The Battle of the Peak by hamfast

Poser • (none) • posted on Jan 11, 2003

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Description

A scene from "Lord of the Rings" that has never to my knowledge been done before by any artist apart from John Howe - The final battle between Gandalf the wizard and the Balrog of Moria on the summit of Silvertine or Celebdil... I attempted to complete this image before the release of the 2nd LOTR movie, but two days before the movie was released, my motherboard on my PC blew up taking my data hard drive with it. I am still picking up the pieces and this image had to be recreated from scratch! Technical aspects: Poser first, Bryce next, Corel Photopaint last. The order rarely changes... The Balrog of Moria was created using DAZ-3D's Gorilla, heavily morphed with ExtremeMorph 3D, and with Rhino-3D created horns. The tail and wings were both from DAZ3D's "Creature Expansion Pack". Gandalf was created with DAZ3D's Michael 2 morphed into an old thin man. Anton Kiesel's "Fantasy Beard" and the Runtime DNA's Hooded Cloak finished off the effect. The staff was created with Rhino3D and Glamdring, Gandalf Goldolin sword was downloaded from Renderosity. The posed figures were then exported into Bryce 5 and apart from Gandalf's skin texture all the other textures were built up from custom Bryce 5 material presets. The fiery mane and wings were created with a variant of "Clay's Volumetric Fire" preset and Bryce Metaballs carefully placed and scaled. A few spotlights and radial lights were placed the light spots in the scene. 3 renders of the scene were done and finally composited into one final image in Corel Photopaint. Extra flames, motion blurring and a bit of extra cloud were added to finish off the image.

Comments (14)

Tamela.J.

4:05AM | Sat, 11 January 2003

WOW!! Incredible work. Excellent job. (Ive not seen LTR)

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sand_tyger

5:01AM | Sat, 11 January 2003

WOW! this is SO good! perhaps you should enlarge your thumbnail image because i almost didn't notice this!

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Mock

6:54AM | Sat, 11 January 2003

Classy very classy

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Djeser

8:34AM | Sat, 11 January 2003

Great pic! This is amazing.

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MrCaleb

9:30AM | Sat, 11 January 2003

Very Beautiful, You Made It Perfect, I Love Gandalf Pose, its very powerfull, and its cool to see fear in the eyes of the ballrog, Oustanding work!

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hamfast

12:11PM | Sat, 11 January 2003

Will try a biggesr thumbnail.

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DMFW

1:20PM | Sat, 11 January 2003

Amazing! I particularly like the effect you've achieved with the fire and thanks for providing such a detailed explanation. This one gets my vote for the top 20.

Dash

7:20PM | Sat, 11 January 2003

WOW! sorry but thats all just WOW!

vasquez

9:45AM | Mon, 13 January 2003

great balrog and great fire effect!

crystalleaf

8:29AM | Tue, 14 January 2003

OH! MY! GOD!

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jwdell

10:12AM | Fri, 24 January 2003

Great job, sorry for your PC woes, but everytime I've had to redo a pic, they always seem to come out better the second time, working one a pic myself of the standoff at Kazaa Dun...

AID

6:00PM | Wed, 29 January 2003

very impressive. I'm in ave

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Elminster_ZK

10:48PM | Wed, 13 July 2005

ust leafing through the archives and this popped up. Have you considered making prints to sell? I really believe this is the equal of Howe's in terms of composition and style. It also has the clarity and sharpness that a painting does not. Well done!

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