Valley of the Red Giant by AnteriorLobe

Bryce • Space • posted on Jan 12, 2007

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Description

The star was only slightly more massive than Sol. For a few billion years it was a very bright star in the sky over the ice covered satellite. But the star's core burned all it's hydrogen, it's helium, and swelled into a Red Giant, whose thin outer layers extended out 200 million kilometers from the hot core (comparable to the distance of Mars from our sun). The increased light and heat was enough to melt the ice that had slowly ground down the bedrock of the satellite. For a very brief period, perhaps a dozen or a few thousand years, water tricked across the surface of the satellite while the Red Giant loomed in thin clouds of the new atmosphere. The atmosphere was already being carried off into space faster than it could be replenished from evaporating liquid. Soon the satellite would be dry, and after a few million years, as the star began to slowly collapse the reddish glow in the sky would recede and the cold would return. In time it would no longer even been a bright star in the sky over the valley. ------------------- Created in Bryce 6. This image came about in a somewhat odd manner by combining parts of two rendering ideas that weren't working well. In one, I had the Red Giant star and a "hot Jupiter" (a Gas Giant very, very close to it's sun) inside a nebula. I added space ships and asteroids, but the result was rather dull. The second is part of an ongoing effort to make a "weird valley" as a background for a "weird flying machine." The flying machine bit is coming along fine, it just needs more tweaks here and there. I could come up with ordinary landscapes to fly over, but nothing "weird." Of course it didn't help that I wasn't quite sure of what I meant by "weird." I then tried making the "weird valley" starting with a DEM grayscale I found on the the net - one for Death Valley actually. I loaded it as a terrain in Bryce and then did all sorts of things with the various terrain tools. Generally the subtle effects end up working better, at least for me. The DEM (and, I guess, Death Valley) have a very flat bottom, so it worked well with a very transparent water plane. Finally it occurred to me that my Valley, which just wasn't working for the Flying scene, might be better with the Red Giant. So I combined them and was very pleased with the result. I've spent a day or so tweaking all sorts of details, but in the end the final result is almost exactly what I had when I first put them together. ------------------- So, here it is, along with an overly melodramatic Background Story of what the scene is -- for some reason I usually like to know all sorts of background details after I make something -- and an extended commentary on what I did to put the image together. I am NOT at all suggesting that many (or any) one out there is that concerned with either the Melodramatic Background or the Extended Image Commentary of my little image here, although, there are certainly a lot of renders out there which I would love to read comparable details about.