This started out as an attempt to reproduce a photograph of pop star Janet Jackson in which the attractive Ms. Jackson appears naked to the waist, arms raised above her head, her breasts modestly concealed by someone else's hands (!). I've always rather liked this picture, as much for its humour as for its eroticism (and it is erotic, at least to me). When I saw the same pose reproduced on a poster advertising a bande dessinée - with a naked girl being embraced by a pair of distinctly non-human hands - I decided to try to Bryce it.

The results, using a pair of Poser 3 figures, were not very successful. The pose is just about right, but the end product looked distinctly unrealistic. Having spent the usual forty-five minutes or so importing the figures to Bryce (OBJ imports take forever on my 7600), I was reluctant to scrap the project, so I rotated the male figure and a new image started to take shape.

The Poser figures use the standard Poser texture maps (the female figure was given a darker skin tone and green eyes), while the woman's hair used a volumetric texture. This gave passable results under normal lighting, but under the complex lighting of the new scene became very 'flat'. The final image has been touched up in Photoshop, using a fine airbrush to paint in more realistic hair.

The walls behind the couple use a procedural texture combined with simple 2D textures driving the transparency and bump channels. The couple are lit by two radial lights, each with a different texture gel (using a standard material) assigned, and by a spotlight with no gel. The Leonard Cohen lines used as the citation suggested the rather apocalyptic sky that is visible through the openings in the walls.

The image is slightly more titillating than originally intended: the woman's breasts were meant to be shielded by her companion's body, but changes in camera angle exposed them again. If you find this kind of thing disturbing or offensive, please accept my apologies and consider getting a life.

The models really need the attention of Klaus Busse's b.iron tool, which would eliminate the ugly seams that can be seen in various places. However, by the time I'd paid my shareware fee, I was too lazy to re-build the image. Especially after hearing it described by a friend as "Ken and Barbie sex". Thanks, Tracy.

P.S. This page is by far and away the most visited of all the notes pages in this gallery. It is also the only one (to date) for which the page keywords include the word 'sex'. Coincidence? I think not. So to all the people who came here hoping for something a little more exciting, my apologies.

The most successful (least unsuccessful?) of the attempted Janet Jackson renders is available. The hair in this image has not been touched-up at all: it is a straight volumetric texture from Bryce and, while it's far from perfect, at least suggests that volumetrics may be a starting point for realistic hair.

Janet [21K]