This is what I've been playing around with lately - trying to get the most out of one picture by playing around with skies. Here's the original, a rainy day sky as I was feeling rather down and I liked the raindrop effect on the water.

This one is where I just added a tiny touch of purple into the clouds and ambient light ...


... and here is where the purple takes over!


I then tried to head back towards reality a bit , a sunset or possibly a distant forest fire.

This last one is where I was wondering how close up I could get before the water started looking too unrealistic - I think maybe I overdid it.

I'll move onto another scene for the next few days, but it's good I've got back into it, it keeps me out of trouble! ;-)

Strange beacon

One of the things I really like about using Bryce is how economical it can be. Once I've set up a scene then changes in the lighting can make a massive difference to the whole picture. This one in daylight has me focusing on the texture of the pillar and the strange foamy waves
whereas the nighttime scene gives an entirely different feel, with far more attention on the sphere and the arcs of light.

Although I tend to prefer nighttime or twilight for my pictures, in this case I much prefer the daylight one. Both of them were nightmares to render though - because of the multiple light sources they took a very long time indeed.

The phone always rings when you're in the bath ...

It's about time I got back into posting more Bryce stuff, so here is one of my attempts at an interior scene. This was done a few years back, though I'm still tempted to redo the file & tweak with the water on the floor as I know it's still not right. The bit I'm really proud of is the lovely little chair which I think came out rather well - this was the first picture apart from landscapes where I made every object in the scene.

Bryce Basics Part 1

Getting away from posting about drawing for a while ...

There's no way this should ever evolve into a tutorial - the web has plenty of these, by people much more talented than me. But I would like to show some of the structure underneath Bryce pics, for those that are interested in the basic 'how' without being more in-depth.

I shall start with a very very simple landscape thing and work up from there to built objects. There is software much better suited to built objects than Bryce is but I do this because it makes me happy so I have no problem staying in the comfort zone of my favourite programme.

This first picture has only two components - a flat plane which I have added a water texture to, plus Bryce's default sky.

To that I have added an island. This is not the massive amount of work that you may think - Bryce has certain basic objects as standard; cubes, planes, cones and such, but also terrains. So in this case I just clicked on a button and accepted the first one that appeared, sank it slightly under the water plane and there you have it.

To me that looks a little too far away .. perhaps if I bring the camera down & closer ...

However, now that things are closer, the water isn't quite right - it gives the impression that the island is a tiny little pebble of a thing. I need to change the scale on the water texture to suit the size of the island.
To me that seems much better now. The sky is just the basic default though, which I can't possibly leave like that. I've picked more of a summer afternoon feel for this one which subtly changes the feel of the scene.
I tend to prefer more dramatic scenes for my pictures though, so here's the same scene later in the day when the sun is lower and the clouds are sparser.It's still not right though, not even for a basic demo picture. I just have to tweak it a tiny bit more. You might think I've changed the sky settings but I haven't touched them. Instead I put in a 3d plane above the water, a rectangular section containing cloud type stuff. This makes the picture far more mysterious in two ways - the fog effect it creates and the way it darkens the sky. The sky changes because the sun is low on the horizon, so it has to get through the cloud layer before reaching the underside of the clouds above.