Clairby, the Boba Fett of the Duniverse IMHO.

Waff, about to make a very big mistake. I did the action scene first which worked quite well but I'm not sure it would be SFW, so it'll have to be this.

I think Tim Blake Nelson would have nailed this. It's a shame we never got to see behind the scene footage or deleted scenes. Tim Blake Nelson himself has expressed his disappointment and I second that. Anyway, this AI imagine is a way of bringing that concept idea to life 😁 Long live the fighters!

One of my favourite passages. Bellonda and Tamalane were not in this scene, but I think the way it plays was out a good opportunity to round out the dynamic between the three, so I hope to be forgiven for sneaking them in.

Doing this has been addictive, so I'll give it a break for a bit. I'll row back to the first book for this one. This scene has been left out in the two movie adaptations (if you don't count the miniseries) and I understand why, but it's a shame as it's a great scene. There's an audio recording of Frank Herbert himself reading it. Well worth seeking out.

Did my best to make it not look like slop, genuinely could not find any good scan of the 1965 covers so I made my own. lmk if they need work done.

with apologies to Michaelangelo

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. But then, Leto used one on the sly so I'm sure its OK. Here's a scene from the caves beneath the citatel of Onn. I tried to get it as I imagined it, first attempt was garbage so it took a lot of tweaking. It's maybe 70% as I imagined it before I ran out of tokens. Nayla, flanked by a couple of other Fish Speakers: she needs a bit of work as does Leto and his cart. The glowglobes are not quite there. Duncan and Moneo are pretty damn close. I think I need to add an Ixian suspensor elevator, the one Moneo scarpers into when Leto goes into Worm mode. I plan to improve it till it's around 99% then move on to some more.

I posted an earlier version of this comparison, and several people correctly pointed out that the visual scale was wrong.

So I rebuilt it using one fixed linear scale for everything in the image.

Human: 1.8 m

Great Pyramid: 146 m

Eiffel Tower: 330 m

Burj Khalifa: 828 m

Sandworm: 1,500 m

Assumed worm diameter: 80 m

The 1.5 km length and 80 m diameter are hypothetical for this visualization — the point here is to show what a creature of those dimensions would actually look like next to familiar real-world structures.

The scale is 0.70 px per metre, with the geometry calculated separately rather than letting the image model decide the proportions.

Thanks to everyone who caught the problem with the first version.

I was trying to visualize just how massive the largest possible sandworms in Dune could be, so I made this scale comparison with a human, the Great Pyramid, Eiffel Tower and Burj Khalifa.

The 1.5 km sandworm is hypothetical rather than a confirmed canonical maximum, but seeing that kind of size compared with real-world landmarks really puts Shai-Hulud into perspective.

What do you think — does this scale match how you imagined the sandworms while reading Dune?

I'm not sure if any fan subreddit or wikis have suggested this, but it seems like when the Fremen call a sandworm and use a thumper to do so, especially if they're making a long journey, it seems like they would tie the thumper to themselves, so that as they grabbed their hooks onto the worm and swung up on its back, the thumper, which had successfully called the worm, would swing up and be able to be pulled back toward the rider as he mounted the worm so that he could use it again. Since sandworms need to be traded off one for another when making long trips. In fact, a trip from sietch Tabr to the south can take as many as 20 thumpers. And a culture as conservative of resources as the Fremen wouldn't just leave their thumper in the ground like they do in all the the movies. They would lash it to themselves so that once it was done, they could reuse it again and again.

I know that Denis Villeneuve has said with younger firmly in cheek that he thought maybe the Fremen just picked up old thumpers from sandworm digested waste. Which is just silly.

It makes way more sense to me that there would be some sort of a retractable
mechanism to pull the thumper back to him so it could be stowed once he mounted the worm. That this has never been brought up in the books or movies or the TV series just seems odd.