Bryce Gallery

I had a chance to work with Bryce 4 during a multimedia class, and immediately loved it. I quickly bought it, along with Poser 4 in case I wanted people in some of the scenes. The interface took some getting used to, but the end results speak for themselves. At any rate, my finished pictures will be shown here, in roughly chronological order. Some were produced for one of the "Project: Imagination" themes, while others were for fun, to work out an idea, or just for practice. Feel free to steal them for use as desktop pictures if you want, just leave the copyrights intact.

• NERV

  Blood and steel.

  (Slightly miscategorized, as this was actually put together in Photoshop. The NERV logo itself is a vector graphic created in Illustrator from a good DVD clip.)

• Stellar Husbandry

  The ring of magnetic accelerators has spun Sirius A into a flattened disk shape. Tuned lasers, shining inwards from the sphere of solar collectors, give the plasma the extra boost it needs to leap off into space where it cools and is collected. As the process continues through millions of years the star will shrink, yielding up nearly two solar masses of hydrogen in the process. Then it will settle into a comfortable red dwarf stage, and the collectors will be linked together into an unbroken sphere supported by light pressure. Before, its fuel would have been spent in a scant billion years, wasted into the void of space in the blink of an eye. After it is lifted, the fate of the Dog Star will not be death, but life. It will burn for a trillion years, as will the ten new stars built from its liberated substance, and its light will support the existance of uncountable lives. Farming the stars: a necessary process to sustain any advanced civilization.

  (Read my story "Chaos Under Heaven" on the Orion's Arm website.)

• Rings of Power

  (1400 x 1050 PNG, 789k)

  Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.

• The West Gate of Moria

  (1400 x 1050 PNG, 2.7M)

  The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter.

  (The design on the doors is a vector graphic created in Illustrator from a scanned image of the corresponding page in the book.)

• PI-66-a-Xaonon (Interstellar Visions)

  Wayside Station is often the last familiar sight an interstellar traveler will see. After leaving Mars orbit, the massive 17,000 passenger liners make a three-week nonstop flight to the boost station orbiting Jupiter's trailing Lagrangian point. This is often the toughest part of the trip; the longest part of the journey takes place at relativistic speeds and only lasts a few days subjective time, but watching the last recognizable part of one's home system dwindle into invisibility is often very upsetting.

• The Sentry

  Not all races find guard duty as arduous as humans do. Though largely a ceremonial task in advanced civilizations, some still consider it a great honor to be deemed a protector.

• PI-60-a-Xaonon (Building)

  "It was fashioned by the builders of old, who smoothed the Ring of Isengard, and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills."

• Nightmare City

  Nuevo Sol was founded in the early days of arcologies, and built in central Arizona years before the melting polar caps made inland locations prime real estate. Despite the chaos of the outside world, the city somehow became a haven for some of the world's most talented artists, artisans, and creative thinkers. However, this prosperity came with a price. Nuevo Sol's architecture was designed by one of its more unhinged founders, and as such has problems which plague no other city. Its narrow, ill-lit and oddly twisting streets confuse even the most seasoned urban dwellers, and the buildings' apparantly non-Euclidean geometry has driven more than a few inhabitants mad. It takes a special kind of mind to survive in what has been only half-jokingly termed "The City of Nightmares".

• PI-58-a-Xaonon (The Home Planet)

  Tau Ceti was a prosperous system, one of the first to be settled in the days before faster-than-light travel. Only a few days' hyperspace travel from Earth, it flourished under the Confederation for close on to a hundred years. And because of its location, the system was even protected from the worst of the Great War. But by the latter half of the twenty-third century, its citizenry began growing disenchanted with the Confederation's increasingly totalitarian rule. By then the Rebellion, which had acquired most of the outer rim worlds, was becoming a force to be reckoned with. Eventually the Confederation was forced to acknowledge Tau Ceti's rebel leanings, especially in light of its proximity to Sol system. The Confederation Space Navy sent its flagship cruiser, the USS Tsiolkovsky, to Tau Ceti to "persuade" the inhabitants to renounce their Rebel affiliations. The local milita, however, had a quite different opinion on the subject. Even seeing the red glow of mass driver impacts rise from the surface made them fight all the fiercer, as they were defending not just their lives, but their home planet.

• Moonbase

  The food is tasteless, the showers are cold and enforcedly brief, and scraping one's head on the ceiling is not an uncommon occurance. Moving to one of the lunar colonies has several hardships—but anyone who has lived there will concede that the view more than compensates.

• Guild Patrol

  Guarding the home of the most valuable substance in the universe is an understandably arduous task. After a long shift of watching out for melange smugglers, a Spacing Guild patrol ship fires his thrusters to match orbit with a Heighliner in high orbit.

• Pavonis Tower

  The most popular tourist attraction on Mars is not actually on the planet's surface. Olympus Mons seems no more than a gentle slope, and even the great Valles Marineris is rendered unrecognizable and boring by its immense size. Phobos, however, is quite another story. The moon is too large to move out of the way, and the orbital tower anchored at Pavonis Mons must have its natural vibration carefully tuned to avoid an impact. Seeing ten trillion tons of rock fly by at several thousand kilometers per hour is generally regarded as both the most exciting and most frightening sight in the solar system.

• PI-47-a-Xaonon (Making Money)

  Clichés can be more dangerous than people realize. In at least one case, a mad scientist with more talent than discretion had heard a certain saying one too many times...

• Earth

  Mostly harmless.

  (I wouldn't want to live there, but it's nice to look at. Imagemaps were created from satellite photo composites. This is also when I figured out how to use a volumetric sphere to give a realistic atmosphere effect, which I've done in every planet image since.)

• First Raindrop

  Where's my umbrella?

• Pointer

  Six billion people on this one worthless rock. The only way out is up!

  (This is both my first real picture of any note and my first use of Bryce and Poser together. I can't take credit for the idea, however; the original may be seen on Anders Sandberg's raytracing page.)