For some unfathomable reason I "discovered" you, or your work, before the majority of the community of active Bryce Evangelists did, when I was "serving" as a judge at the Bryce Forum Gallery. The picture was When Time Gets Bored. Tell us something about it...

Time came about in an interesting way. I was working overtime at work and we kept having parts problems so the line would shut down and we would have nothing to do and no one seemed to be working hard when we got the line running again. I was going crazy with boredom. One of our breaks is at 3 a.m. and I swear I looked at the clock every minute from 2 a.m. until 3 a.m. just waiting for the chance to be able to do something else. But because I looked up so often, it seemed like time wasn't passing at all. So I told a friend, "Tonight is going so slowly that even Time herself is bored." *Bing!* The light went on in my head, and I spent the break writing the basics of the Time picture down.....what Time might look like as a person, and what she might be doing if bored.

So it was a whim, a joke, even. I bet you had fun making it after you got home...

Making the Bryce was a pure joy. Took me a few days to put it together, but the render didn't take more than two hours.

There's a lovely unusual clutter of all sorts of things in there...

It was scavenge work, plain and simple. She's a model sized Poser figure covered in watches from the Ray Dream cd....I just colored each one of them differently for variety. For her hair I used the hair texture off of the Bryce 4 cd and changed it in the DTE....more orange (I found that orange works well with Bryce lighting) and took off some but not all of the transparency. (The texture by itself is too transparent...it looks like hair, by golly, but you can see the head right through it. *grin*) And the stuff around her is bits and pieces of this and that. I opened up lots of different objects from Ray Dream or from downloads from 3D Cafe and ripped out the interesting parts......a clock face from this but the clock hands from that, a grate from a jukebox but a wheel from a toy, anything that looked remotely mechanical.

And the sky, is that scavenged from elswhere as well?

The sky is, believe it or not, an unaltered Bryce 4 preset....Venus sunset or something like that. I just remember opening it up as a test and then realizing that it worked all on its own. I won't shy away from presets if they work.

Well, scavenged objects and preset sky and all, it still is my favourite of the pictures I chose for the Select Gallery. It had slipped past the attention of the previous panel of judges, but it captured my imagination instantly.

I am impressed that you noticed her. She was very far down on the list in the Main Gallery and I had all but given up on her. I liked the piece myself, and had hopes for it, and could not quite figure out why it went unnoticed. I was getting an awful lot of email about her while she sat in the Main Gallery, and all of it was overwhelmingly positive. But you can never know the minds of judges, I suppose. Some prefer landscapes, some prefer space scenes, etc. I kind of wondered why she caught your eye.

Like I said, Karen, she caught my imagination first, and then my eye. I generally like pictures which portray a sense of humour better than most others. The wrist watches made me think of something I read in a novel about Buckminster Fuller (this could be fiction, but I like the notion): the author portrays him as wearing seperate watches for different time zones while travelling. About what gets choseen for the Select Gallery and what doesn't - I believe if a picture gets chosen it means that at the time it was a favourite of one of the judges, nothing more and nothing less. And I am taking this opportunity to say it to all our readers: Don't get upset if a brilliant picture you made does not get picked. It simply means it wasn't one of the judges' favourites. Try to look at the Gallery as a fun way to show your work.

How do you tackle a new project? Do you make sketches on paper?

I bring a sketchbook to work to capture ideas that come to me during the night. Because I work with my hands, my mind is wonderfully free to wander (a pure blessing of factory work that most people would not think of) and I can make little line drawings or just simply write down words to remind myself. Chances are, I do more writing than sketching because I know what will happen in Bryce won't resemble the sketch in the first place. The better stuff that I have done has been impromptu in layout.

More writing than sketching - I find that interesting. I work a bit like that. I make notes on ideas as they come to me - otherwise they'll be gone by the time I get a chance to try them out. I always make sketches of complex groups and booleans, though, to see how they fit together, to determine the grouping order... diagrams, really, more so than sketches.

That's kind of funny that you use your sketches to figure out groupings and booleans because I do that as well. I always have line drawings to capture the vague idea of where I am going, and then I frequently do side ones of the more complicated actions, just to make sure that I get them right.

Do you also work from Photographs?

I do some work from photographs, but only for 3d information and a little modelling. I will probably get into them for textures soon as well. I like stuff I can print out from the net that I can scribble lines over, noting where to make booleans and stuff like that.

Yes, photo textures are great for photo realism. They aren't that good for keeping the file sizes manageable, though.
Do you use the Terrain Editor for modelling?

I'm learning to use the Editor as we speak. Right now, I am a sheer novice, and at the very bottom of the novice pile. I'm talking Terrain Editory kindergarden. I can't quite make it do what I want it to, and I realize there is a lot more to it, and I just need to learn it. I guess a lot of people make these greyscale map thingies, and I don't know the first thing about them, but I want to learn. I can sense the potential, and just don't know how to realize it for myself yet. I need to read a few good tutorials and spend some time practicing.

Isn't it fascinating that there's aleays something new and exciting to learn! We'll get back to that in a moment. A propos modelling in the Terrain Editor - what is your attitude towards using imported models?

I don't have an attitude towards imported models. If they work, they work. If they don't, they don't. It depends on the flavor of the piece. I have absolutely no CAD-like modelling experience, so I will use imported models. But lately I have decided to see what I can make with Bryce primitives itself. I am learning how easy it is to see the primitive shapes in all things, and it's like sticking Legoes or TinkerToys together. I'd like to learn all those fancy kinds of modelling one day, but I am having too much fun making artwork to stop and teach myself.

There seem to be two different "Schools of Bryce". Some people look at Bryce as one of the tools they use to make the picture they want to make while other have taken up the challenge trying to use Bryce and Bryce only wherever it might be possible, even though resorting to other programs maight be faster and easier. How do you feel about "Bryce Purism"?

Well, I'm interested in the finished piece of artwork. I won't quibble about using this or that or the other thing. I have almost no post-rendering skills, however, and still cannot figure out how to even make a mask or separate things into layers and such, so when I am done with a Bryce, I am done. The only post rendering I do is touch-ups on something, like a post sticking through a wall. I don't have the skills yet to do more than that. I need a good Photoshop guru to teach me. Know any? Are you one? How do you feel about Bryce purity? I bet we could argue that one for days.

OK, Karen we can start right here. Photoshop was the reason I bought my first computer. I used to work in Photography, doing mainly such things as toning, tinting, montage, etc, and it made economical and environmental sense to go digital. For me it's the picture that matters - how I get the picture is quite irrelevant. I dare say I know Photoshop inside out, and it's in Photoshop where I make my pictures. I use Bryce (or other 3D) renders, scans of photographs, drawings, paintings and found objects, but I make almost all my pictures in Photoshop.
No, Bryce Purism isn't my way.... having said that, I do enjoy the challenge of modelling something like a wine glass in the Terrain Editor. And I have nothing but admiration for people like Kano and Fred Simmons who have taken on the challenge and done outright unbelievable work.

I know what you mean about Kano and Fred Simmons. I can't even begin to imagine how many hours Kano spends on each piece to get all of those tiny details, and Fred created one of my favorite pieces of all time...2 a.m. I hope you are familiar with it; it won a Select Award a few months ago. I love it because I know the feeling; I've crashed Bryce (not to mention other programs and my whole computer) a time or two.

Oh, yes, I saw an early version on the Bryce Forum... Hey, I'm supposed to interview you... Computer Graphhics are usually constructed and planned, step by step, and this often shows in the final picture. Your work can be very complex, yet, there always remains a sense of spontaneity and immediacy. Is this one of your goals or does it just happen this way? If it just happens, can you tell me what it might be that makes it happen?

Nothing I do ever turns out how I intended it to be when I started it. And the more specific I get beforehand, the worse the picture comes out. I struggle too hard to make the picture live up to how I see it in my head, and I do not yet have the necessary Bryce skills to do that. It is better for me to go with an idea and see what I can do with the idea, rather than a follow a plan and fall short. The pieces lose their life when I do that because I overwork them. I'm pretty happy with the latest Tally picture, but I came mighty close to blowing that one, too. It still isn't how I would want it, but I won't let myself touch it any more because I know I will not be making it any better. I am better off starting the next one and seeing what I can do there.

Yes, I was watching the progress on the Forum, and I think I may have let slip something about overworking it. Let us stay on the subject of the Forum for another while, and learning, one of my pet topics. You seem to enjoy it as much as I do. It is, in my opinion, the best place on the Web for learning Bryce.

The Bryce boards have definitly added an extra flavor to my latest work. My skill with the program grew in such odd steps. I just played around and had fun and didn't really attempt to grow or get good. Then I saw Martin Murphy's Queen picture (although Autumn Flirts with Winter is still my favorite of his)...

...it's my favourite of all Bryce/Poser combinations I've seen...

...and he offered a tutorial on how he made it. I never really paid attention to tutorials before that one, but I read it through because the picture was so amazing and realized that tutorials had a lot to teach. I started reading and learning, and then experimenting on my own. Before I really didn't know how to make the program work for me, and while there is a lot I have yet to learn about it, I know I can step in and do a lot more than before. Then I won that first Select Forum award and you wrote me and brought me back to the boards.

(the editor blushes a little...)

I had discovered the boards a long time ago through the Gallery, and had posted a little in them around Christmas time, and then forgot about them. I got bronchitis really bad, and was working lots of overtime at work, and spending more time learning Bryce and just forgot. And you brought me back and now I am learning even more than before. I love the idea of being able to post unfinished work and get hints along the way. I also love watching other things develop, such as certain Irish cottages.

(the editor blushes some more..)

Watching the process is almost as much fun as seeing the finished work. And now I check the boards every day when I get online, and have started participating in the Bryce chats as well. I only have an hour to linger in them, as I have to get away from the computer and get out the door to work at 10pm, but each of those hours over the week are helpful and fun.

I wish I could participate in those chats. Unfortunately the time zones work against me. And so does my slowness at typing.

next: Karen's Bryce Galleries...