Many years ago, I picked up a book of paintings dealing with
derelict space ships. It's now buried in a stack of boxes in my closet (I'll dig it out one of
these days). But I remember the haunting, lonely images in it. They set my imagination running,
wondering how the ships got there, who the pilots were and what happen to them. Since then,
I've wanted to do one of my own. I've gained some proficiency in Bryce and figured it was about
time to try my hand at this theme. The space ship was created with s-Patch using multi-layers.
I imported it into Bryce and did some test renders. As I played with it, I added parts and
changed some others to give the angles and surfaces I needed for the image. When I was
satisfied, I imported each part into UVMapper and created the wireframe maps. Textures, bump
maps and transparancy maps were then created with Photo Paint. The whole process was iterative
as I'm still learning what I need to do to get the effects I wanted.
When that was done, I created the terrain and tweaked a suitable texture for that. Lighting
came next. I had all atmosphere memory buttons set by the time I finished trying different
settings. It was quite a process, adjusting the various parameters to get the textures to
present the effect I wanted. Some time ago, this would have been a chore. Now that I better
understand the parameter effects, it's more like fun. |
