High Altitude Interception by AnteriorLobe

Bryce • Science Fiction • posted on Dec 03, 2006

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Description

A pair of Wasp Interceptors struggle to gain enough altitude to approach the mysterious starship which has entered orbit, um, mysteriously. Is this a friendly visit or the start of big trouble? It's a mystery. -------------------- This image was rendered in Bryce 6 using the built-in connection to DAZ|Studio to pull over a Wasp Fighter (which was then duplicated in Bryce). The DSC-001 starship was natively imported into Bryce. Credits * DSC-001, by Phillip Drawbridge, available at DAZ * The Wasp, by Serrge, available at DAZ -------------------- Originally I wanted to try a fancy way of adding the slight curvature to the planet using optics within Bryce. (If you put, say, a sphere in front of the camera using colorless glass with no specularity, the index of refraction (as long as it isn't 100) will distort the image like a lens.) Unfortunately I made the lens distorted planet separate from the one with the ships, figuring that I could just paste on the curved planet. But, and I suppose I should have known this, the lens also shifts the range of colors from the top of the atmosphere to the edge of space and it's a real pain to match. I think it would work as a single render as long as the sphere/lens were placed behind the space craft. Or - just thought of this - if a very squashed sphere were used which just covered the top of the planet. In any event I cheated and just pushed the edges down with PhotoPaint. Something I think I did a better job on were the stars. Bryce generates stars, and I had it do so for this image, but they tend to be too big (like 4x4 or even 5x5 pixels) and not "pointy" enough. A real star has a Gaussian distribution - that is the center is much brighter than the edges. (Okay, because of they way our eyes work it's probably not that simple, but close.) So I went through all the Bryce made stars and chopped them down to no more than 3x3 pixels and brightened up the inner portions. I also added a few more faint stars, which are just single pixel ones, but not too many. It is very tough to manually create a true random distribution, so I didn't want to add a lot. In real life there should be lots more faint stars visible.

Comments (4)

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Guineapigmom

11:49PM | Sun, 03 December 2006

Great image! I like the large starship which seems to have just appeared out of nowhere. I like the stars and the way the upper altitude blends into the lower altitude. Very nicely done!

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BtaraKtahn

2:59PM | Mon, 04 December 2006

Well, there's your problem; you should've sent up an A-Wing. That's what galactic recon ships are for. If you've got 'em in your arsenal, then by the Force, use the blasted things! You wouldn't even have to get that close to it! ... great. Now I want to play "X-Wing", again. doesn't think the old program will work or look good on her computer, anymore Oh! Nevermind! wanders off to play "Star Wars: Battlefront II" on the PS2 since it's got space combat No A-Wings, though... which is a bit of a letdown to those of us who loved the little ships in "X-Wing". Your image seems to have a Flying Dutchman quality to it, which looks great. :o) Given that foreshadowin, I'd be more worried about finding out that it's a ghost ship with some unknown alien entity roaming around in it or a weird mutating virus than whether or not the crew of the ship was the forward vanguard of an invading fleet.