The starting point for this image was an unnamed texture from the Bryce CD, which looked ideal for use as alien wallpaper. The wall and gateway were built up from primitives, and 'carved' appropriately using Boolean operations. The rather Freudian gateway was produced from a negative Boolean using a stretched sphere.

Once the architecture was complete, the scene needed to be populated. The first variants featured a female Poser figure, mounting the steps with a torch held above her head. It worked reasonably well, but there's a limit to the number of scenes you can make featuring naked women illuminating dubious orifices with torches before people start to comment. Lest anyone think I'm obsessed, I should explain that Poser 1.0 figures are always naked, and illuminating the scene from a single point source of light creates some attractive effects. I suppose I could use naked men, but I happen to find women more aesthetically pleasing. Bite me.

Anyway, the naked woman went away, and was replaced by two figures in spacesuits (Poser 1.0 figures, set to 20lb overweight and equipped with helmets and backpacks). One figure holds a torch, which is used to illuminate the scene. The other one is holding a weapon of some kind, so the tone is obviously violence rather than sex. To anyone who thinks that I make too many images featuring futuristic weapons of war, all I can say is that if I were exploring anywhere as sinister as this, I'd want the biggest gun I could carry.

The fact that the scene once again features figures in spacesuits is due to the limitations of Poser 1.0; the figures are naked, so you can either (a) go for artistic nudity, (b) hack up some semblance of skintight clothing using Booleans and hair using terrains, or (c) inflate them, stick a helmet on, and pretend they're spacepeople. This scene features option (c).

The New Model Army lyric is an afterthought; to judge from the nervous way in which the figures are looking up, whatever it is is already roaring out to meet them. The title is merely another piece of pretentiousness, being the kind of message that traditionally gets written above sinister doorways of this type. An early version of the file featured a terrain containing the text 'Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate' (and yes, there should be more, but I don't have my copy of Dante's "Inferno" here to dig out the full citation).

These were two early attempts using the same scene. They're not perfect, but I like them enough to include them here anyway.

Woman with torch 1 [42K]

Woman with torch 2 [58K]