Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

Radial City

Comments

The main structure, modelled in Carrara, was developed for a different project that I never finished. In a spirit of 'waste not, want not', I decided to pull it into Bryce, and use it as a test for volumetric materials.

Bad idea. It took forever to render, and the results looked hideous. So I applied a much simpler texture that I happened to have lying around, added some glass domes, and went through about ten variants trying to get something that looked even slightly interesting.

Finally, having let it lie for a few months, I opened the file again, fiddled with the sky for about half a day, and finally got the structure looking more or less the way I wanted it.

Having done that, I built a circular platform in front of it, added a railing and a basin, and began to populate it with figures. First in was the cat (you did notice the cat, didn't you?), followed by three humans. The scene file climbed to about 40MB, and I ended up giving Bryce 240MB of memory to stop it swapping during the render. I could probably have used less detailed figures, or been more careful about eliminating body parts hidden by clothing, but what are a few megabytes between friends?

Somewhere along the way I also added a helicopter I'd been building in Carrara, just to have something to put in the sky.

The two women are the 'Vicky P4' model wearing Posette's clothes, the man is a standard Poser 4 male dressed in a jacket and trousers from the Daz3D Costume Shop CD. The cat is a cat, as cats usually are.

Applications

Bryce 4
Metacreations
Carrara 1.1
MetaCreations
Photoshop 5.0.2
Adobe
Poser 4
Curious Labs