3D & Photoshop wallpaper - "draoidh"

[Enigma]

"draoidh" is gaelic for "druid"

Click for 1024*768 wallpaper.

[toonMom]

That is a really nice looking wallpaper! I love the colors.

[corky]

very dynamic, enigma! is this your creation? give us some details on how you did this.

[Enigma]

(sorry bout the delay, I lost this place's address *again* )

Yes, it's all mine. K, here's how to do it in Bryce...

1) Make a sphere. Pull the handles out so it's large and "blimp" shaped, ie. a long thinnish egg shape. Apply either polished silver, brushed silver, polished pewter or brushed pewter as the texture. (the polished ones are more reflective but not as bright as the brushed ones, the silver is ligher than the pewter; use this knowledge strategically)

2) Make a torus (hoop) in the middle of the sphere and scale it up nice and large. Change its diameter to around 50 - 100 and rotate it round so it's in an interesting position. Apply one of the four aforementioned metal textures to it. Put three lights in it in a triangle shape, two at the front and one at the lower back. (Normal lights, not spotlights or any other fancy ones)

3) Copy and paste the first torus then change its size and diameter to something different from the first one and rotate and move it so it's in a different position. Rinse and repeat, until you have about five or six. Give them all a different metal teture (from the four) for the most interesting effects. If you like, you can stick a metal sphere in the center of the hoops to reflect them back.

4) Make a last copy of one of the torii and rotate it so that it's facing up and down. Edit its diameter so it's pretty wide, maybe 250 - 300, then push the top handle down to flatten it a good bit. Tweak its position (using the little preview display at the top left to see what it'll look like rendered) until it looks like the one in mine - sweeping down round the bottom half of the scene.

5) Do a quick practise render. Turn off antialiasing and pull the render resolution down to around 100*75 and do a quick render to make sure it looks ok. If it's too dark anywhere (you need shadows, I mean if half of the pic's in pitch blackness) add a light at that spot. Change the colour of the lights and the environment haze to get different colour effects.

6) When you're all happy with it, crank the render size up to whatever size you want to render it at - I always do it at 1024*768, wallpaper size, then save it. Put the render settings to Fine Art (third anti-alias setting, the second from the bottom) then click the biggest render button to start it rendering.

Beware, this will take ages to render, you may want to leave it going overnight. If you need to stop it at any point when it's not completely rendered, you can pause it by clicking the little circle immediately on the right of the largest circle, and save it. You can close Bryce without losing what you've rendered; just start it up when you want to continue, open your saved scene, and click the same circle as you clicked to pause it and it'll start rendering again. Do that as many times as you need to. I discovered this a few days ago on a render which still hasn't finished yet.