Work has taken precedence again, but hopefully the project I'm on is just about done. But there are others. Took a bit of time out of a meeting to sketch my idea of a Venus explorer. So here is a rendition of a crawler exploring our twin planet (um, despite her name, she's the ugly twin). This crawler, including the posable six legs and their six-fingered hands, was all made and posed in Bryce. The shape of the leg segments took a positive, negative and intersect Boolean and the posing comes from linking the next lower segment with the cylinder and sphere above it (which is grouped with the above part); a bit tedious, but possible. To get the atmospherics, including the beam of the headlights, I turned on Volumetric World, and after locking up Bryce for a good half hour, turned the quality down to about 12. Still took over ten hours for the top image to render (on Premium, 9 rays) at 2400X600 and about three or four hours for each of the 800X600 images. My Mercury image got a good number of comments for those that viewed it, but barely eighty views so far, so I did the thumbnail a little differently this time to see if that increases the hits. Eventually, I plan to do a series of about a dozen of these: hit the um, eight planets, the moon, asteroids, habitats and I won't forget good old Pluto. But I may get distracted and it may take a while. Next render on my list is something for the Bryce Challenge. Edit: Crap, spelled descent wrong on the first upload. --- Venus is Hell incarnate. Its slow rotation doomed it. Bereft of a magnetic field and subject to month-long days, the world's water escaped to space. The oceans boiled. The tectonic plates seized up and lava flooded the planet. For hundreds of millions of years, the surface baked under ninety atmospheres pressure, a burning, crushing Hades. Nearly a century ago, the Commonwealth authorized the Venus Terraformation Project, a plan to give the human race another livable world, a hope that future generations might be spared extinction in the event of another World War. It will take centuries more for that plan to be realized. For over four decades, multi-kilometer sized ice balls from the Kuiper have hammered the planet, unleashing dinosaur-killer blasts many times each year, slowly adding back water, blasting away the atmosphere and adding rotation to the world. The day is still too long, the temperatures still too hot and the atmosphere still too thick. In just a few more years, superheated rain will begin to fall. Then will come hearty microbes, fixing the carbon dioxide into limestone and burying the hellish lava surface. Nobody lives on Venus full-time. Even in the upper reaches of Ishtar Terra, the equatorial bombardment is too fierce -- the hurricane force blasts of the impacts reverberate around the world dozens of times. But in the lulls between, science teams occasionally descend onto the surface, hurrying to carry out geological surveys before the surface of hell is paved over to make ready a new home for humanity. --Grand Tour 2150: A Guide to the Solar System, Euphoria Press