Slaver's Gorge

Deep within the southern continent of Terakaar a treacherous chasm separates two disparate ecosystems. On one side of the rift lies an inhospitable land of desolation that was long known to be rich with precious metals and gemstones; on the other, a forested land of greenery and natural bounty. Between them is the River, which long ago became a sacred dividing line that the people dared not cross for fear of angering the Gods. For uncounted generations this was so. Then came the Bridge Builders.

Relatively few in number, they had arrived from off-world with superior technology and a brutal and bloody agenda driven by greed. Under their oppressive guidance the native inhabitants of the area cast the massive support statues, chains, and bridge support structures from an alloy unique to the region; they obediently hand-crafted and assembled the stonework under the relentless lashes of their new masters. Eventually they spanned the chasm, and the Bridge Builders laughed and reaped the fruits of their slave labor for many years. They grew fat and rich and complacent.

As so often happens after years of relentless brutality, the natives finally rose up against their oppressors and destroyed them, to a man. Now, hundreds of years later, the tales of old and the Bridge itself are the only reminders of the Bridge Builders presence here. In the last few decades the now ancient, yet well-engineered and long-enduring suspension bridge has become a popular tourist destination, crossing the expanse known to the locals as Slaver's Gorge....

For this image I resolved to push myself into learning more about the 3D tools that I have on hand but need more experience with. It all boils down to POV-Ray for me in the end, but I wanted to stretch my limits and I discovered a lot about how to better use my technical arsenal. Warning: long-winded ramble follows...

Wings3D: Yes, isosurface mountains look great - but they are SOOO slow to render! So, the base landscape is a subdivision surface that I sculpted from a single box with Wings3d, working the model until I had a good representation of the cliffs I’d imagined. I also modeled the boat and some of the bridge in Wings3d including the railings, supports, and statue platforms (I learned a lot of new techniques for Wings modeling while working on this image).

ZBrush: I modeled the statues in ZBrush. ZBrush is very cool, l really like the ease of ZSphere symmetry modeling and free-form clay-like sculpting! This bit took by far the longest of anything thanks to my rather bungling ZBrush skills (and the fact that the version 3.1 patch keeps crashing randomly, grrr... Well, I’ve learned to click save every couple of minutes).

Dryad: I made the trees and weeds with Dryad, a very slick little freeware program I found on the Internet a few months ago. It exports OBJ files and I like it much better than POV-Tree. So easy to use – why can’t Blender be more like this? [Blender rant: I know, I know, I should stop complaining about Blender and spend more time with it and buy some Blender books and RTFM, but geez, who thought up that arcane user interface anyway?]

Poser: The horses, dog, and people are all Poser models (the packs on the horses I did in Wings). I wrote a few POV-SDL macros to randomly place the pedestrians on the bridge and give each a random set of clothes.

PoseRay: As usual, all of the OBJ files for the scene (in this case from Wings, ZBrush, Poser, and Dryad) were converted into POV Mesh2 objects using PoseRay so I could assemble everything and really get down to business in POV-Ray. Ah, POV-Ray, comfort zone here I come!

POV-SDL: The sky is an ambient sphere with a couple of layers of pigment-based cirrus clouds and a few volumetric media-based DF3 clouds for added realism (nod to Gilles Tran). The sun is a single point_light. The birds are just basic bird-shaped blobs. Two layers of ground fog add some atmospheric attenuation.

The block walls of the bridge support platforms are granite-eroded isosurface f_roundedboxes assembled with a couple of macros. The roadway is a series of superellipsoids and the support chains are CSG links (half-torus/cylinder unions) spanning the gaps via catenary.inc macros by PM 2Ring. The support “cables” are just cylinders and spheres. In the end I couldn’t resist adding a few isosurface rocks in the foreground to lend some more realistic details to the mesh-based cliff face.

I completed the landscape by tracing 140,000 simple mesh trees and smaller plants onto the cliffs and walls, along with a couple of dead trees in the foreground. I used proceduralized textures (texture_maps that average image/bump maps with procedural textures) on all objects/surfaces except the water. The water is a simple plane sporting transparency, ior, bumpy normals, and reflection.

The final touch was a soft-filter effect, a subtle POV-Ray post-processing technique that I derived from Sam Benge’s luminous-bloom color bleeding post on the POV-Ray forums a couple of years ago.

In the end this turned out to be the most complex scene I’ve ever done (141,834 objects and 1 light_source). Although it took longer than I expected to conceptualize and implement I’m very happy with the way it turned out. The best part is I learned a lot of new things about modeling with Wings3d and ZBrush in the process, yay!

Hey, maybe one day I’ll be able to afford Cinema 4d and FinalRender, and then I can start my learning curve all over again (but it’s gotta be easier to learn than Blender, LOL).