The stone beneath her hands was oh, so cold, when the warm light from inside flooded the emptiness of all-embracing space.
The huge shadow in the door stood still, and the light crept over her face, showing all her agony and fear, just for one moment; then a lonely, forlorn noise blazed a way through the anxious quiescence. The shape in the light winced at the sound of an unnatural clamant female voice –
When she began to sing.
Oh, holy emptiness of thoughts, broken by me! Hail to you, memory, not-forgotten, unwished, unwelcome!
You, Friend of no one, living for the broken-hearted, subsisting just for the foretime –
Saviour of the despaired, Home for the fugitive of presence!
This I offer to you – never-ending emptiness, space for a thousand tears and wishes!
The sound broke, when the big gate was locked hastily.
Immediately the silence overwhelmed her, and mild oblivion embraced the small figure of the woman, still lying on the cold floor.
The last echo of melody thrilled her body, and with a sigh escaping her lips she rose again, standing alone in the darkness of dull shimmering stars.
So she stood there, Living Memory, locked out of the world, unwished, knowing, lasting.
And a swift, gentle breeze rushed through the emptiness like a laughter of an anew arising universe, and the woman, alone with all, filled the space with her high voice, singing forevermore songs of remembering.
And suddenly there was no emptiness anymore, but a breathing world.

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This short story was made by *Colophonius
I invited her to write something for this picture and even though she was not sure if it would be really good or fitting, she evenutally did it. Thank you! I think these words show me, the creator of this image, a whole new world of what the Title and the Image together tell someone...what the story behind this could be. What fate awaits these two figures in the image.

What is your story?


____________________________
This project was started with a first sketch-render on the 15th April of 2007. That's more than four months ago. I guess this tells you what this project went through. I'm honest and I tell you that I didn't work 24/7 all these four months, not even daily. But still, I do believe that four months are a long time for such a project and I do believe that it shows my dedication to my pieces. I knew that this was something that I have never done before, an architectural piece which needed quite a lot of reference (which I searched even before the 15th of April). I knew that it would need time and I was willing to give it all the time necessary - and eventually I'm glad that I really did it.

So yes, this is kinda a new style for me. If you look closely and know my work, you will surely see similarities to my earlier pieces, especially forma [link] - color palette, the concept with a bridge and the clouds in the sky. Same for Aengrod [link] - bridge and clouds. But you will also see that I tried to develop that concept by adding more to it - like human characters. They should help to give a sense of scale and add a dramatic feeling to the scene, even if they are rather subtle and tiny. They do their job, I think.
Also, I have never done Architecture like that before, it's not machine-like but rather ornamental, romantic, gigantic and old. This was where the reference came into play - pictures from churches were especially helpful. Once you look at the details you can't really help but be extremely amazed to see what the architects of earlier ages were able to do, what beauty they were able to construct and how many details they were able to think of. Simply amazing. I'm nowhere near that, but that would be way beyond my abilites.

About the history of this piece - I got the very idea and inspiration during the great concert of the Lord of the Rings Symphony in Vienna. The Viennese Radio Symphonic Orchestra played the Soundtrack of the Lord of the Rings movies which is nothing short of amazing (I even (almost) cried in the end...). I saw this very scene while visiting Middleearth mentally, while listening to the wonderful songs and decided to do it...I'm most surprised that I eventually managed to portray that thought as I imagined it - I was able to bring my concept, my dreams into reality.

The realization of the image can be split into three main parts:
1) modeling; this was fun, mainly because of exploring all the possibilites of the architecture and to see how powerful simple details can be.
2) texturing; this was not that much fun. I just suck at it and it is not that easy to get good textures...and since I needed a lot of accuracy (for the brick walls especially), a lot of UV Unwrapping was involved. It is really important to have topologically clean meshes to be able to use it efficiently.
One thing I discovered in this step is the usefulness of Normal maps! I haven't used them before but now I know that I'll use them again. They work so much better than ordinary bump maps and give more accurate and precise results.
3) 2D Post Processing; it was hard at first, not really knowing how to do the clouds and needing to experiment a lot. In the end I decided not to use Photos for the clouds but rather paint them...they still look awful but it's the best I could do. Same goes for the stars...

Now for technical details: modeling and rendering done in Blender 2.44.
In total there are 260,022 Vertices and 116,356 Faces, which is not that much, actually. To get the necessary accuracy and clean look of textures I had to use a lot of big texture maps. That means 7 4000x4000 maps, several 3000x3000, even more 2000x2000 and even the smallest texture was 1000x1000 (What does that mean? That I had to render in several parts since my computer couldn't handle that in one piece. Such big textures need a lot of RAM!). Materials are a mix of texture maps and procedural textures. The figures were done with makeHuman while I did the clothes myself in Blender. Rendersize was 4500x3000.

And eventually - the credits:
makeHuman (the two figures)
Mayang, deviantArt, cgtextures, sxc.hu (all of them for textures and stock images for clouds)
CGTalk.com, 3DTotal, deviantArt (for inspiration and reference images)

Thank you and maybe you have some time to tell me what you think - I personally think that 4 months are worth a few words