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My Bryce
Video
After many months of work,
it's finally finished. This animation was created
entirely with Bryce from Metacreations.
The movie is 240 by 180 in size, and has a beautiful piano
music track supplied by Shirley
Kaiser. Her music fit the mood and the feel I was looking
for so well that I contacted her and asked her if she'd be
willing to collaborate on me with this project, and I was
thrilled when she said yes! Her music CD is available for
purchase on her web site, and if you appreciate beautiful,
emotion filled music, it's a must have CD. To listen to
online samples and to place your order, click on her name
above.
When it came time to
compile this video in Adobe Premiere, I ran into some major
problems. Apparently my system simply didn't have enough
memory to compile the scenes and add the audio track,
and no matter what I tried, it simply refused to work. It
either totally blew up my computer, or the finished
compilation looked horrible- there were artifacts all over the
place.
I tried everything possible, and it simply
wouldn't work on this computer. Rodney
L'Ongnion of the movie "Planetary
Traveler" fame, and also the creator of the upcoming
video "Infinity's Child", came to the rescue.
He offered a lot of guidance for this project, taking the time
to answer a lot of technical questions that I had as I went
along. Besides being the "man with all the answers",
he also offered encouragement to help push me along.
There were many times I was ready to give up on this project,
but he was good enough to give me a much needed kick in the
rear to keep me going.
The many phone calls he made to me to
check up on things were always hysterical. He'd call, I'd
answer the phone, and he'd say "Hey- your textures
suck!" and I'd reply with "Oh yeah? Your camera
motions look like they were done by a blind man with shaky
hands!" Then we'd both laugh our fool heads off, then get
down to business. Rodney- thanks a million bud! I appreciate
all the effort on your behalf to help me get this project
done!
After hearing of the
problems that I was encountering with trying to compile this
project, Rodney spent some time on the phone with me tossing
out ideas on settings to try, but no matter what we tried, it
just wasn't going to happen on this computer. He
graciously offered to compile it on his setup, so I burned all
the components of this project onto a stack of CD's and
shipped them to him overnight.
Unfortunately, one of the CD's I sent out was
garbage- it simply refused to mount or open up on any
of his many computers, but he was able to salvage this project with
what I had on the other CD's. I don't know how he did it, but
he got it to fly. The cave scene originally had blue fog, but
for some reason the palette got trashed when it was put onto a
Mac, and it turned out
reddish pink. Oh well, it still looks ok. He got
everything to compile, and now it's done. I owe him a world of
thanks for the guidance and effort he put in, as well as the
hours of work getting the final project compiled for me.
Thanks Rodney- I owe ya' one! Or three..... =D
Since my computer is so slow- a P166 with 64 megs and a 2 gig hard
drive, I had to enlist the help of some fellow Bryce addicts
to render some of the scenes. A friend set up one of his web servers so that
people could download the scene files, then upload the finished
clips to this server for storage. Thanks a million to
Michael Fenimore from Millennium Graphic Arts for setting this
site up and allowing me the space to store all of these files.
I couldn't have done it without his help, so thank you
Michael!
Special thanks go out to
the following people who were kind enough to help with the
rendering chores. I couldn't have done this project without
their help- thanks guys! (If I left anyone out, it wasn't
intentional- I simply lost track!)
Wolfie
Norman
E. Spaulding
Peter St. Clair
Curt
Tooley
Don
Gray
Clay
Hagebusch
With those thank you's
out of the way, now you can see the results of many, many
hours of blood, sweat, and a lot of tears. I've got just one
version for you right now- in the QuickTime .MOV format.
This QuickTime movie is going to be one heck of a huge
download, let me tell you that right off the bat. But it's the
best way to see and hear this video.
It's been compressed with
PKZIP, so you'll have to uncompress it before you can view it.
Mac users can use the latest version of STUFFIT expander to
open up this file. This video will also be seen on CD's
handed out by Metacreations at upcoming trade shows, training
seminars, etc, so if you're somewhere and you see that
Metacreations is showing off their latest products, wander
over and see if they have a demo CD that they are passing out. Chances are that you can see this video on that CD,
as well as demo versions of Bryce, Canoma, and other
Metacreations products.
I just recently
discovered that this video was also included on the DVD
version of Infinity's Child, which is the sequel to Planetary
Traveler. Just dig around on the DVD for the QuickTime Movie
called Discovery.
With modern compression, as well as finally
owning a
computer with enough horsepower to do video compression,
I've been able to compress the original animation file as an
Mp4 file.
This is far superior to all previous versions
in both visual and audio quality.
Enjoy!
This is playable using Apple's
free Quick Time Movie player.
DOWNLOAD Steven_Lareau_bryce_video_discovery.mp4
Here are a few stills from the animation to give you a feel of
this project.
Crusty terrain
This was a still image I rendered a while ago in Bryce 2 with a
terrain material that I created. It just seemed to lend itself to
this animation, since it's really a bizarre texture.
Launch
Another older image which when I was rendering it in Bryce 2, I
envisioned this smaller thing launching and rising out of the
"Mother" object. This animation clip looks really cool-
the camera follows the projectile as it slowly climbs high into
the dark clouds, then disappearing.
Black Hole
Ok, it isn't really a black hole. But it's a cool effect. This is
a terrain created by importing an image of a lens flare I created
in PhotoShop, then stretching it extremely tall to create a long
negative cone. There is one light with a material applied that I
created, which rotates like crazy as it slowly drops away into
darkness. In the finished movie, there's a cool double helix with
a lacy looking material applied to it and it too rotates. It looks
very cool.
Cave View
This is a shot from one of the longest running animations I've
done so far. It starts out inside of a dark cave, then reaches the
edge of the cave, and then the camera slowly glides down into the
canyons below. It winds through them a bit, eventually reaching
open water, where it then enters a cave in a terrain at the
water's edge.
Fog Canyon
This one took almost a week to render. That's absurd for the
actual running length of this short clip. My kingdom for a faster
computer!
It happened here
This is a series of terrains created using a fractal for the shape
of the terrain. The water replaces sand in the original, and if
you saw the original version, you'd understand what the title
refers to. It implies an area where something dreadful happened in
the past.
New York 3K
This is a rather long clip- it's a ride on a monorail / tube
thingie cruising past a dirty city. The camera pans to the
right to take a look at the scene whizzing by, as shown in this
clip, then heads into a tunnel in the side of a mountain.
Fractal Spine
If you've been to my Bryce galleries in the past, you've seen the
original of this scene. This is another one that I envisioned with
movement as an animation as I was creating it.
Get
here
from outside?
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