Lost In Bryce Geek Sheet

This picture was fun to make from the original idea right to finishing it in Photoshop.

The Idea came during a funny exchange between Marcie and Jessica on the Bryce Forum. Jessica veered off topic and then said she had come to the end of her tangent. Marcie, in a giggly mood, "tip-toed to the end of the tangent, holding on to the y-axis". Her description was so vivid that I saw the picture when I read the post.
She was due to visit the same weekend, and she insisted on posing for the picture. I have a Poser character based on her likeness, and she wants to maintain tight control, I guess. We ended up building the scene together and having tons of fun.

The background is a large cube with a KPT5 FraxPlorer Fractal as a Texture. The mapping mode is Object Front, and it is set as a Volumetric Material with Basic Shading. Marcie uses variations of this method in many of her Abstracts

The "thing below" is a Lattice I made in the Terrain Editor from the same Fractal. There is a Tutorial on this method elsewhere on my site.

The letter labels are Lattices. Marcie added them as an afterthought. First, I thought they looked horrible. I tried several suggestions by my friends on the Forum and re-positioned them several times, and now I actrually like them a lot. Pandora came up with the idea to have them skewered on the axes. They seem to add a nice touch of un-reality or dream logic.

The whole scene is set inside a volumetric sphere with a thin red and green cloud material applied. There are only two additional radial lights, apart from the sun: one to the very left of the picture, in the "cut-away" of the Fractal Lattice, and another at about head hight, shinig on the figure, positioned to the front and slightly to the right

Post-processing in Photoshop was minimal. I retouched the figure to make it look less like a plaster cast, especially the hair, added a slight halo to the axes and labels (unrealistic, but it looks good) and added a slight vignette, darkening the corners a little (my Exhibition Print Technique)

The file statistics are very moderate: 37 objects, 674190 polygons, 10.7 MB on disk.
It took just one afternoon to put it all together in Poser 4 and Bryce 4.1. Additional requirements: 1 Pizza Frutti del Mare, 1 bottle of Californian Wine and 4 Cans of Lager.
Render Time: less than the time it takes to finish three quarters of a bottle of Wine between two people...