The original 1993 version was CSG only.
- The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian typically used the
"Golden Number" (around 1.618) as a ratio for some of his paintings (Red and
White, for instance). Here, the ratio is 0.67.
- Achatinas are very large and comestible African snails.
Helix aspera is the scientific name of the common snail.
- A whole story could be built upon the idea of a collective
dream.
- The creatures are simple CSG.
- In the Ancient Rome, the houses were protected by strange
bronze amulets. One, that can be seen at the British Museum, represents a human penis with
the legs of a lion (the lion being also, and undoubtedly, a male). In the picture, the
Guardians are living amulets who watch over their owner's house.
- Mythical creatures are no longer a source for inspiration.
Bigfoot and Nessie are nothing but ridiculous dummies. Too bad.
- The creature's skin is an isosurfacic texture, whose equation
is derived from the one given as an example by Ryoichi Suzuki
: function {(cos(x)+cos(y)+cos(z)+3-noise3d(x,y,z)*1) | (cos(2*x)+cos(2*y)+cos(2*z)+2)}
- In 1999, I had the surprise to see a strangely close relative
of this picture used in a TV commercial. Unfortunately I could never tape it.
- The horse was obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- The sky was created by applying turbulence to a pigment map
made up of already turbulent color maps.
- "Scales" is a follow-up of the "Hunters",
on a different ground.
- The branches and the background are the products of a macro
that extrudes a spline curve along a spline path (macro
available, without the scales). The scales are small flattened spheres oriented along the
normal.
- Much of this picture was made in hotel rooms.
- My first pictures were heavily influenced by the work of the
American photographer Sandy Skoglund. The "Hunters" mixes the cats of Skoglund's
"Radioactive cats" with her red foxes from "Fox games".
- The 1993 CSG cats were transformed into Poser cats in 1998.
- Many pictures, like this one, deal about freakiness in an
environnement that makes it seem casual.
- The Poser characters have been compressed by Warp's Mesh
Compressor and the spikes by a customised version of one of Chris Colefax's mesh macros.
- The ground and the wall are a product of the
"pattern" function available in the recent POV patches (Superpatch &
Megapov) and in POV 3.5.
- The monsters are Rhino meshes.
- The "coral" is made of blobs, individually textured
and randomly placed along the y axis.
- This picture was post-processed by exchanging colour
components. The original version is orange.
- All the characters are Poser ones. The little people (5 men
and 5 women) were converted to the mesh2 format (Megapov, POV 3.5) and placed on the
vertices of the big character, obtained after conversion through the Mesh Compressor.
- The wall is a height_field derived from an acrylic painting
and textured with a texture_map.
- The bottom of the wall was obtained by superposing a
height-field (crackle pattern) and a texture (facet pattern from Megapov). Because these
two patterns are based on the same algorithm, they are a perfect match.
- The rhinos and the runners are Poser/Zygote characters.
- The sphere is an isosurface. The geometry is given by a
pigment function based on a bitmap showing a maze pattern. This bitmap was obtained in
POV-Ray with a pigment algorithm developed by SamuelT.
- The society/building idea has been used by UK novelist J. G.
Ballard in "High-rise", where the wealthy and civilised inhabitants of a
gigantic sky-scraper revert to sheer barbary (cannibalism included).
- The "building" is made of an isosurfacic equation
that mixes square roots, cosine and exponentials. The "spike" is given by a
1/(x²+z²) term in the equation.
- "Bonnemère" means literally "Goodmother"
in French.
- This picture was inspired by the works of the contemporary
sculptor Takis. He has used traffic lights in several of his sculptures (though, as far as
I know, never distorted traffic lights). An impressive sculpture of his, featuring
spiralling shafts and lights is displayed in the business district of La Défense, near
Paris. Sitting on the stairs at the foot of the sculpture, you have a magnificent
quasi-aerial view of the Champs-Elysées, from La Défense down to the Arc de Triomphe. By
the way, a traffic light near my home was hit by car and looked more or less like the ones
in the picture. It was still working when they replaced it.
- It was originally done in 1994 and improved in 1997.
- The zebra (in fact a horse with a striped texture !) was
obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- This picture (at least the buildings and the chimneys) was
inspired by an eponymous photo by Leo Erken (Agence VU) published in the French newspaper Libération (27/04/1996). Leo Erken
has worked intensively in Eastern Europe.
- Another take at Dino Buzatti's Desert of the Tartars... I
didn't realise until recently how Buzatti's short stories had been an inspiration for
mine. I should quote Fredric Brown too, a master of the one-line short story.
- This picture was featured in Computer Grafica, an Italian
magazine, in 1997.
- The cathedral is made from the same pipe elements as in The
Swing and Atlas. The elements are put together with a
macro derived from the pyramid.pov macro available in the Povray 3.1. directories.
- The French version of the title, "Le Combat des
Chefs", refers to an eponymous Asterix the Gaul comic book, where Gallic chiefs fight
each other mounted on shields supported by their men. The picture was actually inspired by
a scene of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, where a giant emerges from the sea with a ship on
his head.
- It's the oldest picture of the whole site.
- The characters were modelled using Constructive Solid Geometry
with POV 2.2 (Poser did not exist then).
- The breasts are built with a piriform equation, as narrated in
the "Mars" story.
- This picture was inspired by the wallpapers in James Ivory's
movie "The remains of the day". Lord Darlington's castle interiors are papered
with an aggressive cyan blue, with a golden trim, contrasting with its gloomy inhabitants.
- In the absence of radiosity, the parts left untouched by any
direct light tend to look dull : unlit parts do not show highlights. You can still put
lots of light sources around, but it can be somehow difficult to adjust them without side
effects (and it slows down the rendering). One unexpensive solution is to place a
shadowless dim light (possibly a spotlight or a light with a fade distance) where the
camera is. The first time I used this little trick was for this picture. The shadowed
parts of creatures' "feet" seemed flat ; with the "point of view"
lighting, they got minimal highlights.
- The Cestello Annunciation is at the Uffizi Museum in Florence.
In one version of this picture, this painting hanged on the wall.
- The Maestà (Majesty in Italian) is a traditional
representation of the Holy Virgin, sitting on a throne with the Child on her lap. Giotto,
Cimabue and Duccio painted Maestà in the 13e and 14e century. In traditional painting,
Mary is represented with a red robe and a blue mantle, and I borrowed these colours for
the whole picture. In spite of the aforesaid religious references, this picture should not
be construed as religious.
- The wall and the throne are isosurfacic equations.
- The idea for this picture came in front of a painting by the
contemporary Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky, that shows some sort of coloured grid. The
vision of a chaotic hill with characters on the top came to me immediately.
- There are around 20 different objects taken from previous
scenes. For instance, the pipes come from The Swing and the lights come from Evolution.
The cars are meshes found a long time ago on the Net. The Chevy 57 was originally
translated to POV-Ray by Keith Rule.
- The objects are displayed on an ascending spiral. Each object
has its own texture that depends from its position in the spiral.
- The picture is overdetailed for a 800 x 600 rendering and was
made for a big size printout.
- This is the only Bryce 3D picture in the site. It was much
easier to position precisely the 20 or so Poser meshes with a graphical interface than
doing so by trial and error in POV-Ray.
- The horse was obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- The soil is an isosurfacic equation.
- The story is set during the German invasion of Norway in April
1940. The Germans met an unsuspected and heroical resistance from the Norwegian air force,
who could only oppose outdated Gloster Gladiators II biplane fighters to the
Messerschmits. The Gladiators actually delayed the invasion for a few hours. Only one
intact Gladiator remained at the end of the battle.
- The wing is a blob
object .
- The lens flare was obtained through Nathan Kopp's Lensflare include
file.
- Like some of the other pictures featuring doors and windows,
this one is ambiguous : optimistic (door opens) or pessimistic (door closes) depending on
your present mood.
- The flowers were obtained at the 3D Cafe.
- I cannot remember where I picked up the tree (it's not from
the 3D Cafe).
- The duck picture is a royalties-free photograph taken from the
CD-ROM Corel "Barnyard Animals". It is used as a texture on a plane and
displayed so that its flat nature is not revealed.
- The trees were build with Laurens Lapre's L-Parser. It is
the same tree shown at three different stages of growth (two trees are actually identical
but the scaling and rotation are different).
- In the original French version of the story, the word used for
condom is "préservatif". It used to mean the same as in English, i.e.,
something that preserves, but it is today the official and common name for the now popular
rubber device. Strangely, French Canadians still use the word in its former meaning,
causing funny misunderstandings.
- The asteroid was built with John Beale's GForge and the Orb-Cyl utilities.
GForge generates image files to be used as height fields, or to be processed into rocks
and asteroids by Orb-Cyl.
- The "shark" was modelled with the beta version of Rhino. Actually, it is a mixture
between a shark and a tuna !
- The striped pattern on the asteroid was inspired by British SF
cover artist Chris Foss' extraordinary painting of a camouflaged pirate spaceship on a
striped asteroid, made for an aborted movie adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. The movie
was made much later, in 1984, and unfortunately did not use Foss' work.
- The rocks are all isosurfacic equations. I took the simple
primitive equations for the sphere and the cylinder and added a few sine and cosine
function to alter the shapes.
- The three "creatures" on the left are Julia sets.
- The Nasa mission on Mars was on the news when I made this
picture, thus the title.
- I wanted a dark, deep, mythical, monumental, tempting forest,
drawn in ancient-looking colours.
- "La selva de la palabras" means "the forest of
words" in Spanish.
- The texts are the first paragraphs of "One hundred years
of solitude" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "The life of Lazarillo de
Tormes", a Spanish anonymous novel of the 16th century.
- The "trees" are Povray-programmed meshes.
- This picture is a byproduct of Mouseless.
Sources are available for the lamppost and the cobblestones (the latter macro was modified to get the
random effect).
- The loose strands have been created with a "hair"
algorithm by Tsutomu Higo.
- Two Poser cats, meow !
- The ships are huge meshes made with Rhino beta.
- The texture is an image_map made with Paintshop Pro and used
both as a pigment and a normal map. This image was also used as a height field for the
background.
- Julia sets made nice little spaceships... Random placement in
space.
- The tree was created with the MakeTree macro.
- The inspiration for this picture comes from an
"installation" by the contemporary Lebanese artist Mouna Hatoum. One of her work
features a group of wire cages where a light bulb goes up and down. The shadows move
accordingly on the walls of the room where the installation is, thus plunging the
spectator in total disorientation.
- This image was created in 1994 and improved in 1997.
- Some of my first pictures were totally paranoid, because fear
and anguish are feelings easy to express with limited means. It takes a lot of talent to
represent joy and happiness without making it sugary.
- Before I started using Poser, I used to build humanoid
characters by Constructive Solid Geometry. Arms and legs were made up of scaled sections
of spheres and cylinders, or, as in this picture, of quadrics (2nd order polynomial
equations). The formula here is : quadric {<1.0, -1.0, 1.0>,<0.0, 0.0,
0.0>,<0.0, 0.0, 0.0>,-0.3}
- Heliotropism is the aptitude of certain plants to turn
themselves towards the sun. Sunflowers are typically heliotropic.
- The war alluded to in the story is the 80-year conflict
between Spain and the Dutch United Provinces, who freed themselves from the Spanish in
1648. Of course, the medieval weapon is totally anachronic in this context.
- The painter Carl Fabritius was killed in the 1654 powder blast
that almost destroyed the City of Delft. Vermeer was his executor. Samuel Van Hoogstraten
(brother of Jaap ?) is credited as the first artist to paint (in 1654) a truly
photorealistic object-containing box.
- The patterns on the ground were copied by the Dutch artist and
engraver Maurits Cornelis Escher during one of his trips to the Alhambra palace of
Granada. The drawing in Escher's notebook is dated May 24th 1936 (here is one absolutely
useless piece of trivia). Though I did this by hand when I made this image in 1994, today
I'd probably use François Dispot's Arabeske utility.
- The baby picture used here could be found in several morphing
utilities in the 90's.
- This image was done in 1994 and improved in 1996.
- I don't endorse at all the character's somewhat grim
point of view about office life in the story. It sounds like a Dilbert parody. I have
great office co-workers who are also friends, but I've been told this is not the case
everywhere.
- The glass model is a lathe object (source here).
- Because of the soft shadows, multiple reflections and
refractions, this picture took forever to render : 6 months at 800 x 600 pixels on a
Pentium 200 Pro running Windows NT. In the last weeks, I had to borrow an array of 4
Pentium 200 (to my said colleagues) so that it could be finished before the end of 1997. I
had cranked up the max_trace_level at 20. I tried to decrease it to 10 : it reduced
drastically the rendering time but left the image much darker, so that I left it at 20. I
was recently told, to my retrospective dismay, that reducing the adc_bailout value could
have helped a lot. Always read the fine manual...
- The tiles are 3D objects, individually textured with a
function that randomly associates a colour to the <x,y> position of the tile.
- The Poser characters' human heads were changed for an
Anubis-like head made of a blob object. Actually, the characters look like the Anubis
drawn by French illustrator Enki Bilal in his graphic novel "La Foire aux
Immortels" (translated in English as "Gods in Chaos" in 1983).
- The nipples of the female character are small flat spheres.
- The "story" is a parody of the "movie reviews
for parents" as provided by Screen
It ! The people at Screen It! establish, for every important movie released in the US,
the list of the potentially offensive, disrespectful or morally condemnable words,
attitudes and situations it contains. It is a lot of fun to read, particularly when the
reviews detail what can or cannot be seen in sex scenes, or when the villain's plot to
rule the Earth is considered as a truly nasty case of bad attitude. However, the people
who run Screen It are not the moralising crackpots you'd expect : they really love
(and know) movies, and the reviews are very good indeed. The general tone is actually
tongue-in-cheek.
- The walls are made of an isosurfacic equation (a modification
of the one in La Maestà).
- The glass model is a lathe object (source here).
- The face was made by putting a friend's face on a black &
white scanner (I experimented it on myself first), and then using the resulting picture as
a height-field. The scanner I used was actually quite dim and the operation was harmless,
but I would not encourage people to do this on other, brighter scanners (and please don't
do it on a copier !).
- The chairs started out as a DNA double helix.
- The "shower" is large mesh made with Rhino beta.
- Poser 3 skeletons...
- The tree was obtained with a macro derived from an algorithm
originally written by D. Skarda for Ryoichi Suzuki's isosurface patch. MakeTree, a much
improved version of this macro, is available here
- Of course, this picture is very ambiguous. It could be a dream
(being loved by so many people) or a nightmare (the people who love you may crush you in
the process, or maybe it's not about love at all). I didn't want the picture to be sexual,
so I did some Poser mammary reduction and ended up hiding the breasts altogether.
- 10 different Poser hands, 12000 copies of them in two layers
of 6000 each.
- This image is the 2000 remake of a 1996 picture. In fact there
were two versions, one with the sharks and one with the drowned man, and the two have been
merged here. Probably I will update it one of these days with a better female character.
- The woman, the arm and the shark are Poser characters.
- The bed cover is made of bezier patches sawn together by an
algorithm created by Ron Parker, who used it in his IRTC picture called
"Here we go a-borrowing". The code is provided at the IRTC site (see the January-February 1999 round).
- This image is the 1999 remake of a 1996 picture.
- The madmen, initially CSG constructs, were replaced by Poser
character. Only the spider remains from the original picture.
- The frogman is a Poser character found at http://www.renderosity.com.
- The frogs are also Poser/Zygote characters.
- The curtain is an isosurface.
- Old cities with their intricate mazes of narrow streets are a
real challenge for computer generated pictures. As much as I like the smoothness and
purity of contemporary architecture, I think that the eye needs the chaos of natural
shapes. Alfama is an old popular district in Lisbon. I took many photos there in May 1997,
and one of these was the basis for this picture. Of course, everything was reconstructed
in CSG.
- "O Sonhador de Alfama" means "The Dreamer of
Alfama", in Portuguese.
- This picture uses area lights and radiosity. Radiosity is
particularly noticeable in the way the left walls and the bottom of the balconies are lit
: the light comes from the white walls on the right, not from a direct light source.
Without radiosity, the picture would seem totally flat.
- The pattern on the Dreamer is the "spiral2" pattern
type in POV.
- The wrought iron arm that supports the street light was drawn
by hand in Paint Shop Pro in black and white and the resulting picture was used as a
height field such as this one.
- All the clothes are bezier patches.
- Cities in flight is a SF novel by James Blish and the
Chris Foss paperback cover was a strong personal influence.
- Would the giant be the dream of the lonely woman on the right
?
- Because this scene contains a very large quantity of lights
and objects, it was necessary to turn off the light buffers (-UL switch).
The eggs and the sand are isosurfacic equations. The egg
equation is simply an ellipsoid (sqrt(x*x +y*y*0.5 +z*z) -5) with some 3D noise added. 3D
noise was also added to the sand equation (a much more complex one). 3D noise is much
better than "normal" modifications because it really alters the shape and not
just simulates the bumps. It slows down the rendering, too...
- The final egg (simplified version not using the isosurface
available here) is the difference between a first
egg shape, a second and slightly smaller one (then you got the empty shell), and a
star-shaped prism (then you got the hole).
- Another flying city/building/island. It could be the nightmare
or the dream of a lifelong city dweller.
- All objets but the building are Julia sets.
- The whole picture was built with isosurfacic equations, but
the two apartments. It was actually impossible to use the isosurface in a difference (the
results were all wrong). Thus, the apartments were built with the standard materials
(spheres and all).
- This picture is voluntarily unrealistic. I wanted a universe
of coloured lines, in the style of some Paul Klee or Hundertwasser paintings.
- I don't like so much to write social comments, but why being a
social worker, or an educator, is a globally undervalued, underpaid profession when it's
so needed ? The answer is obvious : because no shareholder has any immediate profit from
this kind of work. That's the way things are, and it's very unpleasant anyway.
- The buildings are meshes generated by a macro. Textures are
randomly defined.
- This picture was created in a hotel room in Madrid while
watching the "interview" of Bill Clinton by Kenneth Starr on CNN. I had trouble
concentrating on both activities and I finally turned off the TV.
- If you live in an old city like Paris, it is very tempting to
try to recreate the atmosphere of the past, when this past seems to surface at every
street corner, in spite of the multiple layers of make-up plastered by modern urbanism.
Photographs by Charles Marville or Eugène Atget let you imagine how Haussman's or Zola's
Paris was, particularly when you recognise in an old picture the facade or gable of a
still surviving building.
- Two weeks were necessary to create the macros for the lampposts, windows,
balconies, stairs, walls etc., and two other
weeks were spent in building the 10 different houses, the cat and then putting everything
together. Almost every object had its dummy counterpart to speed up test renderings.
- The picture was overdetailed for a 600 x 800 rendering and was
made for a big size printout. Just try to find the second cat...
- The picture should not be construed as a metaphor of critical
and market appraising of Art ! The fish do sincerely like the paintings.
- The "shark" was modelled with the beta version of Rhino.
- The paintings on the walls are mine. It's acrylic abstract
painting on A4 paper.
- The head and butterflies textures were hand-painted in Paint
Shop Pro 4. The trick is to render first the objects to paint using an orthographic
projection. The textures are painted on the resulting picture. Once completed, this
picture is used as an image map : because of the orthographic projection, the shapes of
the image map and of the object match exactly. Translating and scaling the image map still
require a few run tests, though.
- In real life, Ada Babbage was Charles Babbage's wife and the
daughter of Lord Byron.
- A lot is already revealed in the story about the way the
windows and the walls were made, but I won't disclose the equations behind Isadora's
Grids. If you use a version of POV-Ray that supports isosurfaces, you can have a lot of
fun figuring out your own grids. You'll need tinkering with a lot of cosine and sine
functions, keeping one direction (y, for instance) flat.
- Setting up all this tubing was easier than it seems. The trick
was to create first an "alphabet" of pipe sections : 7 types of pipe elements were defined, each one with its own
smaller tubing, rings, rivets, wheels and openings. These "letters" were
assembled into "words", and these words were assembled into "phrases".
The whole scene is made up of 7 "phrases", with different sizes, rotations, and
locations.
- Each length of pipe has a "body double" consisting
of a cylinder of exactly the same length, to be used during testing. That speeds up
considerably the test runs.
- There are around 100.000 objects in the final scene and 84
light sources : it was necessary to turn off the light buffers (-UL), otherwise the scene
would still being parsed !
- The picture has been updated in 1999 so that it could use a
better Poser character.
- The landscape is one large isosurface (Isadora's Grid). The
texture is also an isosurfacic equation (close to the one used in Shopping frenzy)
- The "objet" is made up of the same pipe elements as in The
swing and The Cathedral. The elements are put together
with a macro derived from the pyramid.pov macro available in the Povray 3.1. directories.
- This picture is made up of only two objects : a Poser
character and a height-field based on a real fingerprint found on the Net (if you
recognise yourself, just tell me).
- This picture, like Breaking out, was
a project of poster for a computer art show.
- B&W scan of a hand turned into a height-field, media, area
light, Poser, you know everything...
- Several Poser limbs... The ground is a giant blob. The easy
chair was made with a macro.
- The tree was created with a new prototype of tree macro, which
should have replaced the present macro. This
work has been discontinued due to the lack of time and computer power.
- The hill was created with GForge. The plants were created
with Plant
Studio and the grass with my grass macro, and
the positioned on the height-field with the trace function (Superpatch/Megapov).
- The dog is a Poser animal.
- The wreck was obtained with a modification of the MadPipe macro where the cylinders have been replaced
with noisy isosurfaces.
- The fish is a Poser animal.
- This image used a lot of macros for the windows, cobblestones,
columns, arches etc.
- The zebras and the lion are Poser animals. The lion texture
was redone from photos, since the original Poser texture was really bad.
- The Serengeti is a natural park in Tanzania. Gary Larson (The
Far Side) used to make pictures about it, like in the "Poodles of the
Serengeti".
- A first version of this image was made in a few minutes for
the celebration of Ken Tyler's birthday. The inspiration came from one of Mr Tyler's
pictures, and from a picture by Lance
Birch (look in the gallery section of Lance's web site, The Zone). The picture was
later refined for the Book of Beginnings.
- The face is a Poser 4 mesh. It was converted to the PCM format
with Warp's Mesh Compressor and then cut in half so that the top and bottom parts could be
processed separately. The bottom part is a mesh, while the top part vertices were used to
created the wire structure.
- The skin texture was created in several steps. First, the
bottom part of the face was fed to UVMapper to obtain a UV map and create the UV
coordinates. The resulting bitmap was used as a templace for the image_map and the
bump_map. Particularly, the skin pores were created by spraying noise on the bump_map in
Picture Publisher.
- The painters are Poser characters.
- The eye was obtained using one of SamuelT's wonderful bits of
POV-Ray code.
- All the animals are Poser/Zygote characters, converted to the
mesh2 format.
- The closest buildings are CSG constructs based on real
buildings in the Butte aux Cailles street, Paris.
- The far buildings are simple heigh-fields.
- This image uses radiosity (Superpatch).
- The very humid "Element of Crime", from Danish
director Lars Von Trier, was the movie that inspired this picture.
- A first version, done in 1994, was replaced by the present one
in 1999.
- The buildings are a byproduct of the previous image.
- The streetlamp is a macro.
- The rats and the lion head are Poser/Zygote characters.
- The chess game is a real one.
- According to rabbinical legends, Lilith was Adam's first wife,
and she left him because she couldn't accept his rule. She took refuge in a cave, where
she lived with demons. According to other traditions, she was herself a Babylonian demon,
and she is briefly alluded to as such in the Bible (Isaiah 34:14).
- This image was made after Eve's morning (see next), further to
a remark by Glen Berry, who has a
real fondness for Lilith.
- The library was made by a macro.
- The globe code is here.
- The gremlins and the frogs are Poser/Zygote characters.
- The skull was sent to me by Ken Tyler. It is a highly detailed
3DS model, probably a 3D scan of the real thing.
- The pipes were obtained with the MadPipe macro.
- Adam, Eve, the cat and the rat are all Poser/Zygote
characters. Eve includes many "morph targets" found at http://www.renderosity.com and other Poser-related
forums. Morph targets expand the range of expression of the standard Poser figures. In
this case, morphs were used for her face and breasts.
- In spite of using morphs, the rendered Eve wasn't quite
perfect, so she was touched up here and there to remove various blemishes (and
particularly some strange rolls of fat on her thigh). However, this was the first time I
was able to use a Poser character in close-up.
- A diary of this image is available here. It is the complete picture's story, from the
early drafts to the final image.
- This picture won the November-December 2000 Internet Ray-Tracing Competition
("Gardens" topic)
The Births of Z
are a part or the universe of Z, a shape-shifting entity created for the Museum Hermeticum of
Dominique de Bardonnèche. The graphic and literary ventures of Z can be seen and read in
the Z-Files
cabinet in the Museum Hermeticum.
The 7 births (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) were created
in the following way :
- Character creation in Poser and conversion to POV-Ray with
Crossroads.
- Compression by Mika Nieminen's Mesh Compressor.
- The compressed mesh is read by macros adapted from Chris
Colefax's mesh macros. The Mesh Compressor and the original macros can be found at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/.
- The macro writes the position of each triangle in an array,
and, depending on the clock variable, creates an object (triangle, letter, blob, cone,
sphere) with its particular colour and position.
- The Z sequences were made for an animation, too large to be
shown here.
