Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

Stranger in a strange land

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Back in the days of Bryce 3D, I made an image using a Poser 2 figure, showing a rather hard-faced young woman with a short, masculine hair style, exploring a rather Earth-like world. I posted the image to an earlier version of this site and named it - rather unoriginally - 'Stranger in a strange land'.

When I rebuilt this site, it didn't seem worth including the image. The technology has moved on, and what once seemed impressive (back in the days of Bryce 3D and Poser 2) now looks horribly crude. However, it turns out that 'stranger in a strange land' is good linkbait, being the title of both a book by Robert Heinlein and an album by Iron Maiden. The logs reported a lot of traffic coming from people looking for the missing image.

In a shameless attempt to boost my pageviews a little, I decided to create a new version of the image. Instead of the crude Poser 2 figure with painted-on clothing and a Poser 2 male hairstyle, I would use state-of-the-art models; instead of Bryce 3D, I'd use a modern renderer (in the end I went with Vue 8). The goal was to produce something broadly similar in spirit, but perhaps not exactly the same, and drop it in as a substitute.

This is the result. The original image showed the woman wading in a shallow stream; in this one, she's on an arid world. The original image had strange alien structures in the background; here, there's a spaceship. Still, there's a limited amount of overlap.

The image, needless to say, has nothing to do with either Heinlein or Iron Maiden. Sorry.

I actually abandoned the image for a while until I went through a period of entering lots of online contests (and not winning any of them). I needed something to submit to the Vue Character Rendering Challenge 2010, so I dusted off the half-finished image, added a spacecraft model that I'd built in Carrara for a different contest, rendered it and sent it in. It didn't win either, but at least I now had a new version of 'Stranger' which, even if it wasn't a contest winner, was good enough to put on my own website.

Applications

Vue 8
e-on Software
DAZ|Studio 3
DAZ 3D
Carrara 8 Pro
DAZ 3D

Models