A long time ago, a friend sent me a link to an image by Chris Moore, which was used as the cover illustration for Philip K. Dick’s novel “Ubik”, and challenged me to do something similar.
Using Bryce 4, I set out to reproduce the image as closely as I could, which was an interesting learning exercise. I flatter myself that I got pretty close to the background. The foreground figure was less successful. In the first draft of the image, I modeled the helmet using Bryce primitives and Boolean operations, and the result was ... not good.
Later, I reworked the image in Bryce 6. I kept the background as it was, but posed a new figure using DAZ Studio, and added a helmet from a model sold at DAZ3D. The helmet isn't an exact match for the one in Moore’s illustration, but it's certainly better than my first attempt.
My image is still a fairly long way from reproducing Moore’s image precisely. I didn’t get the pose or expression right, and I was too lazy to attend to some of the details -- the sign on the pillar, the model’s distinctive red lips and raindrop-dotted skin, and so on. The biggest problem with the image is that Moore’s composition makes the foreground figure the focus of the image, and in this image the figure is the weakest part -- the model and its skin texture don't hold up. Maybe in a few more years, I'll try replacing the figure with a properly-textured and -posed Genesis 8 model, and see if that improves anything.
Aside from learning a certain amount about modeling and texturing in Bryce, I came away from this experiment with a still deeper respect for Chris Moore’s talents as an artist.
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A long time ago, a friend sent me a link to an image by Chris Moore, which was used as the cover illustration for Philip K. Dick’s novel “Ubik”, and challenged me to do something similar.
Using Bryce 4, I set out to reproduce the image as closely as I could, which was an interesting learning exercise. I flatter myself that I got pretty close to the background. The foreground figure was less successful. In the first draft of the image, I modeled the helmet using Bryce primitives and Boolean operations, and the result was ... not good.
Later, I reworked the image in Bryce 6. I kept the background as it was, but posed a new figure using DAZ Studio, and added a helmet from a model sold at DAZ3D. The helmet isn't an exact match for the one in Moore’s illustration, but it's certainly better than my first attempt.
My image is still a fairly long way from reproducing Moore’s image precisely. I didn’t get the pose or expression right, and I was too lazy to attend to some of the details -- the sign on the pillar, the model’s distinctive red lips and raindrop-dotted skin, and so on. The biggest problem with the image is that Moore’s composition makes the foreground figure the focus of the image, and in this image the figure is the weakest part -- the model and its skin texture don't hold up. Maybe in a few more years, I'll try replacing the figure with a properly-textured and -posed Genesis 8 model, and see if that improves anything.
Aside from learning a certain amount about modeling and texturing in Bryce, I came away from this experiment with a still deeper respect for Chris Moore’s talents as an artist.