Sorry guys -- all I have left of the original renders is a couple of thumbnails, which I'll include here for the sake of interest. The rest have vamoosed. A website from which they were remote loaded isn't there anymore, or an account was discontinued, or some ruddy thing. I don't even know ... it's been fourteen years. Argh. I'll pop in some other "guy candy in the spirit of," to fill the blanks -- and/but I'll stay with Michael 4 here rather than digress into Genesis. At the time I was doing this stuff (learning, learning -- making every mistake in the book, but having a load of fun at the same time!) Genesis hadn't even been thought of. M4 was state of the art. In fact, some folks were still playing with M3 and V3. So let's stay with Mike 4, and fill in the blank here before I return you to the original post!
Bryce 5.5 meets DAZ Studio 3 ... and I like the results! Picking up today where I left off yesterday: it's 10,000 BCE, it's the short arctic summer of the ice age, and a young hunter has gone out to find something to skewer for dinner. The big difference today is that the background in these renders was generated in Bryce...
I worked out how to design skies ... kind of clouds, how many clouds, direction of them, color of them. And how to change the whole color tone of the image. Then I designed two geographical objects -- a range of hills in the distance and a mossy, rocky tundra type surface -- and plunked them right where I wanted them, under that gorgeous sky.
You might be interested to see the actual Bryce landscape, before 3D props and characters were set into/onto it...
I worked out how to design skies ... kind of clouds, how many clouds, direction of them, color of them. And how to change the whole color tone of the image. Then I designed two geographical objects -- a range of hills in the distance and a mossy, rocky tundra type surface -- and plunked them right where I wanted them, under that gorgeous sky.
You might be interested to see the actual Bryce landscape, before 3D props and characters were set into/onto it...
[snip .... nope. Image gone. Rats. Sorry about that...]
Not too shabby for a few days' learning -- but I have a hell of a lot to learn yet before these landscapes are seriously up to snuff. They're better as looooong distance shots. If you have a look at this one, above, at full size (click the pic to get the big version) you'll see that as the terrain gets into closeup (what would be right in front of your feet in real life) you kind of "run out of detail." It gets blocky and geometric. And I knoooow there is a way to set the level of detail, or whatever it's called in Bryce. I just haven't found it yet. Gimme time!
At the moment, though, I'm getting a bit better with configuring skies and oceans:
So that's where I am in Bryce today ... and I was actually about to imagine a landscape and then go into Bryce and make it, for today's render... however. It was NOT imported into DAZ 3D as an OBJ and used as an object. There's more to learn about that, apparently, before I get there. I can export the terrain object as an OBJ file -- no problem. I can also import it into DAZ, no problem. Better yet, it arrives with its materials already applied. But the scale is off, and I need to work out ratios and values and parameters and all that good stuff. Then, I ought to be able to bring the terrain object right into DAZ.
In the meantime, this one is an artistic fake. The backdrop is the Bryce render. The foreground is the "floor" from the Fairy Tale Story cyclorama set. You turn OFF the sky dome and the cyclorama, and the cloud plane, and all the pre-set plants. Then you import your logs, boulders, pebbles, grasses, and get everything arranged to artfully hide the fact the scene's been "staged" rather than "shot on location." Actually, it works out fine, and it is so much easier than fiddling around with the full-on terrain OBJ. Whew!
I love that overcast sky with the low cloudbase and the sun glow...
Jade, 20 March
