It started with a wig.

In the course of making a tutorial about Poser hair I took the standard Poser male wig and applied Ray Dream Studio's Spike deformer to it. The result was a punkish hairstyle which, when rendered, produced a fairly mean-looking character. I looked at the result and thought "Hmm. I bet she wouldn't take shit from anybody". And almost immediately I had the idea of a character in some future history, a revolutionary leading a rag-tag army of alien mercenaries to conquer, pillage, despoil and generally blight the lives of the latter-day bourgeoisie. Saint Jane was born.

Why 'saint'? I'm not sure. She doesn't look very saintly. Maybe I was still thinking about revolutionaries and there was some vague association with Toussaint L'Ouverture. Maybe I really meant "Sweet Jane", an excellent song written by Lou Reed and performed by the Cowboy Junkies. But she doesn't look very sweet either. As to the Jane part, well, that's another story. But if your name's Jane and you look (or once looked) anything like the person in the picture, send me a message; it's been a long time.

Anyway, back in the world of technicalities, Jane is a detailed female nude, semi-modestly dressed by the use of texture maps prepared in PhotoShop. The Ziggy Stardust lightning flash was a late inspiration, but one that I think improved matters considerably. Her alien friends are standard male nudes whose heads have been replaced by shapes modelled in the Free Form modeller of Ray Dream Studio. I'm not entirely happy with the result, but it'll have to do.

One of the problems with replacing body parts is that the texture mapping breaks down. That is, the standard Poser texture maps will no longer cut it, which is not surprisingly really. What was surprising was quite what the texture mapping mesh looks like once you've replaced a body part; I wrote a program to read the vt nodes from the OBJ file and draw the map, and, frankly, it's a mesh. I mean a mess. Poser's own beautifully neat texture maps seem to have been hand-made.

Anyway, enough geekery. The result of this was that I gave up trying to get textures to map properly on the alien's heads and decided to live with the current results. The actual texture maps used are based in part on the Greg Carter Mekanika texture that ships on the Poser CD, supplemented by some KPT and PhotoShop noodling. Much of the appeal of the aliens actually comes from this superb texture.

The turret of the self-propelled gun (yeah, that's what it is - what do you mean, you didn't know?) was modelled in Ray Dream Studio, and consists of three free-form shapes. It was then supplemented by a number of Bryce primitives making up the hatch, the main gun, and diverse lumps and bumps. The machine gun and its pintle are also entirely made from Bryce primitives. The camouflage is the basic Lowlands material.

The alien weapons are made from primitives, the background hills are standard Bryce terrains, and the sky was the result of a little refinement of a particularly fortuitous click of the 'Mutate Random' button in the Sky and Fog editor.