With the pack of hungry sand-runners snapping at his heels, he scurried up the rock outcropping. The big male in particular was getting far too close, but its mates were not far behind. He wasn't sure if he would be able to fight off the entire pack, but he found a flat area above them, turned to make his last defense, and drew his sword and dagger. Looking at the snarling brutes climbing swiftly towards him, he thought things could not possibly get any worse for him...
He was wrong... This one has been a long time in the making! I first created the main part of the image, the huge dragon partially clinging to the rock, some months ago - the dragon uses some of the morphs of the then-new Version 2 of the DAZ Millennium Dragon. Its pose is inspired by some of the dragons from the "Dragons Made Real" mockumentary by FrameStore/CFC, the folks behind the "Walking with..." specials of the past few years, which I had watched on DVD at about that same time. On my dragon 'binge' I prepped 'Dances with Dragons' in Bryce, and this one in Vue d'Esprit 4. Yet, something was missing. I really liked the dramatic sky, but something was needed for the foreground... so, I never posted it to my site, I just kept it in the 'in-progress' folder. Then, I stumbled across a website holding a contest to illustrate the completion of the phrase "Just when he thought things could not possibly get any worse, they did..." (OK, I'm paraphrasing here...) Well, that got my imagination going, although I was too late to enter the contest. In a flash of inspiration, I knew exactly what I was going to do; but I still had no free time to come back to the scene. In the meantime, I had upgraded my Vue d'Esprit 4 to the new Vue 5 Infinite; and I hoped that, when I finally returned to this image, it would be in V5I rather than my old 'obsolete' Vue 4. Finally, a few days ago, I needed to take a break between finishing up my latest project for DAZ and starting on the next one. I put together the barbarian and his pack of animal tormentors on the prop rock outcrop in Poser 5, and assumed I would be importing both the original scene and the new foreground figures in V5I, with its improved file-handling. No such luck. V5I failed every time I tried to tweak any of the 'original' contents after importing the original scene. After several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to try to complete the scene in my 'obsolete' Vue 4. I was leery of importing the new content into Vue 4 (3 critters, plus 4 'figures' associated with the barbarian and his clothes, plus various props - the weapons, hair, and the rock base) - the heavy load of new polygons would tax the resources of the old program. Sure enough, Vue 4 crashed soon after importing the new content, once I started positioning and otherwise tweaking it. After a few false starts, I decided to do things one. step. at. a. time. ,. saving. my. file. after. each. tiny. tweak... To my great relief, that eventually worked, after fretting through many nail-biting waits while the program accepted the modifications and refreshed the screen! It's still not perfect (the barbarian's crouched pose looks odd from this angle), but any incremental improvements would not be worth the frustration of getting creaky old Vue 4 to accept any further changes without trashing my scene files!
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