The Bridge Builders

Nothing is permanent in this universe.

The City grows like an alien organism, spawning new appendages when and where it needs them; resorbing them again when they have outlasted their need.

Yesterday, a bridge was built to improve the traffic flow; tomorrow, it will be dismantled, choked by the sprawling City. In the mean time, while forms are being filled and filed, it remains the awkward yet beautiful reminder of former days. It has won its own grandeur over the years.

Are they aware of its looming presence above their heads, the children, dreaming of their own fantastic and ephemeral constructions? Probably not. It is too much part of their daily, familiar universe. Today, they build. A bridge maybe. By tomorrow it will be forgotten, maybe replaced by something else, as impermanent as their bridge. Soon, the place will be deserted. And occupied again.

The image is almost entirely built up from mesh2 objects. The bridge is a .3ds object I downloaded four years ago, but unfortunately, I don’t remember from where. Also, it probably was from an anonymous artist. I put a lot of work (in Silo2) to repair degenerate triangles and re-group and join objects together. Not everything is yet done, but enough for this image. The concrete texture of the bridge heads has been taken and slightly modified from Sean Day’s excellent Old Royal Scot (IRTC, July-August 2006).

The city is formed by elements from Daz|Studio’s Distopia. It forms a satisfying background but its maps are not too good in close view.

The sewer pipes were built in Silo2.

The figures and animals are Poser7 figures. So are the different grass patches used here, the oil drums and the crate. The flowers however, originate from PlantStudio2. The flying gulls in the background are based on a simple blob by Mick Hazelgrove. They are randomly flown through the sky by a simple macro.

I made extensive use of eval_pigment() for the grass, Prob() for the flowers, inside() for the flowers, and trace() for almost every visible and invisible objects.

The sky uses Lightsys while the clouds are generated by Zeger Knaepen’s FastCloud macro. The water in the canal/river is a media. A discrete ground fog was used. No atmospheric media here (inside a container) although I experimented with it. However, the render time was excessively long and did not add too much in the end.

Norbert Kern’s Position_Finder macro was of great help for placing the different elements in the scene.

This is Cathy’s World #4.