Hilltop Design

I’ve designed a cool toy for you to play with, a Bryce Kaleidoscope. I designed it so that you can quickly make mirrored images inside of Bryce for use as terrains, for use as Bryce materials, web page backgrounds, or just for some cool abstract artwork.

The concept is a simple one- it’s a scene with a mirrored surface and one sphere. You place a material on the sphere, then while watching the preview window, you start turning the sphere in all directions until you see something interesting, then hit the render button. It’s rather amazing what can be made with this idea, it creates an almost perfect mirror image, handy for web page backgrounds and seamless tiles for use in your favorite 3D app.

I’ve built a scene that will mirror what you see on the right side of the sphere to the left. Or in other words, whatever’s on the right side of the sphere will be reflected onto the left half, and the reflection is on the vertical axis. It’s a simple two way mirrored effect.

Ok, here’s what I’ve done, and how it works. As shown in the screen shot above, the black object is a mirrored box. The white sphere is the half of the sphere that will show the material you’ve applied to it. I’ve set the material on the box to be 100% reflective, and it has black set for all the properties, so it’s a perfect mirror surface that won’t add anything to the mirrored portion as far as color. The camera is strategically placed, and both the boxes and the camera are locked down so you can’t move them.

I did this so that you won’t accidentally move either one, as the slightest movement will cause things to be misaligned. Also, in the scene you’ll see a second box which cuts the sphere in half so that only the front portion of the sphere is visible. That was done to limit the effects from using materials that are transparent or volumetric. Some of them will show the backside of the material, and it doesn’t look too good in most cases.

Here’s some tips to get you on your way to creating some great images.

• Don’t ever move the sphere!! You can rotate it in any direction you wish, or expand or contract it with the resize tool, but don’t move it in, out, up, down, or side to side. Otherwise the reflections won’t be perfectly aligned. The finished image isn’t *perfect*, but this is as close as I can get it.

• There is no light added to this scene, so whenever you use a material, you’ll have to crank the settings for diffusion high, as well as the ambiance of the material itself, or it simply won’t show up. You can try adding a light source to the scene, but the experiments I did yielded bad results. You end up with two reflections, which looks kind of goofy. Adding sunlight messes things up too, so just crank the ambiance up to 100% and you’ll be good to go.
• If you add a material, and it’s not spinning when you rotate the sphere, go into the material editor and check to see what mode it’s set to. World space won’t rotate, so set it to object space and see how that works.
• A lot of fun can be had with your own materials by setting the material properties to random. This will take a boring material and make it a lot more fun for this project.
• Try playing with cloud materials! Also, some volumetric materials can make for some very interesting images. Again, make sure to set the materials to object or random settings, and turn up the properties for ambiance and diffusion.
• Try setting the material into spherical mode too- there’s some great effects to be found that way!
• I’ve included some material presets that I made for use in this digital toy- go into the material editor and change the colors and other properties. It’s amazing what a small tweak can do for the material!
• For best results, keep the document ratio square- go into the document setup to change the size if you’d like, but keep it square.
• Try ANIMATING your sphere overnight, and render it out as individual images! In the morning, you’ll have a lot of cool new tiled images to play with! If you find a few you like, make note of the frame number the image is, then just scoot the time scrubber to that frame, then render a larger version.

Check out these sample images that were created entirely with this toy.

This image below was created with the kaleidoscope. These are a sample of some of the more odd looking images that can be created with this Bryce toy.

Click the thumbnails to see larger versions of the images.


This first one looks like a genie.


This was created with one of the included material presets.


This was created with one of the included material presets. I set it to random mode and increased the size of the sphere to get closer in to the camera, which gives you more things to see!



This image is the same exact image as above it- I simply used the above image to create a picture based terrain, then mapped the first image on top of the terrain as a material, set to Object Top Mode. This is another example of what I’ve come to call Bryce Recycling. Cool or what?


This is the same thing, using a kaleidoscope generated image, mapped as a terrain, with a simple reflective gold material applied.



This is the result of recycling again- I created an image with the kaleidoscope, then I applied the image to the sphere and then rendered it out. Try this yourself- and try setting the material property to random! It’s a lot of fun!


This is another recycled image.
This is the same exact material as the image above, but set to random.


Download the 2 way vertically mirrored Bryce 4 Kaleidoscope toy HERE


Download the 4 way horizontal/vertical mirrored Bryce 4 Kaleidoscope toy HERE

Download some cool, custom Bryce 4 Kaleidoscope material presets HERE

As you can see, Bryce is able to do a lot of cool things, it’s up to you to use your imagination on how to come up with novel ways of working in Bryce. There’s more to Bryce than just landscapes you know. I hope this has sparked a few new ideas for you to try- have fun!

Steve Lareau

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