AC2 Cover

Author

David Stevenson, October 1996

Image Details

Large image is 395x564, 24-bit colour JPEG. The image submitted for printing (not included here) was a 1015x1450 256-grayscale TIF of around 1MB.

Brief

The requirements were fairly flexible, but stated that the image should be generally light in colour, and include the Atari logo (fuji) in some subtle manner.

Having just got back from New York, I wanted to do something with tall-buildings, and the idea of doing one in the plan of the fuji was obvious. A few other ambitious designs for the other buildings were dropped due to time constraints, so the Atari one was the only "interesting" building used; Atari standing out from a sea of mediocrity ;-)

Software

Mostly Mac stuff. I had just taken delivery of version 2 of the Bryce raytracer, and this project gave me something to work on while learning the software. The only Atari program used was DA's Vektor; at the time I didn't have a Mac-native drawing program, so used Vektor to construct the fuji shape.

Partial screen shot of Fuji shape under construction using DA's Vektor.

Bryce

Bryce was original designed as a landscape renderer, and the most common technique using this program is to use a 2D grey-scale image which Bryce translates into a 3d terrain by mapping dark pixels as low ground, and light pixels as high ground.

Scaled screen shot of grey-scale to height-field processing in Bryce.

The bits of land you can see in this image were obviously constructed this way, using Bryce's fractal generator to get psuedo-random landscapes. But this technique was also used to construct the Atari building; a TIF bitmap was generated in DA's Vektor and imported into Bryce; the dark background became the ground surrounding the building, and the fuji shape rises out of this.

Scaled screen shot showing construction of Fuji building.

The other buildings were constructed from simple block and pyramid primitives.

Partial screen shot showing construction of whole scene.

Atmosphere

A light fog was added using the "Sky" parameters in Bryce, and a few large thin objects were added with a cloud texture. This served several purposes, including making the whole image lighter, and reducing the amount of effort I had to put into detailing stuff that was hidden by the fog ;-)

A couple of spotlights were trained onto the Fuji building to give it a bit of colour, though this effect is obviously lost in the printed version.

Textures

I thought that the hard bit might be getting the buildings to look like they have windows, and to have some of those windows lit up, but in fact it was easy; Bryce has a set of pre-defined procedural textures, and a little editing of one of these got the results you see.

Rendering and Post-Processing

The final render at print resolution took about 10 hours on an Apple Performa 475 which has been upgraded with a PPC 601 processor. The only post-processing was to convert to greyscale and save as a .TIF file, as this was how it was to be delivered.

Also by this author

Feel free to visit my home page, Yeovil Town FC pages, or gallery of raytraced images. The latter includes some work done with POV on an Atari Falcon030.

Author: David Stevenson

Email: hoagy@ktl.cix.co.uk

Last updated: 9 Dec 1996