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Historical Notes
The island of Rhodes, in the Eastern Mediterranean, was frequently attacked by navies of rival islands, and one siege by the Greeks in the end of the fourth century BC dragged on for a year before the Greeks finally abandoned their attack and left the citizens of Rhodes in peace. Wishing to celebrate this victory, the citizens of Rhodes chose to build a giant statue of Helos, their God of the Sun and protector.
Using in part the bronze from weapons and hardware left by the Greeks, they commissioned a huge bronze sculpture, with a wooden structural support inside, that would stand over a hundred feet high. It was completed in 280 BC.
We don't actually know exactly what it looked like, although we have some artifacts showing other sculptures of Helos and they sort of resemble our modern Statue of Liberty. We also don't know exactly where it stood, with several sites in Rhodes possible. I chose the site out on the tip of the harbor entrance, but he could have stood more inland or in the city center.
Sadly, a mere 50 years after he was built, an earthquake toppled him, and so he lay with his face in the sand for centuries after. After nine hundred years of laying in the sand, he was dismantled by the conquering Syrians and his bronze panels were melted into other metal objects.
Certainly the most popular myth of the Colossus was that he stood so tall, his legs straddled the harbor and ships sailed beneath him. But given he was only a bit more than a hundred feet tall, and the harbor was over a thousand feet wide, it was obviously impossible for him to do so.
But even with this myth discounted, the Colossus of Rhodes easily remains one of history's most famous and fascinating sculptures of a human figure.
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Construction Notes
To start, I "borrowed" a human statue figure from my Temple of Artemis file so I could place a temporary mockup of the Colossus and start building around him. At first I tried a view from out to sea looking in at him and the harbor and city behind him. Then I changed my view and tried looking at him from the walkway leading to him from the city. Finally, not satisfied with either, I built a patio off to one side and chose the view looking out from the patio to see him towering over the harbor.
I used quite a few Light Maps (also called grayscale maps) which I built with primitives and rendered out with the Altitude Render feature to get shapes and heights correct, and them imported these grayscale maps into the terrain editor to shape terrains similarly. This process allowed me to "roughen" up the stonework, so it wasn't so perfect and its edges weren't so smooth.
The face of the Colossus was a head bust I did right after I finished the Hanging Gardens, before I knew I'd be able to do all Seven Wonders. It was my first test to see if I could create an acceptable human face sculpted in terrains and lattices. I used the head bust alone in the museum gallery image on the home page of my web site. The hands were formed from cylinders and spheres, the palms of lattices, and the arms were groups of spheres laid out like muscles. The wardrobe was more terrains.
I won't kid you and say this is how you should do human figures in Bryce. My sincere recommendation is you use Poser instead. But I was deliberately restricted to using Bryce alone to see what it was capable of. And while my human statuary didn't equal what Poser could do, I did find that I developed an even greater appreciation for the potential of Bryce's terrain/lattice modeling potential.
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