My first image using Bryce 5's Gradient Fall-off Lights. They
sure make creating light zones a lot easier! Gradient lights have 3 main components - color, transparency and
overall range. Color and transparency use gradients to control
how the light "tints" and fades and are created in the light's
Edit Gradient Diaolg. The Range control, found in the main Edit
Light window sets the overall throw of the light in the scene.
The value used here is close to being in Bryce Units (off by about
10% in this scene), so I was able to use the shell object's size
in BU's to calculate the range of the lights. One thing that made
this easier was that the shell was centered in Bryce space, There are 4 omni lights in the "cornors", with full intensity
for 50% of the gradient's transparent range, then a sharp fall
off and a low intensity fade out. The light's overall range was
then set so the light fades out by the center lines of the room.
[Edit Gradient Dialog image] There are 3 omni lights that run along the top curve of the room
(F/M/B) that fades to 50% at 75% of the range and then falls off
sharply to 0. The overall range was then set so the top middle
light fades at the floor. [Edit Gradient Dialog] It's overkill but the Coffee On light is a graident omni light
that has a very steep falloff and a very short range. Solid Red
color. [Edit Gradient Dialog] There's also a simple soft edge spot on the keyboard and 2 paralell
lights iluminating the monitor screen and the star map. All lights
except the paralells use Soft Shadows. The whole scene was modeled in FormZ except the Bryce tree-plant
and the cylindrical Hipparcos star map from www.solarviews.com.
The Mechdog critter was boned and posed in Poser Pro Pack (download the Poser 4 MechDog). Some objects were UV mapped with UVMapper and textured with
Photoshop and Painter 3D. The rest of the objects are textured
with Bryce procedurals. Rendered at 36 RPP (about 4 hours @500MHz) and the total Bryce
file size was 22MB.
