From time to time, people who don't know better 'borrow' some of my images without asking. The most annoying are the ones who not only say "Hey, that's a nice picture, I think I'll put it on my Web page", but who don't even bother to copy it to a server of their own. They just put in a link straight to my server, so I get to incur any bandwidth charges going for making their page look good with my artwork. This annoys me.

Lately, someone (or perhaps more than one) playing an online fantasy game has used one of my images to represent them in the game, linking straight to my server. The way the game system works, I can't find out who's doing this. A polite letter to the game administrators didn't get any response. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. Thrarg was born. Or perhaps spawned. Whatever.

Thrarg is my personal emissary. He's going to deliver a little message about copyright and bandwidth theft to the people using my image. To do this, I've simply substituted a picture of Thrarg (plus message) for the image that was being stolen (this is the other dumb thing about linking to someone else's server: not only can the owner see you doing it, but they can also put whatever they want in place of the stolen picture, something which could be potentially embarassing. I'll give Thrarg a week to deliver my message, and after that the image goes completely black. Or becomes a cuddly kitten in a basket. Or something).

Anyway, back to Thrarg. He's an orc, out of Tolkien, or at least one possible conception of one. He began life as the morphable Poser 4 man from Zygote's Costume Shop CD, but all kinds of terrible things happened to him. His face was morphed out of all recognition. His arms, neck and chest were bulked up, while his feet (which you can't see) were lengthened. I then dressed him up, gave him a spear and shield, and sent him out to work for me.

The basic Thrarg figure was all modelled in Poser. His battleaxe and his fangs were modelled in Ray Dream Studio. They're very simple models; nonetheless, RDS crashed my computer completely no less than three times in the process of making them. I can't think why I never demanded my money back from MetaCreations; it's probably the single most unstable piece of commercial software I have ever used.

But it got the job done, and I duly imported Thrarg and his bits and pieces into Bryce for rendering. He has a modified texture map made in Photoshop that actually gives him green skin, but the way he's lit you can't actually see this. There are several radial lights in the scene - two to light his face, another to cast a little light on his shield, two more actually inside his eyes (which have been made partly transparent) for that good old Evil Inside glow.

His shield was originally supposed to have some inspiring messages mapped onto it ("Ash nazg durbatulûk, dirt-breath" and "My squad leader went to Barad-Dur and all I got was this lousy branding iron") but I couldn't get the parametric mapping right. Oh well. Perhaps it's better to play it straight.