Aye, haven't really played with Bryce enough lately. I've been focusing on learning some other proggies, which is all fine and dandy but Bryce is much more "artistic" for me. Meaning that I find it much easier to just DO a scene within Bryce, instead of focusing on all the techy aspects of things... And I love it. Anyway, here's the story : the world is toast, and people gotta get outta here. Everyone who understands physics knows that spaceships are not only fake, but stupid. Too much margin for error, people will never make it to another star in stupid metal structures. Enough politics, though. I modeled the Gateway in Rhino, textured all in Bryce. Buildings also "modeled" in Rhino, although they took mere seconds considering it is the volumetrics doing all the work, there. Some random trees. A simple cube-path. And some custom mats and sky, of course. I also have a thicker, volumetric sky which I'll be layering in, but that's another story. Next come dozens of little people running up the stairs, most likely 2D picture objects (alpha-channeled) from Poser or maybe some photos, if I get out to the City this week. So I wanted some feedback. Compositionally, how's it looking? Does the Gateway work? I mean, can you tell just by looking what the heck is going on here? Or is it just stupid-looking? Tell me what YOU think!?!

looks great to me man, really does. maybe make the gate and steps a bit more grungey like, mud or something, i dunno. I'm a spaceship designer, wtf do i know? LMAO

I'd've pulled a bit closer and darkened the sky. And would've put the gate on one of the sweet spots. And tried to position the view so the path goes diagonally across it. Buildings, I had to read your description to see they are ruins of buildings. I'd suggest splitting the cubes so parts have windows and parts just the iron grid. Would have added a diffusion map on the windows so they look broken and dirty. The gate and its crag are great, although there could be something in the Diffusion channel, to make the gate a bit more grungy.

Once the poeple are in place, it should become clear as to what is going on. Excellent work so far!

Very cool, has a Diablo-II feel to it.

I agree about the buildings, as they are they just look like wire cages or mesh or something, I don't agree about grunging up the gate, I like the fact that this is the only "working" thing on this world, too much grunge would negate that feel. I do think the steps need to either be grunged a bit or their bright colour toned done - why not a stone texture? At this distance it looks like new wood. I think the scene is maybe a tiny bit bright, but I wouldn't go too dark or you won't be able to see everything, perhaps just a duller day? Less sun in the sky? Slightly less sun shining in the puddles on the right of the image? I'm not sure about the carpet texture on the gate vortex(or whatever you call it) itself, I think you need something a bit more fluid, less patterned, like petrol on water, or soap on a bubble - maybe something like that? I think you have a good camera position here, depends on what else is going in, or how much more will fill the view, you could maybe go a little closer to the gate, but not enough to lose the expanse of destruction behind the gate. All in all a good idea, and I wish I'd had it. Fran

I would go for a more "techie" looking gate. The toasted terrain texture is fantastic!!! Put it on a person.

Okay, so : Buildings suck, re-map them. Gateway sucks, toss it. Steps look stupid. Anything good here worth salvaging?

The buidings don't suck, maybe just add a few pieces of broken wall here and there, something solid in there. The gateway is fine, just needs to look as if it's doing something, maybe electrical charges or something coming of it! Have to agree about the steps though, they do suck! LOL. Has the makings of a fine pic!...Keep at it!

I don't think anything sucks here..! As for the buildings, I could see right away what it is. Only two things caught my eye as not quite right: The fallen trees in the background seems to have fallen in odd angles that doen't look natural to me. Maybe you could make the gate look a bit "deeper" - it looks more of a mirror-type thing to me than a gate that you're supposed to enter. But still, adding people could change that impression a lot. I think it's a great image, please do post the next WIP!

I have my opinions but I'm keeping shtum til I see the next WIP... Bookmark :-)) Cheers, Diolma

Aye, good solutions, JOhnny and Ek-art... I'll give them a whirl when I get home, see what happens. Methinks that if I export both main terrains (the crag and the immediate "floor" terrains) to Rhino, perhaps I can accurately model a better path. Of course, in Bryce it's nearly impossible to interact properly with the terrains, as there is no collision detection, merely a modified bounding-box technique. SO if I do a drop-down of the existing steps, nothing really happens that's worth happening... Buildings should be an easy fix. They are all separate models, created by slicing apart boxes and octas in Rhino with heightmaps (terrains). If I simply duplicate and shrink the duplicates down a bit, and apply a different mat to the duplicates, it should help add to their solidity. And some chunks of concrete wall and whatnot would also help...! (thanks, Ek!) The trees? Well there's not much I can do about them other than rotating them around randomly. Again, Bryce has no physics to handle such things... I COULD export the terrains to Maya, and then make POV-Tree trees, cut down their polys in Maya, and use Maya's physics to actually collide and slide the trees into place. But that would involve me setting up dynamic weights for the branches, and a whole lot of other things... And if I had wanted to use Maya at all for this scene, I would have just done the whole thing in Maya! So I don't think I'll change the trees, but I might move them around a bit, or get rid of the distant ones...? Thanks for the input, everyone!

actually, you could get a sense of immediacy by an 'over the horizon' flamelike glow. This looks like things have been stabilized by time..but it's your pic..I'm impressed.

I think it looks really great, particularly the mud. My only suggestions would relate to the sky (I really do hate Bryce's skies; combo Brycean sky and volumetrics is my favorite). Also the portal's field might look better if you used either a terrain or Wings to make ripples and then put a simple reflective material on it (lol like Stargate). It just looks like a force field to me right now. Alternatively, you could try setting up a simple scene and using that (heavily modified, of course) as the portal to show what's behind it. Like the really, really cool portals in Serious Sam, if you've ever played that game. Those are my thoughts. =)

Is the portal magical otr technological in nature? I get the feeling magic here with the organic shape. Your terrains work well here, but the sky feels as if all is not lost yet. Needs some toxic loving IMO. All the buildings need is some ruined solidity to them as well as the skeleton frames. Try a couple of nested layers of USS Derelict texture. I am having some trouble with the perspective on the foreground path steps. I like where you are headed here and look forward to your next post. Richard

Aye, thanks again for all the input, everyone...! Good ideas, Shin and Incarnadine. I'll implement many of them when I get home... Shinyary, my dear friend : no more Wings blasphemy, please! My ancient dragonlord's heart can only take so much shock in one day! (smiles with a Rhino-like grin, if rhinos CAN grin!)

lol@LSD

oh..well if you can afford Rhino, then I could see the point..;)

Aye, well Rhino's cheap, Pakled. Think about a job, and think about the job cost. Now factor in your expenses... At my exteriors job the average Sunroom sale is $30,000. I use SolarCAD 3D to assemplbe the sunrooms, and Rhino to make any extraneous parts that aren't already manufactured. Now consider that, on average, my company sells 10 sunrooms a month. And that's not even including the 15 vinyl window jobs (averaging $10K apiece) and the 20 vinyl siding jobs (averaging $20K) we pull in monthly. The cost of Rhino and Maya were a drop in the bucket, all it took was some convincing on my part about how much we "needed" them! Nobody buys high-end software just for fun, well I suppose SOME people do, but that's silly. Better to get outside financing for such things... Anyway, here's a quick update. This was finished last night, and rendered for 5+ hours. I'm now going in a totally different direction with this image, closer to the version in #1, but I thought people might like to see it, anyway? Tell me what you think of the Darkness... (this version tells more of a demon's emergance kinda story, as opposed to something hopeful and somber...)

Anyway, Erlik : I wasn't ignoring your input on the composition. The whole gateway, crag, and path need to be rotated to either side, creating a more diagonal composition and finding the "sweet spot" of eye-travel... So I'll rig the camera and photo-sky I'm using now, and figure out which side it all looks best on. I've failed once turning it so that the gateway is on the right, but a few tweaks and it might be okay... Back in a few with another updated render. This one will NOT take five hours, hopefully!

The new effects around the gate look really nice. The stairs turned out well too. Maybe lowering the view a little could look cool, get the view from the stairs looking up to the gate. ??? Excellent!!!

And here's a (postworked) version of the new setup. Any improvement?

Wow. I liked all three versions. Keep up the good work. :)

I liked the lighting better in #2, it seems too bright now (at the portal). Do you stil want people walking up towards the portal (or even out of it)?

Yes, this looks a lot better to me. =) The portal in particular looks better to me.

well, that works..if I had the money I make people spend on high-end network printers..;) Yeah, if it's for work, it's not a luxury, it's an asset..yer lucky you can do that..great images, keep with it.

Aye, the trees are pretty stupid-looking, though, now that I stare at them some more. (nods) And I think you're right about the portal being TOO bright, Ek. Also, the dark area on the ramp seems to suggest it twists, but it doesn't, and shouldn't look that way... A ranged light should fix it. Here's the non-postworked version, in case anyone wants to see it.

That pathway looks pretty slick and treacherous to me. I wouldn't try to go down it with lots of other people that have the same idea, escape.

I like the feel of post 22 best myself. I would suggest moving the portal to the 1/3 point in the image horizontally though, I keep getting the feeling that the main focus item is extraneous as it is so close to the edge. looking good!

looking great and getting better all the time , now its time to add a nakid vicky with a sword comming out off the portal to give it a sense off scale. just my 2 cnts.

Just an idea, how about finding a darker, more stormy sky? I'm thinking of a contrast between light and dark, which might make the portal seem more of a ray of hope, and also drawing the viewer's attention to the main focus of the scene (yes, the portal). I like the portal better now, but I'm not so sure about the aura around it... It's nice to see such a nice progression in a good image like this one. The next incarnation of this pic will be interesting to behold indeed. =)

Aye, Shinyary... But I don't "find" skies. I take photos of them, and use them in my pictures... My days of using other people's stuff are, for the most part, over. Now if I could just figure out how to make people in Maya...!?!?!?

This is a very cool image LSD.... I particularly like the portal from post 19 better than the rest. The darkness of it gives it a very ominous and forboding look. I think that the dark looking portal would look quite decent in the image you posted in post 22. I really like the clarity in the image in post 22. The desolation of this image is grand. Looking forward to see further WIP and completion of this image. 8)

Lol, it just rained here. The absolute perfect sky, only a matter of about half a country. =) Is it worth it?

I think all three are fantastic. The only Nit-Pick I have is the two tree's in the background with their trunk's pointing up in the with nothing visibly supporting them. A heavy trunk would pull a tree back down on it's side even if it landed on it's head unless the trunk were resting on something.

Indeed, Mizrael. I ditched all of the trees, though. Without foliage, the Treelab trees tend to look too sharp, stark, and mathematical. Perhaps I'll import something from TreeFactory or just model some rounder types of trunks in Rhino, but there's no sense in using something that doesn't work so well when I have other options. Just takes some patience, apparently finishing this image/scene this weekend isn't really realistic, but that's okay... Frustration and inspiration both come and go in waves. It's just the way of things. "Do not be quick to reveal judgment. Hidden judgment often is more potent. It can guide reactions whose effects are felt only when too late to divert them." --Bene Gesserit Advice to Postulants (Frank Herbert, "Chaperhouse : Dune")

"Without foliage, the Treelab trees tend to look too sharp, stark, and mathematical." I agree. Too bad you can't export the trees; then you could import them into Wings (hehe there I go with my heresy again) or some such program and smooth them, then bring them back into Bryce for rendering. I think that this would solve that problem; or, DAZ could pull a rabbit out of their collective hats and smooth out the trees in Bryce. Honestly, though, I'm not expecting much from Bryce6. DAZ is, in my opinion, a really great company, despite my complaining (though I still don't like Bryce5.5), but if my expectations are low I can't be disappointed. =)

DAZ will have to add more than just smooth trees to get me to upgrade. I want decent Export abilities!!

Aye, but like we talked about in another thread, Mizrael, it'll never happen. Not without a complete re-writing of Bryce's boolean coding. See, Bryce doesn't actually "boolean" anything. It merely sets up boolean filters inside it's "hide" system, and dosn't actually cut or intersect anything. How is another program to know what is what? No exportable format includes extra coding for such things, not .obj, not .3DS, none of them. Also, since Bryce has almost ZERO actual modeling features, look at it's boolean methods as an "Intro to the concepts behind 3D modeling", and that's about as far as it goes. Even the free modelers have a million more features than Bryce, that's why they are modelers! Bryce can already export the only thing it does particularly well, which is heightmapping.

Well basically I'd like it to export files it has already imported with better export features. That secret back door export that renames every body part cornholio000? is a slap in the face. The least they could do is allow you to use it's import/export features as a good file conversion utility. Keeping internal object group names the same as those that you've imported is important to some of us.

Don't get me wrong, Mizrael... I'd love to see them make it all happen, too! I just don't think it's very realistic. DAZ hasn't impressed me in the least yet, but that's just between Bryce 5.5 and DAZ studio, which is a joke to me. And an even LESS funny joke than Poser, which is a horrible joke! But we'll see. I'd really like to be wrong about Bryce, DAZ, and version 6...!