Some friends of mine were thinking of working on a game with a rather "Stargate" plot; a series of alien-made, star-spanning gates are discovered and used by human explorers and traders. They never did much with the idea. But I still managed to get an image out of it.
I filled three pages of notebook with variations on "a disk or ring you can step through." Rings on the ground, in the air, with gadgets pointed at them, with pistons and sliding parts... This one was the oddest of them all, so naturally I tackled that one in Bryce.
Everything but the rocks is a Bryce lattice (the rocks are created with MacRock, a tiny but often helpful little shareware.) For more about modelling with lattices, see the explanation and links for "Karesansui."
The image took a day. I couldn't get the mist to look right, though, and played with that for over a week. I tried lattices, and clouds, and imported objects, and volume materials, and haze, and nothing quite looked right.
Some time after I posted the completed image someone asked to borrow the model. It got me wondering if it looked as good from other camera angles. To find out I rendered a short animation.
That turned out to be fun. So I went and created a whole animation with animated materials and camera moves...and then a whole mess of post-proccessing, mostly in PhotoShop. To cap it off I turned on SoundEdit and MusicShop and donned my other hat, and composed background music and sound effects for the completed animation.
At four megs, though, it is too much to host on this server. So it has gone where all little animations go; to some sort of celluoid limbo, I suppose, like a heaven for Roger Rabbit and his ilk.
