TITLE: SimElement NAME: Rick Kennedy COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: ekennedy@voyager.net TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: simel.jpg RENDERER USED: Bryce 3D 3.1 TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro for image assembly and conversion to JPeg RENDER TIME: About 3 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 80MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: (With apologies to Maxis. :-) Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium... All those elements have to be made somewhere, right? This is my attempt to explain where. Disclaimer: No Sims were harmed during the the explosion at the Sodium plant, nor at any time during the creation of this image. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I purchased Bryce 3D 10 days before the deadline of this competition. Nothing like waiting until the last minute! This is my first-ever project using Bryce, so I've only used basic objects and materials. Lots of objects! This scene consists of 5535 objects, which frankly is way more than Bryce can handle efficiently. The project was a learning experience, and the lesson learned was, don't use Bryce for a project like this. File saves alone took upwards of 20 hours. Selecting and manipulating objects was an exercise in patience. Rendering the full image crashed Bryce every time. I had to split the scene into several chunks in order to complete the render, and then paste them back together with Paintshop Pro. (That seemed to be within the spirit and letter of the rules, but if not, I'm sure someone will let me know.) Frankly, it's a bit of a miracle that it all worked in time, given the inefficiencies and crashes. I still intend to keep using Bryce, since it does have a lot of nice features--but only where it makes sense. Meanwhile, I know I have that copy of POV-Ray around here somewhere... Source is not included, because it's 50 MB. You're not missing much, it's all very straightfoward. Believe me, you wouldn't want to inflict it on your computer anyway.