Metempsychosis: The passage of the soul after death into the body of another being.

This image was originally started about a year and four months ago.

The central figure is a default model from Poser 4, positioned and then exported in OBJ format into Bryce 4.
Once imported into Bryce the figure's arms and legs were removed and the various tubes and wing structures (sans feathers) were added and the entire grouping was then textured using customized settings from Bryce's Deep Texture editor.
The original background was then re-rendered using differant sky settings and then exported as a seperate BMP, the structures seen in the upper corners were also rendered and saved seperately.

Once all the basic BMPs were created they were combined using Photoshop 6.
Once the basic arrangement had been worked out, I then began airbrushing the detailing using my Intuos tablet.
All of the metal plating and the inticate detailing of the wings was accomplished by hand over the course of several weeks, working a little bit at a time.

After nearly two months of work I still had not arrived at a final image- the wings remained bare, the background was unsatisfactory and I was suffering from creative burnout so I called it quits and submitted the unfinished work here [link]

The image then sat for a year on my harddrive.

A few weeks ago I dusted off the PSD file and went back to work (finally). I went to work on the wings first;

I created a default wing template in Photoshop and applied it to a Bryce Symmetrical Lattice. Two customized textures were created for two seperate renders which were combined to create the final feather. I then hand placed each individual feather on each wing.
I hadn't originally planned for three seperate tiers of feathers but that was the configuration which looked the best.

Once the wings were feathered out I once again turned to Bryce to create a few small gearworks which were placed in 4 differant places on the wings to augment to already complicated details which were done previously.

The background was next- I stripped out the original background and revisited Bryce for some customized Symmetrical Lattices, columns, chains, wall plaques and lighting. Poser donated the skulls as OBJ Exports. I tried to keep an organic "H.R. Giger" feel to each piece.

Each background element was textured and rendered seperately and hand assembled in Photoshop for maximum versatility.

The PSD file totaled up about 150 layers or so.

Make sure you Full View to see all the details.