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...)