I actually started working on this one in early 2002. I was sitting with Bonnie in Dr. Ryall's Intro to Public Speaking class. I was just starting to get the material for the monolith in the right-foreground when the professor walked in and started class. I went to work on it again a couple of days later and the same thing happened again. As time went on it got pushed lower and lower in my pile of things to do. Eventually (a little over two years later) I finished putting it together in my living room while watching TV.
The rendering part was a different story. This is how two different versions came to be. The original one (this one) has a brighter appearance. That is because of a lighting effect that I added. I took this project over to dad's so I could render it on his computer. His machine was newer and not a pokey machine (at the time) by any stretch (2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 128MB ATI graphics card). The estimated render time for this version of the project was 9 days. That's about how long it took too (within a day or two).
This work was released April 29, 2004 06:37 AM and can be found in the following galleries: Bryce 5 , Bryce 5: Pre-2005 Renderings .