How Does She Do That?

I know there are lots of people who haven't a clue as to how graphic art works. Some think we only cut and paste. Others think that we just import a ready made object and voila we have a picture. Wrong! The main thing you have to understand about graphic art is that you are working in three dimensions not two, you have an x, y, and z axis at all times to deal with.

Let's take this picture "Nemesis" and see what went into its creation. I work out of Bryce and when I start it up a work area is displayed. You have a generic ground plane, a generic sky, and an indicator where your "camera" is. Those are the default settings and what you have is the digital equivalent of a blank canvas. The first thing I did was make the camera invisible because that little box drives me nuts and besides there are some things that you can not do if the box is visible. The second thing I did was study an actual photograph taken at Portmeirion to see what elements I was going to need to recreate since that was my inspiration for the picture. You are not going to bring in a photograph itself because that would defeat the entire reason you are working in 3D. 2D is still 2D even in a 3D world. The only time you bring in something 2D is if you are doing a special effect like I did with the cat cubes in another picture. Okay back to the photograph you have water, a hill with foliage, hills on the other side of the water, and a bell tower.

I wanted a figure in the picture so I went to my figure creating software called Poser. Poser will give you a generic figure that you then have to alter to make the figure you want. I start out with a generic, nude, bald man. You can change the proportions of the figure and "ideal adult" worked for this one. If you want over weight adult you need another program. ;-) I went through the clothing until I found the articles I wanted my figure to wear and rushed to clothe him before Mom walked in. I also went through the different hairstyles to get the one I thought would look best or at lease render in Bryce. I had to reposition the body parts to get the pose I was looking for. Poser doesn’t make it all that easy to position body parts as every little piece has its own settings and I do mean every little body part. It also gets confused easily and if you aren’t real careful you’re moving clothing and not the body underneath. Finally after much work you get a working model that you can use and alter in other programs. You then save what you have created and go back to Bryce.

I started with the ground plane. Why bother with that if water is going to cover it you ask? Simple the water has transparency and what you do with the ground plane underneath is going to reflect through the water and change its appearance. Since this particular picture didn’t show the actual color or texture of the sand at Portmeirion I went searching for other photographs to see what I needed to recreate. Bryce has presets which are starting points. It is like choosing a base color of paint and then tweaking it by adding and subtracting other colors of paint to it. You tweak in “materials” where the choices are huge. You can change the levels of diffusion, ambience, specularity, metalicity, or raise and lower the bump height. You can go to the color choices in diffuse, ambience, specular, specular halo, or volume. Volume you ask? Because Bryce deals in 3D you have a choice with your objects, color can be applied just to the surface like you paint a house or you can apply the color volumetrically and the entire thing becomes infused with color. This works real well when you are dealing with gas planets, one of my favorite things to do. You also have reflection, refraction, and transparency to play with. It sure makes using your handy tube of Titanium White to thin out your colors seem like a dream doesn’t it?

In Bryce the water plane dominates the setup. If you add a water plane the only way to have land showing is to build the land higher then the water. I started with the water plane, chose a water preset that I could use as a starting point and worked to get the amount of waves I wanted. The materials edit screen is used to raise or lower the height of waves, make more or less turbulence, and to change the color, brightness, reflection, refraction, transparency, etc. Once I got the water looking half way decent I went on to other things knowing that I would have to tweak this again later.

Since you are working in 3D you usually work from the distance forward. It is just easier. I worked on the distant hills next. Bryce will bring up a generic terrain that you will be working with. Think of it as clay only it is on your computer screen rather then in your kids hair. You go to the edit feature to sculpt your terrain. The button “fractal” alone has 30 types of things that you can do to you terrain. You also can smooth, erode, raise or lower, add "noise", subtract "noise, etc. You can flatten portions, create cut outs for caves, etc. It is a powerful tool. If you have a bad case of insomnia go read the Bryce manual on material settings. Once I got the shape I wanted I had to reposition the hills to get them in the background. In 3D you are physically moving your object back and forth, you can turn it around, change the angle, put it on its head if you so desire. Once in place I added a texture and as with the water went into materials edit to alter the material until it came out the way I wanted it to.

The next element was the bell tower. That I built. Bryce has generic shapes that are like building blocks and you can build props you need out of them. Once the tower was built I added texture to the individual pieces and again through material tweaked it until I had what I wanted. I then grouped the parts to together and moved the whole tower into place. This grouping and ungrouping of parts is a whole other lesson.

I then worked on the foreground. I needed to do another terrain to place my foliage. But you don’t see the ground! No you don’t but you can’t have the trees floating in air. Foliage takes a very long time to get right. You pull up a generic tree and then you have to define it as to actual type of tree, how many leaves, branch angle start and finish, trunk or branch thickness, how strong of pull of gravity on the limbs, randomness of branches or do you want them fairly standard, and many, many more choices. If you aren’t that hot on horticulture and you are looking at a photograph that takes a lot of working on to discover what those trees really are. After finally getting the foliage I wanted I put them in place on the foreground.

Time to bring our figure in and position him. Create “Rover” out of our handy dandy sphere object and one of my favorite Halloween textures “Marley’s Ghost.” Okay reposition figure, reposition Rover, reposition hills, reposition foliage, add more foliage, subtract that foliage it doesn’t work, no that water doesn’t look right yet, okay have I avoided the Bryce headache as much as possible? Yep. We now come to sky. Whimper. I love Bryce. Really I do but their sky setting drive me nuts! It doesn’t matter how many presets you have none of them are right and building your own also doesn’t work because the stupid sun is incapable of reaching any foreground that is elevated! Aha see the problem. Where is our guy? Yep out of the sun’s reach.

The sky controls are like all of Bryce a gazillion choices to make. You can change from night to day in the spinning of the globe. You can add or subtract clouds, mist, haze, moon illusions, whatever. You can spend hours on the sky alone. You finally come up with a sky that comes as close as you can to what the photograph shows and guess what? Your other colors are no longer correct. So back you go and reedit your much edited hills, water, sand, foliage, etc.

Now back to Mr. Shadow. Not what you had in mind so at this point you go grumble, grumble, add light source. I’ll give you a break and not tell you all the settings you have to decide for light source. Finally the picture looks the way you want it to. So now you can set that puppy to render, grab a couple aspirin for your aching head, and off to bed you go trying to stretch the cramped muscles that have been sitting at that computer for too many hours into doing something other locking into a sitting position.

Come morning providing you don’t find any gaping errors like something hovering on the ground because you forgot that little command to set it on the ground you can now do touch up. I pull my pictures into Painter. The main work on this picture is on the figure. The jacket has pin stripes and these need to be painted out, piping needs to be added to the collar and lapels, the shirt has to be changed to a turtleneck and the Poser moths need to be taken care of. Poser has a very bad habit of rendering clothes with holes in them. You position the body at all and the clothes just don’t go with them so you are always “darning” those holes.

You are now asking yourself why anyone would go through that much trouble. This is where it becomes so neat that us geeks love this. Look at that picture and now imagine what it would look like if the camera were in the water with Rover and looking up at the man. We don't have to imagine as we can do that angle without redoing the picture. 3D means we can do a 360 degree flyby. I can move that camera to get a view of that picture from the bell tower, from the hills, overhead, looking up from underneath the water and I don’t have to redo the picture at all. Reposition the camera and rerender the picture and wow look at that!

So there you have it 3D graphic art. As our field continues to grow and expand we will be able to do better and more realistic art. We are artists and we are proud of our work.