EMAIL: michel@wunderworld.demon.nl

NAME: Michel de Rooij

TOPIC: Water

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT

TITLE: Tide Machine

COUNTRY: the Netherlands

WEBPAGE: N/A

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 % precision.