TITLE: SimElement
NAME: Rick Kennedy
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: ekennedy@voyager.net
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: simel.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 3D 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Paintshop Pro for image assembly and conversion to JPeg

RENDER TIME: 
    About 3 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 80MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


(With apologies to Maxis.  :-)

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium... All those elements have to be 
made somewhere, right? This is my attempt to explain where.

Disclaimer:  No Sims were harmed during the the explosion at the 
Sodium plant, nor at any time during the creation of this image.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I purchased Bryce 3D 10 days before the deadline of this competition. 
Nothing like waiting until the last minute!  This is my first-ever 
project using Bryce, so I've only used basic objects and materials.  
Lots of objects!  This scene consists of 5535 objects, which frankly 
is way more than Bryce can handle efficiently.  The project was a 
learning experience, and the lesson learned was, don't use Bryce for 
a project like this.  File saves alone took upwards of 20 hours.  
Selecting and manipulating objects was an exercise in patience.  
Rendering the full image crashed Bryce every time.  I had to split 
the scene into several chunks in order to complete the render, and 
then paste them back together with Paintshop Pro.  (That seemed to 
be within the spirit and letter of the rules, but if not, I'm sure 
someone will let me know.) 

Frankly, it's a bit of a miracle that it all worked in time, given 
the inefficiencies and crashes. I still intend to keep using Bryce, 
since it does have a lot of nice features--but only where it makes 
sense.  Meanwhile, I know I have that copy of POV-Ray around here 
somewhere...

Source is not included, because it's 50 MB.  You're not missing 
much, it's all very straightfoward.  Believe me, you wouldn't want 
to inflict it on your computer anyway.



