Duskrider's Blog

I have heard it said, and seen it on posters as I'm sure most of you reading this has, "To err is human, but to really foul things up it takes a computer."

I'm inclined to believe that this is true.

This morning I was working on an image for my gallery (hopefully it will be up tomorrow) entitled "The End of All Things". It's a Bryce rendered space scene depicting... well, the end of the world. I've just recently begun working with transparency maps and bump maps in Bryce (at least outside of the limited materials Bryce provides), and this image uses both a custom transparency map (a couple actually) and a custom bump map. For those of you who don't know, transparency maps deal with making things 'see through' in Bryce, and bump maps make things... well.. bumpy or rough. A good example is the picture I'm working on (again, hopefully it will be up tomorrow.:) ).

In this wallpaper I'm making, we have the Earth in the foreground, and the sun in the background. The sun is doing something very naughty... like exploding, and the Earth, of course, will soon be toast. The image is just after the initial explosion of the sun and just before the demise of the Earth. Last moments, if you will. The bump map and transparency maps come into play on the Earth. I need to have a good deal of detail on the Earth here, since it's in the foreground and right there in your face. I also want to make sure that you KNOW it's the Earth, and not some random planet. For that, I have to have an actual map of the Earth's surface to wrap around the globe I put in Bryce. Fortunately for me, Bryce already has just that sort of material... an Earth mat (mat is short for Material in Bryce talk).

(Don't worry, there is a point to the title of this story, we'll get to the err part in a minute)

So I wrap this Earth map around my sphere and viola! I have a nice plastic looking Earth floating in a black void. I'll load in some stars and I now have a nice plastic looking Earth floating amongst a bunch of little points of light. Hmm..

To make the Earth look real, I have to make it look real. I know that sounds strange and kind of obvious, but if there's one thing I've learned while doing images it's this: In order to make something look real - you have to make it look REAL. That means, look at the real thing and see what your version is missing. What is my version missing? Well, an atmosphere for one thing. An Earth without clouds is pretty rare, don't you think? So, we'll add some clouds by wrapping a cloud mat around an only slightly larger sphere. *Poof* Now I have a nice plastic looking Earth with some plastic looking clouds around it. Hmm...

Ok, let's play with the light a little. Here I have my Earth, and I know I want my sun to be behind it (from the camera's perspective) so I have to place the sun back there. Doing so in Bryce is pretty easy, so I do that. If there is one thing that can make or break an image... lighting is it. Lighting is way more important than anyone realizes. This is usually because if lighting is done correctly, nobody realizes it's done at all. If you have to stop and look at a picture and think, "that lighting looks cool, but it's a bit off" then the whole reality is ruined. Anyway, so I play with the lighting (which is something I'm far from mastering). Ah.. now we have a nicely back lit Earth with some lighting playing off the mountain ranges at the horizon line. That takes away a bit of the plastic look. Good. The foreground of my Earth is pitch black though... it provides a nice contrast to the lit side of the Earth facing the sun, but pitch black isn't very realistic. Besides that, we're still faced with smooth plastic looking clouds. Hmm...

First let's take care of the Earth. Now, it's the 21st Century and the Earth hasn't been Pitch Black for over a hundred years. Even from space you can see the complex network of cities and highways lit up at night, so that's what we need. Here is where we use our transparency map. I went to Nasa and found a really great high quality night time map of the earth taken from satellites. (This is a really neat picture by the way, you can find it HERE) Since I didn't want that night-time map to be over the whole globe though (only on land because that's where the lights are) I had to make a transparency map of the water. That way, the parts that are water on this image will be transparent on my globe, and you'll be able to see the material underneath (which also happens to be water, but of a lighter brand so there is more contrast).

A transparency map is simply a picture with dark patches and light patches. The darker something is, the more transparent it is. Thus, completely back means completely transparent, basically invisible. So what I needed is a version of the same picture I used for the Earth, where the water is black and the land is white (making the water parts of my light map invisible so that only the land, where the lights are, is visible). Bryce already happened to have this black and white picture for the Earth mat I used earlier, though it was reversed with the land being black instead of the water. A little trip to photoshop fixed that.

So! Now I have my transparency map of the lights on the Earth. I wrap that around my globe, line up the light map and the real map so that they synch and the lights for Europe are actually over Europe, and viola again! I know have a beautifully modeled Earth complete with night lights and plastic looking clouds. Hmm...

Ok, so why do the clouds look like plastic? Well, what's wrong with them... they lack depth, they're way too smooth, and there's no real color. Color is a lighting issue and we'll take care of that later. Depth, however, can only be taken care of via bump map (at least in this situation). A bump map is just like a transparency map in that it has differing shades of black, white, and grey. On a bump map white is high and black is low. So we take the cloud layer into photoshop, make a copy, and start messing with filters until we have a nice rolling bumpy cloud like texture in shades of grey. Take that back into Bryce, make it a bump map for the clouds, and we finally have a nice Earth, floating in space with some stars behind it.

Now we have to work on the sun, the exploding, and all the other effects that come with that. :)

Now comes the err part. I told you I would get to it.

Once I had finished working on the Earth, the Sun, and all the exploding and everything, it was time to do what I normally do which is tweak small parts of the image to make it a little better. While I was doing all this tweaking, I got a pop-up window in Bryce with the worst possible message. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was along the lines of, "Bryce has caused a fatal exception in module whatever of whatever and will now have to shut down. I hope you saved your work because if you haven't you're going to lose everything. Have a nice day."

I will admit, I used a few choice words when I realized I hadn't saved ANYTHING that I'd been doing for the last 2 hours.

So, the program was going to close, and I couldn't access the file menu to save my work. Before I actually accepted this little box that was telling me I had to close Bryce, I decided to try to continue my work... just to see if I could. To my surprise, I could still create objects, copy and paste parts of my picture, and generally continue to work. I just couldn't save anything... or could I?

I decided to try and save the entire picture as an object in Bryce. Normally you would only save a single object, say the Earth with light map and clouds, as an object, but I was desperate. I took every last sphere, torus, plane, object, and light I had in my scene , grouped them all together and added them to my Bryce library as an object. I silently said a little prayer... and closed Bryce.

When I opened it back up, everything was gone. I started a new scene, and opened up my object library... and there is was! Everything I had done was actually saved, even though the program crashed and I was dumb enough to not save my work in the first place. I couldn't believe it.

So, to err is human.. but to really foul things up requires a computer. I just got really really lucky this time and was able to thwart my computer from stealing an image from me. Sure, I could've redone it - but no two images ever look the same, even if done the same way from the same artist on the same machine with the same materials. At least not in my experience... and I liked the way it looked the first time dammit.

-Ed