TITLE: Tide Machine

NAME: Michel de Rooij
COUNTRY: the Netherlands

EMAIL: michel@wunderworld.demon.nl
WEBPAGE: N/A

TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: tide.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 3D


TOOLS USED: 
    3DStudio r4


RENDER TIME: 
    app. 5 hours


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 233 mhz, 64 RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The idea of the Tide Machine was born after i had made the
hourglass. I was so pleased with it that I just had to use this, but at first
had no idea what to do with it. Then i invented the tide machine, a technical
device as opposed to the 'primitive' means of keeping the time to adjust the
water level. Because i am still a novice i still let the program (Bryce 3D)
dictate the rules and i couldn't compose the picture as i had wanted.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    For creating objects in Bryce 3D it
all revolves around boolean operations. Unlike other renderers it is not
possible to bend, twist etc. the primitives. For instance to create a curved
pipe one takes a torus and 2 boxes which overlap 2/3 of this torus. The boxes
are assigned the negative and the torus the positive. These three are grouped
and voila, a curved pipe. After that it is just pure hell to fit other parts of
the pipe to the bend part.
In order to seperate the inside lighting from the outside lighting (which is
global) i had to build a box around the inside scene. This was also necessary
because i couldn't allow the glass sphere to reflect the sky. The window with
the outside view is the only open connection with the outside (by means of a
boolean operation). 
The glass form of the hourglass i had to make in 3DStudio r4. I imported this
into to Bryce as a .dxf file (single layer). It would have taken to much effort
to create this in Bryce itself and the result might not have been very
satisfying. One of the drawbacks of Bryce is its rather unfriendly interface
which doesn't allow for 100 0recision. 

