Bryce 3D Images

I had access to a Celeron 300A (450 Mhz overclocked) and used this opportunity to play around with various material settings. Especially volume materials are VERY time consuming to render.

Volume Material

I played around with some of the properties of volume materials. I just wanted to know how they work together and what does what exactly. It's a pity that the manual is very vague in many things.

The object shown is just a sphere. The material is set to "volume". Material component A is set to "Earth". I am using component A basically as a color component.

Material component B is set to a home made texture. It consists only of an Alpha-Channel where I use noise and phase to generate a two-dimensional wave that is phase-shifted also in three dimensions.

(Never mind. The important thing is that most of the noise happens in small stripes. The stripes are then shifted for small amounts into the third dimension. You will see from the pictures what I mean.)

I use component B for density, fuzzy, or quality. (Watch the animations for details.)

Here I used the noise component as density. The density slider is set to around 30. Note that this is just a texture! Try to model this object with NURBS.

This is the same object as seen from the side. Now you see what I meant with the two-dimensional waves that are phase-shifted...

Never mind!

From the front, again. Here I also set the fuzzy factor to a lower value. It gets fuzzy, indead.

Here I changed the noise component to higher density. I added also some specularity.

This is actually a surface texture. Don't ask me for details. I made it more transparent and it looks nice. It is still just one sphere with one texture.

Volume Lights

This is just a sphere with one volume texture (as usual). The color is green and the density is driven by component A (Earth). The sphere is located right within a spotlight. The spotlight is not a volume light.

Same as above but this time the spotlight is a volume light. You see that the sphere is lit from "within". (Looks like the Mars moon Phobos to me.)

Animations

I wanted to know how the various parameters of volume textures work. I created a green sphere. Then I made an animation where I adjusted either "density", "fuzzy", or "quality".

Animation of the density factor

Animation of the fuzzy factor

Animation of the quality factor