TITLE: Skyworld
NAME: Brian Ballweber
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bballweber@austin.rr.com
TOPIC: Still images - Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: skyworld.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Bryce 4.1



TOOLS USED: 

    Bryce 4.1, Ray Dream Studio 5.0.2, Detailer 1.0.2



RENDER TIME: 

    6h 21m 3s



HARDWARE USED: 

    Athlon 1.2GHz, 1GB ram



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A fantasy world where civilization has taken to the sky.  Bridges and
tunnels link an interconnected web of floating cities.  In the skies
above, merchant airships hover about, like bees around a hive...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


First off, to ease the conscience, the circular render was NOT
achieved via post-processing, details are below.

Most of the image is modeled in Bryce.  All of the city and landscape
was done in Bryce using primitives and booleans.  Bridge superstructures
were created using booleans of many large radii toruses.

Airships were created in the Ray Dream Studio freeform modeler and 
exported to Bryce (ironically, given the title, the airship design 
came to me from watching Waterworld).  Detailer was used to create 
texture maps for the airships in the foreground.  

Technical side note for RDS, Detailer users: To get good meshes 
out of RDS, stick with the freeform modeler not the meshform (UV coords 
make much more sense that way).  Also, 3DMF format works well for 
moving objects from RDS to Detailer and Bryce, and parametric mapping 
works best for texturing in Detailer and reapplying maps in Bryce (I 
only mention this because it took me forever to learn this procedure 
on my own).

I spent a lot of the creation time working out the camera angle and 
the composition of the scene.  I tried to balance foreground
to background objects, and not let any one thing dominate the scene 
(thats important because I wanted to create a "Sky World" not a 
"Sky Object").

As an added element, although the image looked ok as normal square
render I wanted to make it more interesting.  My goal was to make it 
appear as if you were looking through a crystal ball into another
world.  To do this I decided to give it a view as if you were looking 
through a very wide-angle or fisheye camera lens (this would make the 
world warp at the edges).  I accomplished the circular render and lens 
effect by placing the camera inside a matte black box, then using 
boolean operations to cut a circular hole in the side of the box.  
In the hole a spherical glass lens was placed, thus making the normal 
camera have an additional lens.  I messed with the refractive 
properties and shape of the lens until I got the desired effect.  
(Oddly, looking over past IRTC images, no one seems to leverage this 
powerful feature of a raytrace engine.)

Title and sig were added in the render by placing them inside the
black box with the camera, giving them a funky blue glass texture,
and pointing a couple spotlights at them.  By making the box black
and disabling its ability to cast or reflect shadows it almost
makes the scene look like it was composted in a 2D program (a cool 
effect IMO).

Scene file was omitted because in the final revision it tipped the 
scales at just over 200MB (one thing Bryce is not is low-poly).
Final render was done with the higher quality anti-aliasing setting
in Bryce (necessary to get fine detail such as bridge structures and 
airship cables to appear correctly .. of course the jpg conversion
tends to wipe some of that out...)

