Bryce images http://www.metacreations.com
All of the images below were rendered in Metacreations Bryce
some of the objects were created in other programs.
Test images: Most of my work with Bryce has been involved in getting to
know the program. I have found that easily controlling the environment and the
easy access to materials makes it a convenient and worthy place to render models
created in other programs like trueSpace or Rhino.
ABC in glass
This is a block that is cut out either A, B or C
depending which axis you are looking from.
Lighted Cage
I probably spent way too long on this one. Maybe an hour or two. I was trying to
make something that looked good while experimenting with light. I have several
mountains at different distances and to make the ground seem less flat there is
a very low ridge running left to right the full width of the picture just beyond
the sphere. I also fussed a lot with the colored haze over the moon. The sun in
setting and very low in the sky. Notice the shadow of the cage on the side of
the hill to the right of the cage near the middle of the pic. That is cast by
the sun.
Kristin A & B
The 'Kristin' (my niece) on the left used normal lighting and the one on
the right used volumetric lighting. Roughly 15 minutes versus 3.5 hours to
render and my brother said he preferred the easier one for the higher contrast.
I think I agree but I admire how the volumetric sun makes me want to squint my
eyes when I look at it.
This is a test using the Bryce Terrain Editor to make text from bitmap
images. Notice the rough edges like they were cut using a hacksaw. Useful in
some situations because it adds texture to the glass. I can't remember if I
tried smoothing here. I later found the using another program like Amorphium,
Raydream or trueSpace to quickly make the text gave me a much lower polygon
count but of course I could have done more to the letters with the Bryce Terrain
Editor if I had chosen to do so.
 
Angular Mound
This was one result of an experiment drawing overlapping squares in different
shades of gray on a grayscale image then extruding it in the Bryce Terrain
Editor. With this material I think it kind of looks like an ultra modern or
artsy office complex. If you gave it an adobe texture it would look a lot like a
wierd house that can be seen from Highway 280 about 25 minutes south of San
Francisco. My problem with this was the difficulty in making the sides straight
up and down. I eventually traced it to the fact that the TE basically uses a
grid (like volleyball net) where individual intersections are raised or
lowered depending on the grayscale value of the underlying pixel. The problem
that totally vertical walls would require placing one point of the net directly
over the other which is not possible. Very high resolutions and stretching the
resulting terrain vertically while squeezing it horizontally can make very steep
sides though.
Cityscape primitives
In the experiment above I had hoped to very easily create a whole
cityscape from one or a few terrains. After doing some calculations I decided it
was more polygon efficient to build buildings like those below from primitives
and copy them semi randomly onto a grid for variety. This also has the advantage
that each building can have its own texture. I planned to surround the city
center with lower 6 sided buildings to form the outlying areas, a technique
which would use very few polygons. Dull but it will probably be effective. I
hate it when the best way isn't any fun. :) This picture was just a
test shot of a group of one of each of the simple buildings I built. I impressed
myself with how realistic it already looks with a good texture. The cityscape
was only meant to be a background anyway so I guess it doesn't matter that it
will be easy to make.
Musical Notes
This a test of the concept of using font based notes extruded in Amorphium then
rendered in Bryce as the basis of music related animation. I later built a
staircase in black and white that looks like a music staff. I'll have to dig it
put and post it here for a comparison.
Happy Birthday Doug
My brother was out of town for two weeks on vacation and only receives my emails
at work. I realized Monday morning that the day before had been his birthday so
I rushed to get this together so I could email it to him. Only after I was done
did I realize he would still be gone for another week so my rushing was for
needles. What I like about this image was how I did it from scratch in about two
hours with a program I had only been using for about two weeks at the time. I
wish you didn't have to have a hazy sky to get a rainbow in Bryce. I guess if I
fiddle around enough I can get a somewhat clearer sky and still have a rainbow
but this is the result of a lot of rainbow fiddling as it is. There is a light
inside the flame in the candle which explains the ring of shadow around the base
of the cake. I used two spot lights in front of the model from the right and
left with slightly yellow and orange tints, respectively. I have no clue if they
were worth the trouble but ya gotta start somewhere. :)
Pyramid Temple
This was one of the first pics I tried to do when I upgraded to Bryce 4 from not
touching Bryce 2 in a long time. I made the pyramid with booleans of different pyramid
type shapes. The columns meet near the top very neatly though you can't
see it here. I had this as my windows wallpaper for a couple weeks before I
noticed the cactus are floating in the air! Oops. I did this one before I read
the manual far enough to know the down arrow thingy puts stuff on the ground. I
always thought the haze at the base of the mountain looked odd. It may be a
shadow under the mountain. I never went back to the model to check. My wife
thinks the cactus don't look real but I just copied them from Bryce's stock
objects to try to show scale.
White Picket Fence
This was the first thing I specifically tried to construct in Bryce besides just
experimenting with random booleans. I think it looks pretty neat. But then I am
the proud papa. I guess I should try to find a wood bump map to give grain to
that white paint.
2001
I did this one just as a kind of joke to email to my older brother. 2001 was the
very first movie I saw in a theater. As simple as this pic was I spent long
minutes trying to get the angle right on the obelisk. The surface is supposed to
absorb light or something. It is supposed to be really dark. But I needed a
little contrast along the sides and to show the bottom just a tad so you could
tell it was 3D and not just a flat surface.
This page was last updated on 05/17/00.
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