Martian Invasion of Surrey - Ch 7: Exodus - Ch 8: Thunder Child

These latest chapters in my ongoing serialisation of The War of the Worlds by H G Wells chart the narrator's brother's escape from London, his travel to the Essex coast and his attempt to get out of England on board a paddle steamer. Three Martian tripods stride out into the sea to attack the steamer, but are intercepted by the warship "Thunder Child". As previously, I have drawn on the illustrations of Henrique Alvim Correa.

I apologise for the delay getting these chapters to you, but they were particularly challenging to make and both pivotal to the story. I needed to portray the mass evacuation of the capital and show hoards of fugitives heading northwards. In the book, this is vividly described with the action taking place on The GREAT NORTH ROAD through BARNET and CHIPPING BARNET, so that is where I set these scenes with some 20,000 characters! Other places which appear are CHALK FARM STATION, CHALK FARM ROAD, EDGWARE, HADLEY and TILLINGHAM.

The THUNDER CHILD sequence is so well known that I had to spend a lot of time getting it right. There is a lot of controversy as to what ship Wells based the Thunder Child on as it is a vessel which never existed. My research turned up a likely candidate; the TORDENSKJOLD, a Danish Torpedo Ram which fits the description nicely particularly as it has two funnels, unlike the usual suspect, the British torpedo ram POLYPHEMUS, which only had one funnel. Added to that is the name, "TORDENSKJOLD" which is Danish for "THUNDER SHIELD", not a coincidence I am sure.

Apart from needing to build the computer models for the steamer (THE "VICTORIA" was a steamer which operated on the south coast) and the THUNDER CHILD, I wanted to create big explosions and fires. I used a program called EMBERGEN for these effects. I also have started using 3D COAT for texturing some of the models.

As always I use LIGHTWAVE as my main animation and rendering program. It's great to see that this fantastic program has been taken over and is being supported again and regularly updated by a dedicated team of enthusiasts,