Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

The House of the Dead

Comments

Inspired by Roger Zelazny's strange and vivid novel, "Creatures of Light and Darkness", this scene represents Wakim before the throne of Anubis, the Angel of the House of Death.

The figures are Poser 4 figures. Anubis's head was created by taking the head from the Poser wolf and editing it in Ray Dream's mesh-form modeller to create something closer to the stylized jackal head that Anubis is usually shown with. The result was actually a distorted asymmetric mess, but with judicious lighting and texturing, this doesn't really show up. Anubis actually looks considerably meaner than I intended: I was trying for something rather stylised and austere, but with the wolfmask twisted and distorted by my clumsy manipulations in the mesh-form modeller, he emerged looking quite demonic. A texture map is used to give a little more relief to the body.

The figure of Wakim is a basic Poser nude male, with the Hero morph applied to make him a little more muscular.

Anubis and Wakim are the only imported Poser models in the scene. The figures of the dead in the background were all rendered in Poser and then inserted as 2D picture objects. Some of them represent recognizable figures from the story - the woman described as 'tall, golden and a suicide' is visible at the front of the crowd. Others are simply ordinary men, women or children. The crowd should probably be more heterogeneous and feature more different kinds of creatures, but I was too lazy to use anything but human figures.

The scenery was made using Bryce primitives with some Boolean operations where necessary. Most of the pieces are actually simpler than they appear; texturing accounts for much of the apparent detail.

Applications

Bryce 4
Metacreations
Poser 4
Curious Labs
Ray Dream Studio 5
MetaCreations
Photoshop 5.0.2
Adobe