Epiphyllum Tutorial

This is not exactly a tutorial as such, what it is, are the thoughts and ideas that I used whilst making this image. Hopefully you will be able to glean some insight into creating Landscapes with Bryce and pick up one or two tips.

If you enjoy this type of tutorial please let me know.

Epiphyllum: -

So why Epiphyllum? well the foreground plants are based on Christmas/Easter Cactus and their dominance in the image suggested the title as they are members of the Epiphyte genus.

In their natural habitat they are plants that live on other plants and do not put roots out into the soil but attach them to tree bark. They do not harm their hosts and are not parasitic. They are also found on steep rocky walls of canyons or solitary boulders sticking above the tree canopy.

I wanted a serene peaceful landscape, something Earthly but also maybe not of this Earth.... or at least not in our present time. I've used soft colours to establish a sense of serenity with predominent cool green flora and stark clean white buildings.As many of my previous landscapes are taken from a low camera angle I wanted this one for a change to have a high viewpoint.
The viewer would be looking down from a tall cliff or outcrop, with the white 'palacial' structures giving a sense of scale.

With those basic ideas in mind I created the initial terrains. Low and hilly, no cold snowy peaks in this land. tut3f

A total of twelve hires terrains set the basic landscape, each one seperately sculpted in the terrain editor. For the structures, the lowland Palaces are Bryce primitives stretched grouped and duplicated, all standard Bryce stuff. I'm not totally at ease with them, sometimes they remind me of an oil storage depot! The tall 'watchtower' was a dxf import of an object made using the excellent SPatch utility.
I deliberately placed it partly inside the terrain to give a feeling of it being part of the landscape whilst most obviously being a man/alien made structure created by some advanced civilisation capable of carving away mountains.

The sky is a real Brycean sky, but using a technique I'm still experimenting with that gives a pseudo 3d effect to the clouds. If you are interested compare this sky with the one in 'Iceplants'....they both use the same sky!
I'll reveal all in a tutorial soon if there's enough interest. mail me here

I really wanted a cliff edge as the foreground object to emphasise the depth in the scene, but after a lot of experimenting I still couldn't get the effect I was after. Thats when I had the idea of hanging branches, but not just trees, something different. I took a piece of a Christmas Cactus ( aka Epiphyllum ) I have and scanned it on a flatbed into Paintshop Pro.

To give it a more 'alien' look I nibbled parts away to give the spikey/hooked look you see. I imported the image and applied it to a Lattice object and used the same image as colour and bumpmap to give the leaf an almost natural look. Each leaf segment you see is a seperate Lattice object there are 18 (512 res) in total.

The scene was progressing nicely but looked a little 'sterile' and devoid of life, so I added the dragonfly. The dragonfly started as a hi-res jpg image I had to hand. My first attempt was to just use it as a pict object with alpha maps for the semi-transparent wings. Whilst this worked it still looked 'flat'. Another Lattice object proved to be the answer. In Paintshop I isolated the body, converted it to greyscale then built up the image by making the centre lighter and darkening the edges to produce a heightmap suitable for applying to the Lattice object. Voila, instant 3d body and with the original coloured body image applied, reasonably convincing. ( from a distance).Next the wings minus the body were applied to a pict object which was then grouped with the lattice body to complete an insect. viewable from any angle.

The lower left area of the image seemed lacking in interest so I added a pseudo forest.
A huge (1024 res) spiked terrain carefully tweaked to prevent spikes appearing through the palaces was added.
When applied with a foliage material this gives a convincing forest/scrub texture to the lowlands.

tut3d Because of their brightness, the palaces appeared ( to me ) to dominate the scene so I carefully placed yet another cactus leaf construction at the bottom right. Partly to obscure the palace thereby toning down the whiteness of that area but also as a guide to lead the eye back into the picture.

Last but not least a little fog/haze to further emphasize the depth in the scene.

Total time about 8 evenings + one lost evenings work when Bryce refused to load the previous nights scene file. Grrrrrr