It all begun with just playing around in the Mandelbulb3d software (the intereface is ugly as hell). Based on a very neat preference from a Mandelbulber called Andrew Hughes I created this bridge like rendering with a lot of details (it rendered for about 8 hours on my iMac). I also exported a depth map as a greyscale image to use it as a mask in Photoshop later.

The mandelbulb rendering inspired me to do a composing with the new Adobe Fuse CC (Preview). So I started up Fuse and created a zombie-like Jack Sparrow with a steampunk touch with a few clicks. Because my final image was going to be huge, I set all the textures on the highest resolution (1024 px) and saved then to my CC Libraries.

Then the fun really started: I placed my new character (I called him Hondra) into the rendered Mandelbulb world and animated his body with a pose preset (I just had to turn his head a little bit). I set up four light sources to visually embed the character in the scene. Then I tweaked the look and feel with some color lookup presets and used my depth image to mask this layers to give the scene more depth and a underwater feeling. And finally I loaded the whole scene with a lot of fishes, eels, jellyfishes and plankton noise.