I have had several enquiries about the construction my Vertigo image that was posted to the Bryce Forum Gallery. It appears as though hundreds of cylinders were used in a huge lattice to create the apparent endless depth. In reality very few real objects were used, the effect is possible due to reflections and Bryce's perfect mirror materials.

What follows is a brief rundown of the technique used, it isn't complicated, only one cube and 12 cylinders are used!

Here is a brief run down of how it was done.

Basically it relies on Bryce objects being hollow.'Vertigo' started life as a cube or box object with a highly reflective surface applied. This box then becomes the boundaries of your 'World'.

The next step is to move the camera and a couple of light sources to within the 'World'. I've found it best to keep the lights dim otherwise they wash out the image due to the multiple reflections. Better to have more low intensity lights than 1 or 2 bright ones. For the structure I took a standard cylinder and stretched it until it was slightly longer than one edge of the 'World' I then applied a techy/city type of material to the cylinder.

Then 11 duplicates were made ( 12 edges on a cube ) these were lined up to each edge of the 'World' in turn such that only a quarter of each cylinder is visible from inside the World. Due to the internal reflections the viewer is fooled into seeing whole cylinders. That completes the basic scene, 12 cylinders one cube + Camera and a few lights. It's then just a matter of positioning the camera to give a good view of all the reflections along with adjusting the light levels and careful positioning of the lights.

One other point, the global sky/sun settings affect the lighting within the 'World' even though it is effectively a sealed room. Maybe someone with more technical knowledge of how Bryce works internally could explain that one. Initially I set the sky/atmosphere to black with a black sun, (Bryce3 users could turn off the sun of course). You can then tryout different combinations of sun/sky colours to get some really neat effects.

Best wishes

Bob Buttery