The Anatomy of a Bryce Image

Wherein the sordid details of the creation of a planetary image in Bryce are revealed.

The image above shows the stage area of the Bryce 3D screen, as seen from the camera's view. The small image at the upper left shows a preview of the rendered image while the main area displays the wireframe objects which make up the image. The background image completely fills the view and is, therefore, not visible. The planet and its atmosphere are made up of three spheres. The rings are made from a sphere that has been squashed flat. This image shows the stage area as seen from above, showing the camera, its field of view, and the position of all the objects in the scene. The 2-dimensional pict image serving as the background is currently selected in this view. You can see how it has been sized and positioned to just extend past the camera's field of view. The half-opened umbrella like thing is a light source I added to the scene to throw some more light onto the surface of the planet to help it stand out more from the background.

The Materials Lab is where you define the way a texture will behave in the stage environment. The planet surface is shown. At left is a preview of the planet itself, while at right are three windows showing the elements which make up the color, alpha channel, and bump map of the texture applied to the planet. In the middle are the controls which determine how the texture will appear by defining the texture's specularity, transparency, reflection and refraction characteristics and such subtle parameters as the color of the ambient lighting and whether that texture will accept and cast shadows. This is the Deep Texture Editor, the engine which drives the entire Bryce process. This area was considered so complex by the publishers of Bryce, that only in its 3rd version has any documentation of it's use appeared in the manual. The windows show the three components which make up the planet's texture. The left and right windows are two bump maps (which give the planet it's texture), the middle window serves as the display for the alpha channel (which is used to map the colors onto the surface) and the lower window shows the preview of the combined components and the colors applied to them. Simple, no? Just be glad I'm not going to get into the Noise, Filters and Phases applied to each component!

At left we have the Deep Texture Editor screen of the material that was applied to the rings. It is a rather simple 1-component object that only took me about 2 hours of experimentation to get right. The application of the proper amount and type of Noise was crucial in order to get the bands in the rings to appear with the proper density and spacing. The slightest change in the Noise setting can completely change the ring's appearance.

Materials and textures were also applied to the two spheres making up the planet's atmosphere. One sphere serves to simply make a hazy layer showing the extent of the atmosphere and is a bit larger than the planet itself. The other sphere was used to create clouds and is sized only a hair larger than the planet itself.

Here we have the gruesome details of the Render Report, showing that this image took 20 hours, 35 minutes, and 25 seconds to render. The total number of pixels rendered in the scene are shown.

Bryce utilizes ray-tracing when it renders a scene, which means that it sends out rays of virtual light from the camera into the scene and records what that ray hits, and if the ray hits a reflective object, it will record where that ray bounces off to and what it hits along the way. Since the rings around my planet are semitransparent, the rendering of this image was rather complex. When's the last time you had proof that your computer made over 5 trillion computations for you? When I rendered a high-resolution version of this image to print to slide film, a total of slightly more than 4 QUADRILLION light rays were recorded. The render time took more than 7 days. I really, really need a faster computer.



The image above shows the stage area of the Bryce 3D screen, as seen from the camera's view. The small image at the upper left shows a preview of the rendered image while the main area displays the wireframe objects which make up the image. The background image completely fills the view and is, therefore, not visible. The planet and its atmosphere are made up of three spheres. The rings are made from a sphere that has been squashed flat.		This image shows the stage area as seen from above, showing the camera, its field of view, and the position of all the objects in the scene. The 2-dimensional pict image serving as the background is currently selected in this view. You can see how it has been sized and positioned to just extend past the camera's field of view. The half-opened umbrella like thing is a light source I added to the scene to throw some more light onto the surface of the planet to help it stand out more from the background.



The Materials Lab is where you define the way a texture will behave in the stage environment. The planet surface is shown. At left is a preview of the planet itself, while at right are three windows showing the elements which make up the color, alpha channel, and bump map of the texture applied to the planet. In the middle are the controls which determine how the texture will appear by defining the texture's specularity, transparency, reflection and refraction characteristics and such subtle parameters as the color of the ambient lighting and whether that texture will accept and cast shadows.		This is the Deep Texture Editor, the engine which drives the entire Bryce process. This area was considered so complex by the publishers of Bryce, that only in its 3rd version has any documentation of it's use appeared in the manual. The windows show the three components which make up the planet's texture. The left and right windows are two bump maps (which give the planet it's texture), the middle window serves as the display for the alpha channel (which is used to map the colors onto the surface) and the lower window shows the preview of the combined components and the colors applied to them. Simple, no? Just be glad I'm not going to get into the Noise, Filters and Phases applied to each component!

		At left we have the Deep Texture Editor screen of the material that was applied to the rings. It is a rather simple 1-component object that only took me about 2 hours of experimentation to get right. The application of the proper amount and type of Noise was crucial in order to get the bands in the rings to appear with the proper density and spacing. The slightest change in the Noise setting can completely change the ring's appearance. Materials and textures were also applied to the two spheres making up the planet's atmosphere. One sphere serves to simply make a hazy layer showing the extent of the atmosphere and is a bit larger than the planet itself. The other sphere was used to create clouds and is sized only a hair larger than the planet itself.

		Here we have the gruesome details of the Render Report, showing that this image took 20 hours, 35 minutes, and 25 seconds to render. The total number of pixels rendered in the scene are shown. Bryce utilizes ray-tracing when it renders a scene, which means that it sends out rays of virtual light from the camera into the scene and records what that ray hits, and if the ray hits a reflective object, it will record where that ray bounces off to and what it hits along the way. Since the rings around my planet are semitransparent, the rendering of this image was rather complex. When's the last time you had proof that your computer made over 5 trillion computations for you? When I rendered a high-resolution version of this image to print to slide film, a total of slightly more than 4 QUADRILLION light rays were recorded. The render time took more than 7 days. I really, really need a faster computer.