Created for the August Bryce Challenge at Renderosity, "The Abyss"
. The submersible was very loosely modeled on Harbor Branch's
Johnson-Sea-Link. Modeled in FormZ except for Michael 2 from DAZ3D.
The rocks are exported from Bryce into FormZ where the mesh was
subdivided and then heavily smoothed. The Volume effects are just a Bryce cube that encloses a space
not much larger then the camera view. The texture is just about
the fastest base texture that Bryce can produce - only a solid
blue-green diffuse color at 100%. The volumetrics were set to
Density 100%, Edge Softness 0%,Fuzzy Factor 250 and a Quality
of 88. This high Quality setting was necessary to remove *all*
banding artifacts but it really didn't start looking "bad" until
about 70. The 88 Normal AA render time was about 6 hours and 4
hours at 77, both at 500MHz. The lights are all B5 Gradient Falloff lights with a much steeper
Falloff then the default lights and a very short Range. This keeps
the lights from overlapping each other too much (which really
slows done the render) and leaves a lot of room for volumetric
shadows. I was very pleased with the shadow thrown from the top
propellor "arm". There are a couple of UV Mapped objects (as always, using Classic
UVMapper) but most are Bryce Procedural, including all the Michael
textures.
