Bytescapes

a gallery of computer-generated images

Dark Boat

Comments

Another spin-off from the ill-fated "Hive Mind" series, this image recovered the 'sabot' from the hive mind's container and used it as a pontoon for a futuristic catamaran.

The 'dark boat' is modelled in Bryce, using primitives and symmetrical lattices. The engine nacelles, tailplane, and the struts joining the pontoons to the hull are all symmetrical lattices, based on greyscale-to-height (G2H) maps painted in Photoshop. The results are sometimes a little ragged - I haven't quite got the trick of this yet - so the model is rather carefully posed and may not look good from all angles.

The most difficult - and least successful - part of this image is where the pontoons meet the water. I used a stretched terrain (also based on a G2H map painted in Photoshop) to create ripples to which were applied the basic water texture used for the water plane. This is better than nothing, but still doesn't give a really realistic impression of a heavy object sitting in water; there should probably be a little more foam.

The tower in the background is composed from primitives.

Applications

Bryce 3D
Metacreations
Photoshop 5.0.2
Adobe