Stranded

Navigating the time streams is a tricky and dangerous business, regardless of how accurate and quick the quantum navigation systems become, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. His machine, like all time machines produced in Amerique, was a small biomechanical sphere. A breathing mask, connected by an air tube to a port on the inner wall, kept him alive as he floated within the protective milky fluid that filled the sphere.

The traveler knew that long jumps were a bad idea, but there had been no other alternative. The sphere landed violently, a victim of the wave function's inherently increasing uncertainty in traveling so far from its point of origin. Its inertial damper systems, designed to work in conjunction with state-of-the-art Heisenberg compensators, overloaded on impact.

Arcs of lightning melted a massive gash into the hull within seconds. The traveler's breathing mask was ripped away as the fluid flooded out and he was flushed headfirst through the opening along with it. His foot caught in the gash and he landed brutally on his back outside the machine, lying unconsciousness for a time on hot rocks beneath a blazing sky.

Drawn by gravity most of the fluid sluiced away down natural gullies. The parched rocks and dust soaked up what little remained. The traveler lay for a few moments in the harsh sunlight, still dazed and unsure of what had happened. His ankle began to throb. He opened his eyes. As he painfully leaned forward to free his foot he caught a first glimpse of the time machine's damage. Steam and smoke billowed away into the hot, dense air, and he knew instinctively that the sphere had lost too much fluid to repair itself. Occasional lightning bursts still crackled within, illuminating the interior of the sphere in flashes. Systems began to shut down.

His passage through time into the distant past had been difficult, but necessary. Although the thick fluid had certainly saved his life it had not protected him completely. All hope faded from him as his broken ankle swelled and shrieked in agony. His breath was ragged and he suspected one or more broken ribs as well.

He'd taken a huge gamble and lost. The machine was dying. And he was stranded...

This challenge once again allowed me to experiment with a lot of new techniques (new to me anyway!) to achieve what I wanted. I spent much more time failing to get what I wanted than succeeding, but finally getting it right is the fun of it. From start to finish the image took a full four weeks of struggling, and I'm very happy with the final shot.

The Sky
The sky is just a sky_sphere with a y-gradient and some simple pigment layers for subtle clouds. I used a few fog layers along with a z-depth pass to create the atmospheric attenuation. Just before the final render I added the birds from my "Across the Plains" entry to help balance the composiiton.

The Landscape
The background terrain is a hi-res function-based height field with just over a million triangles (probably overkill), and the foreground terrain is an isosurface with a high max gradient for lots of detail.

The Time Machine
Michael Moorcock inspired the design of the time machine as well as my little story above (via Emperor Huon's crazy "milk globe" in the Imperial Palace at Gran Bretan, and via the short description of a time machine crash in the 1969 novel Behold the Man). The time sphere began as a simple cube in Wings3d, smoothed many times and exported as OBJ. To greeble the ship's hull I first composed a 2:1 aspect bitmap filled with many random lines and rectangles in varying shades of gray. To make the gash in the side I overlaid a photo of a rough, dark cave mouth that was the basic shape I wanted. With the help of Ive's IC and its awesome cylindrical to longitude/latitude filter it became a spherical image map.

I brought the sphere model into PoseRay and used the image map as a deformer (and later as a texture component). In Silo I selected all the "cave mouth" polygons and extruded them inward a few times to create a lip, then deleted those polygons leaving a gashed hole. The final mesh has just under 1 million triangles.

Over the course of a couple of days I used Silo to create the crazy tubes that run all around the machine (and yes, that was really tedious).

The lightning inside the machine is just image_pattern textures made from some photos of a Tesla coil along with inverted masks (to create transparency) that are projected onto two image plane "billboards" strategically placed within the sphere. As a final touch I added a milky disc inside the sphere, and a simple Silo mesh for the liquid dripping from the gash to the ground.

The Smoke/Steam
A few days of experimenting with various media patterns and lots of spheres.

The Traveler
The figure is my old pal Ryan, from Poser 8 (he was also the camera-holding hand in the TC-RTC "Illuminated" round and the floating bald guy in my IRTC "Rebirth" shot)

The Liquid
This was the trickiest part of the shot and it took me about a week of experimenting to figure out an acceptable technique - one that required three alternate versions of the foreground texture (dry rock, wet rock, and milky liquid). I used a render area to get two alternate versions of the foreground: one version that used a wet rock texture and another version that used a reflective milky texture.

Next I brought the wet rock render into PhotoShop and on a blank layer drew a mask (in black) everywhere that I wanted the wet areas of rock to be. A second "milk mask" consisted of heavily contrasted photos of tide pools meticulously positioned, erased away, and connected by little hand-drawn rivulets. This gave me complete artistic control.

At last, I rendered the full "final" image with a dry rock texture. In an orthographic pass I used an image_pattern to seamlessly blend the full dry rock image with the render region wet rock image. This preserved the dry rock texture in most areas while revealing the wet areas through the "wet mask," giving great results.

Another image_pattern texture and a final orthographic pass pulled it all together, resulting in the "milk mask" preserving the wet/dry rocks while revealing the reflective milky texture for the pooled liquid on the ground.

I know it's not perfect, but I think the end result is pretty convincing overall.