Diana on Panjandrum

Original Post: 26 March 2013
Posted Here: 2 December 2017

The idea of a statue of Diana the Huntress for my story "A Conversation with Gina Verucchio" actually came about quite a while ago when I wrote a chapter for my novel Silver Threads, "The Pirates of Panjandrum." A version of this chapter appeared in Issue 28 of OG's Speculative Fiction.

In this story, Tom's Aunt Sheila purchases a plastidroid which she uses, in the form of a heavily patinated statue of Diana the Huntress, to separate the gangster, Bidido, from one hundred seventy-five thousand unees and a small starship.

Once I had the original model of Diana the Huntress, I needed to give it that blue-green patination characteristic of weathered copper or bronze statues. I searched the internet for images of patinated bronze and downloaded several. I Photoshopped one of the images and used it as the texture map for the Diffuse node of all parts of the original statue.

It didn't come out too bad. However, tiling is one problem with Poser models and with texture maps. Each section of the model has a distinct boundary with the next. Although your upper and lower thigh are continuous, this is not true of Poser models. And my doctored texture map had very dissimilar edges. So when applied to the various parts of the model, discontinuities in the patination could be seen here and there. However, I was able to use Photoshop's Blur and Healing Brush tools to hide these boundaries in the rendered images (in what 3D modelers refer to as the "post-processing steps.")

Keep reading, keep writing - Jack