This one was inspired by the train of thought I was in yesterday, when I had to render the cafe scene in three layers and paste it together like a jigsaw. I was (!) thinking about rendering in layers, and when I saw the Bryce image that became the background for this shot, a scenario popped into my mind. The character is new: a hard-nosed patrol officer who works at the spaceport. Very neat. It's based on this one, of course, from February 5:
Lots of rendering and painting later, it's very much more dramatic!
Also ... a flight to the Italian Alps, in Terragen:
The only thing I'd wanted, that I couldn't make Terragen 4 do was to put a chop on the mirror surface of the river/lake. Nothing I did raised a chop on the surface, so ... what the hey. It was a still day when we went flight seeing, right? Right. Next time, I'll go back and experiment till I can get a choppy surface.
Note: the experiment to see if I could generate a terrain on Bryce, export it as an OBJ and have Terragen work with it went phhht. Terragen seems to require imported OBJ models to arrive compete with their texture/surface mapping. And yes, I did generate all the maps in Bryce prior to export, but Terragen is incompatible, can't read the file format. Well, fiddlesticks.
But since I'd designed the terrain, I went ahead and rendered it in Bryce. I managed to squeeze this out of the old program:
As Bryce goes, not so bad. Better than most. But it's not photo-realistic, as even the quickest, most neophyte render in Terragen is. You can almost buy the spiky "noise" on the island as fir trees, which is the intention...
But here's the rub: I got all the Terragen scenes in the same amount of time it took to make Bryce do this one simple image. Ack.
Very, very hot weather is coming: the forecast is for a 100+ degrees every day till next weekend, so I might not got back to this for a few days. Don't want to cook the computers!
