Attached Link: http://www.employees.org/~redneck/graphics/journal_01.htm

I have been using Bryce for 24 hours. What I want to do, very badly, is render dirigibles. I have this thing for dirigibles, and I want to make some illustrations of dirigibles in weird settings. So as soon as I understood how objects worked, I tried to figure out how to make dirigibles. While Boolean objects are very powerful, I get the feeling Bryce is not the greatest tool in the world for 3D objects. You got the primitives, which can be combined in various ways, and some simple transformations, and that seems to be it. What I need to be able to do is render a long cigar-shaped solid which is sort of faceted longitudinally (representing the longitudinal ribs of rigid airships such as zeppelins). I used to work with computer graphics back in the eighties, and from what I did then I thought what I needed was some kind of extrude tool. I could draw a line representing the curve of the hull of the dirigible, then extrude it into a long thin plane. Then you duplicate and rotate the plane around an axis representing the longitudinal axis of the airship. But Bryce has no extrude tool. However, Bryce does make it easy to move the origin point out away from an object so you can do the duplicate and rotate trick. Now all I needed was a way to get the initial primitive to dupe and rotate. Someone on Usenet suggested there were better 3D modeling applications out there, which I might use to build the dirigible and import it into Bryce. In the end, I have worked out something with terrains, but it's not perfect. If anyone would like to help, I've put it all down in an illustrated journal at: http://www.employees.org/~redneck/graphics/journal_01.htm Thanks, Mitch Barrie

Try the free program D Mesh it should take about 30 seconds to make a dirigible with it. You can get it at: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/4500/

Practice makes perfect -- or at least closer to perfect. Two years ago when I started working with Bryce I relied heavily on Ray Dream to do most of my modeling. Then I would import everything into Bryce and render. Now I hardly use Ray Dream or Strata unless I have a very specific need. If you are on a PC, there are many free or very reasonable modelers out there. There are fewer for the Mac that are free or reasonable but they do exist. Personally, I think you can make some very nice dirigibles in Bryce by using primatives, terrains and symmetrical lattices. Sarah

Thanks. I'll try those other tools. I've been hearing from other people I should probably do my modeling with other tools. But if this can be done in Bryce, I'd love to understand how. As you can see from my Web site, I have been using the terrain editor to build the dirigible hull one rib at a time. I'm not happy with this because I don't have a lot of control over the bitmap I'm using (how to paint a nice gradated range of tones representing the curve of the hull?) and in any case this method, while it looks cool, results in a dirigible comprised of at least 72 objects, which is too many just for the hull. Makes scene files unwieldy. A symmetrical matrix won't help me until I can figure out how to produce a greyscale bitmap to describe the hull. If you know how to make some very nice dirigibles in Bryce, I'd love to hear more. Thanks, Mitch http://www.employees.org/~redneck/graphics/journal_01.htm

The poly count on D Mesh is so low in obj format and the user interface so simple, you really should give it a try. The finished object will have an extremely smooth skin, too. The modeller doesn't use sweep or extrude it employs displacement to mesh deform/edit. You could build it in Bryce with boolean operations, but to get the tapering along the side where there are ribs could take forever. Another inexpensive ($99.00) modeller that would get the job done in no time is Nendo. That would be my first choice for a project like this.

Thanks Februrus! I had a look at that site, but also went sniffing around elsewhere. I downloaded the Rhino eval and had a hull (not a very good one) banged out in less than half an hour. Details at: http://www.employees.org/~redneck/graphics/journal_02.htm Thanks for all your help. I'm moving forward now... Mitch

Here's a tutorial on doing gray scale images for the terrain/lattice editor: http://www.bryce4all.com/tutorials/photogray.htm It's not specific to dirigibles but it might help. What I would do is create your circle of ribs as one grayscale image. If you post an image of what you're looking for, I could give it a go.