click to see at large size -- 1100 pixels wide
Adventures in Bryce ... but the first image up -- the spaceport, or skypark -- was done n DAZ Studio. It's well worth viewing at full size, because its loaded with detail, and that's not a backdrop ... all the buildings and so forth are objects, right there in the shot. Talk about processor power --! It would have been an impossible render with my old machine. Here's a snap out of it -- the character himself. That's one of my faces, wearing the SAV Eros skinmap and the Casual Slick hair by Neftis. The costume is the Forgotten Warrior, by Slide 3D -- but a lot of the textures have been changed. There's three different aircars in this shot -- the Stinger, the Wasp and the Skyrider, all from DAZ. Two out of the three were freebies on the cover CD-Rom, with a recent issue of ImagineFX magazine.
Steadily, slowly, I'm getting happier with the Bryce work I'm doing. At the moment, the experiment is about "how do I get true daylight?" Because the renders I've been getting are fine and dandy, but they're not what you'd call photorealistc, and they don't feature anything remotely like real daylight. Now, sometimes this works to the advantage of the piece -- like The Sword in the Stone, for instance. But I would just love to be able to get true photo realism, true daylight, which are features which programs like Vue and Terragen manage automatically!
I spent a pleasant half hour drooling over David Brinnen's work from about 2006, on his Deviantart gallery, the other night. The work he was doing in Bryce 5.5 was ... amazing. Very, very close to photo realism, in a program that's well and truly obsolete now. So this stiff has to be doable in Bryce 7.0 Pro. Now, how?!
The experiment continues. Brighter lights? More complex shadows? "Volumetric" clouds? Sure. I'll be happy to try anything I can think of! There's a long, long way to go, but -- it's a load of fun.
Jade, 16 January
