Among my many vices is the computer game "Marathon", put out by Bungie. Although it's beginning to look a little dated now, it still has one of the most complex and intriguing storylines of any game of its type (storyline? What's a storyline? Aren't you supposed to just shoot stuff? Well, possibly. But "Marathon" has a good
story too).

This image was inspired by "Marathon". The starting point were the figures who are supposed to represent the BoB's of "Marathon II" ('BoB' stands for 'born on-board' - they're the second generation crew of a slower-than-light starship, conscripted by a rogue AI to fight its battles hundreds of light-years from home, so they have reason to look mean). I needed a background, so I simply took over a scene that I'd been working on previously (working title "Captain Nemo's Engine Room"), made some minor modifications, and that's it.

The figures are Poser 3, from Zygote's "People" collection: the foreground figure is an African-American casual male, the woman climbing the stairs in the background is an Asian casual female. This is a nice change from all the white boys and girls who've hitherto dominated my scenes. There's no reason why the future needs to look like something dreamed up by the Aryan Nation.

The surroundings are all made from Bryce primitives, with occasional Boolean operations - the pipework, the stairway leading down, etc.

This was one of my first images made in Bryce 4 (the figure in the foreground is illuminated by a light using the new ranged falloff setting). Bryce 4 is nice, but it seems to need more memory than Bryce 3D (I used to run B3D in a 48MB partition; this scene required an 82MB partition under Bryce 4) and it gets very unstable if it hasn't enough memory or scratch space. I had a fair number of crashes while making this scene.

The title of the image is the title of one of the levels in "Marathon II".