An Appointment to Keep. 1999 My second Poser + Bryce image. This one, I suppose, is more traditional Bryce territory than Exhaustion, my first such picture. See the comments on Exhaustion for details of how I created Matthew. The two people behind him are the Poser 2 businessman and businesswoman figures, which I used to try to make them look different from Matthew. I used the low resolution versions, in an effort to keep the polygon count down. (It's around a quarter of a million.) They look as though they're wearing sunglasses, but in fact this is just an artefact of the rendering - somehow Bryce managed to pick all the black pixels around their eyes in the texture map. Normally I'd curse a lot when something like this happens, but here it helped the two characters look mean and nasty, so I left it as it was.

Everything else was modelled in Bryce. The aircraft is basically a squashed sphere, with a slightly smaller sphere booleaned out of it to make it hollow. The door is a copy of this object, intersected with a cube. The tail fin is a pyramid with the tip cut off.

The concave curves on the buildings (yes, that's what those mushroom shapes are) are a cylinder with a torus cut out of the circumference. The ragged holes in the middle one are made with a couple of stone objects. The texture on the inside of it was a lucky accident. Bryce came up with this when I was trying to do a texture for another object in the scene.

For the clouds, I used two cloud planes to try to give a little more depth. (As their name suggests, Bryce's cloud planes have no thickness, and this is obvious when the camera is close to them.) The two planes have slightly different textures. I could probably have done the clouds better by putting a volumetric texture in a box or an infinite slab, but this didn't occur to me until later.

The picture has a little bit of retouching: a focal blur, using the same technique as If Only..., and some filling in around the bad guys' feet, to make their shoes look more like boots.

The textures on the walls behind the characters started out from the randomiser in the materials lab. Bryce seemed to have an eerie ability to give me something close to what I wanted. I then spent a couple of evenings fiddling with the transparency, scaling and deep texture editor to get something which looked interesting but didn't distract too much from the foreground.

For Thander's and the Director's hair, I decided to try procedural textures, rather than pictures.  I'm not convinced that it was a good idea, but who knows what future hairstyles will look like, hmm? ;-) The Director's hair colour and bump map are both the Basic Wood texture. For the bump map, it's stretched vertically. Thander's hair colour uses Water Puddles, with the colours adjusted to be more similar to each other. Her bump map is also Basic Wood.

The Director and the guards have a little bump mapping on their faces, just to add some realism to the supermodel perfection that comes out of Poser. The bump map is Goldenbump, scaled up to 500% or 600%, with the bump depth set to -5 to -10. (Thanks to Peter Fulford on the Poser mailing list for this tip.)

The soft shadows come from 12 spotlights above Asheg and Thander. The intensity of each light is set at 6, which is quite low, but they all add up. I put them all in the same place and then moved them apart slightly with the 2D randomise tool. Some people recommend putting the lights in a spiral, but I couldn't figure out how to do this automatically, and I was too lazy to do it manually ;-) And if 12 lights sounds like a recipe for long rendering times, you're quite right - times for these pictures were between 1 hour 30 minutes and 2 hours. I saw Peter's tip about bump mapping for skin after I thought I'd finished the set, and said a quiet prayer for whoever decided to put the plop render into Bryce.

The HTML image maps (the things that let you click on part of the picture and go to another picture) are one of the new features in Bryce 4.

I imported the people into Bryce 3D for rendering. The other objects in this scene were all modelled in Bryce. This is my first picture with Bryce 3D, though I've done a few in Bryce 2 before. Version 3 is a satisfying upgrade, but it continues its predecessor's tradition of being alternately delightful and exasperating.

Delightful things include everything about terrains and stones (except that you can't export either). I like the plop-render, which lets you re-render just a small area of a picture, to see the effect of local changes more quickly. (Let's face it, though, Bryce's rendering is so damn slow that you really need it.) I like the way that you can control material properties like reflectively with an alpha channel, so some parts of an object can be more reflective than others. I haven't decided whether I like the Deep Texture Editor yet.

Exasperating things include the fact that, at one point, the torchlight in this picture started going straight through the stone that it's hitting. At other times, the "visible" light beam was just a circle on the stone. I still don't know what I did that fixed these problems. And don't let me get started about all those buttons that do something different if you hold down Shift, Ctrl or Alt when you click them - without the interface telling you that anywhere.

The best improvement in texturing in Bryce 3D is that it now supports parametric mapping of bitmaps. This is the same mapping mode as Poser, so you can use Poser texture maps for your people. The way you go about this isn't entirely obvious, though, and periodically causes anguished questions on the Poser mailing list. Peter Sharpe has a good tutorial on the subject, here. The textures for Thander and Matthew are the standard ones, recoloured a bit, and with the usual dirt and blood added in Paint Shop Pro. I also did a bit of sharpening on Matthew's clothes to make the fabric look coarser.

The other textures started out as Bryce presets, but have all had some tweaking: mostly some extra noise in the Deep Texture Editor. I've found it easy to get good results if the texture is already fairly close to what I want, but rather harder otherwise. The big pipe on the left still doesn't look right, despite my spending longer on its material than any other. what I really wanted was a dark metal, almost black, with streaks of rust, as if water has dripped onto it. The water's been dripping for longer than I thought... I was sorely tempted to make a texture in POV-Ray and wrap a bitmap of that around the cylinder. Then I thought that that would be cheating. If I stuck with Bryce, I still might not get what I wanted, but I would at least learn something more about the Deep Texture Editor. Hmm...

The final picture took 1 hour 50 minutes to render on a Pentium II 333, with fine quality antialiasing. (With antialiasing off, it took only 7 minutes.) Just for once, I didn't do any retouching on it. I tried a focal blur, using the same technique as If Only..., but I didn't think it improved the picture.

Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09