TITLE: Aerie
NAME: Charles H. Rousseau
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rousseauc@bellarmineprep.org
WEBPAGE: www.bellarmineprep.org
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: aeriechr.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 4.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Mesh models of structures made in Rhino, terrain meshes are Bryce
primitives; JPG conversion from bitmap in Corel Photopaint 9.0.              

RENDER TIME: 
    15 hours at Bryce's highest volumetric setting.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Classroom PC with 450 processor, 128 RAM.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The image seeks to represent a large and mysterious complex
set high in a cloudy, foggy mountain setting backed by dramatic sunlight
streaming past the turrets onto the lesser structures below.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The front wall section was a shell
modeled with multi-duplicate Boolean objects in Rhino, meshed and then swept in
a broad arc and exported to Bryce as a 3DS file.  A scanned rock texture was
applied to one copy of the mesh and the second Bryce open foliage texture was
applied at small and random scale to a 101% duplicate of that same mesh to
create the moldy surface which partially obscures the stone beneath.  The
second level of the structure was much less detailed and with substantially
less depth than the outer wall.  Two copies were meshed and fused and curved. 
A smaller scale of the same stone texture was applied and the bump map of the
same was pushed to its maximum since these stones would be small and deep in
the fog.  The third section was originally six towers and six walls arranged in
a hexagon, but it was broken up into smaller sections and the turrets were
resized for both variety and to increase the illusion of depth. Colorful
textures were originally applied to all parts of these structure, but the
volumetric render tests all but obscured the detail, so much more generic
colors were applied instead.
The Bryce sun is coming into the scene from a high 4:00 position and what looks
like the sun is actually a spherical light set in the notch of the mountains
and behind the large central turret.  The light is set to infinite, volume, no
falloff.  There are two cloud layers, one in the normal sky position and one
tipped between the main castle structure and the front wall to catch more of
the beams of light.  If the clouds and volumetric are turned off in the scene,
the details in the modeling show up much better, but the atmosphere of the
piece seems lost.  I opted in the final render to let the mysterious element
govern the image, although some of the details in the closer wall still remain.
 I knew a volumetric render would take a long time, but I never imagined
fifteen plus hours.  When I get more time, I am going to work on two more
lights behind the mountains, thinner clouds but more layers, and a stronger
texture contrast on the mountains in the back which just have the basic Bryce
snow and thaw.  The image was rendered as a 640x480 bitmap and imported into
Corel Photopaint for transformation to JPG format and reduction in file size. 
The contrast-intensity-brightness of the image were nudged a little before
saving to increase the contrast in the light beams between the towers.  I
learned a great deal about light and fog from this exercise.