Phony Roses Geek Sheet

The idea for this picture has been with me for quite a while but I could never get the very cheap artificial flowers just right. Thanks to Barb Ingersoll for the idea to use jagged rocks made with MacRock, a little Freeware program for Macintosh. Thanks also to Lee Hughey and Rancid Moth for help with fine-tuning the lighting. The lighting technique for soft shadows is from Susan Kitchens' excellent Brye Tutorial Book. And thanks to everybody on the Bryce Forum for their continuing support.

The main light is from 9 radials inside the lightbulb. Light arrays are Bryce's "hidden feature" for creating soft-edged shadows. There are also three "modelling spots": one to the left just outside the frame, pointing horizontally at the rim of the vase, another one behind the camera, more or less aligned with the camera, and finally another spot very close to the power cord from which the light bulb is suspended, from the left, slightly to the front. All the spots have "cast shadows" turned off. A very large parallel light is suspended above the scene, set to negative, shadows turned off, to soak up about half the total light. This was necessary because for deep enough shadows I had to turn the radials up after adding the spots.

I modelled the power cord, the glass part of the bulb and the photograph in Pixels 3D Studio. The blossoms and leaves are all the same random rock made with MacRock, rotated and deformed in various ways. The vase is a quick Clayscape object (another Freeware modelling program for Macintosh, the first I've seen using OpenGL preview) and the cigarette butt is from 3D Cafe. All other models are pure Bryce, with scanned textures for the coins, and the match box. The texture for the floor tiles is made up in Adobe Photoshop. The picture on the photograph is a crop from another exhibit in my Gallery

Rendering took 1 hour and 22 minutes on my elderly Powermac 8600/200, surprisingly fast, considering the lighting set-up. The file size is 4.2Mb, quite small for the amount of imported models and 2D textures.

After rendering I darkened the wall and the floor a little in Photoshop, corrected the overall tone and colour balance and added a free-form vignette, very much like I would process a photograph.

Have a look at a very different earlier render of the same scene