Sooner or later, someone's going to write to me to say that they've seen something very much like this before.

This image was done as a technical exercise. A friend of mine showed me an image by science-fiction artist Chris Moore, which featured all the classic elements of good SF images - an alien planet, cool-looking starships, and a hot babe not wearing very much. By some strange coincidence, these are also the elements that feature most often in my own scenes.

I commented on the fact that the image could almost have been made in Bryce - the spaceship and the fuel tanks in the scene could more or less be decomposed into Bryce primitives, while the terrains, weird skies, etc. are the stuff of which Bryce scenes are made. Having said that, I realised that I would, of course, have to see if I could reproduce the image in Bryce.

I began by building the different elements of the scene separately - the ship, the fuel tanks, the column and so forth. I then imported them into the scene and set to work recreating the image. To get the alignments right, I used a scan of the original Chris Moore image. Importing it with "Open Image" and then switching to the view mode in which the wireframe is overlaid on the current image gave me a good guide to work on.

After I'd got the basic look more or less right, I set up the sky and lighting and then added materials to the models. I hadn't textured the models before importing because I didn't know how the textures would interact with the sky settings. Instead, while building the models I assigned family colors to the different parts of the models so that I could quickly re-find all the parts that needed to be textured in one particular way. My ship, for example, uses three family colors, which I named Ship White, Ship Gray, and Ship Decor (the last being a variant of Ship White with a 2D image applied as a 'decal'). Each part of the models was also named, and the models themselves were grouped, making it very easy to pick out and manipulate the different scene elements: a little preparation in the building phase turned out to be a big time-saver later on.

The final image resembles the Chris Moore original, but is far from being an exact copy. There are various elements that I either couldn't reproduce or chose not to. Parts of the scene work well - the spaceship and the fuel tanks - while others work less well - the girl in the foreground and the column she leans against. Overall, though, it was a useful learning experience. Among the things I learned were:

1. Good SF art is a lot of work, and Chris Moore is clearly a talented man. Among other things, his composition is excellent. His original picture (and this scene) works because the composition is so strong - a vivid foreground element, eye-catching (but not distracting) detail in the background, and an intriguing 'camera angle', among other things. The picture also 'tells a story', which is always fun.


2. One of the weaknesses of the foreground figure was that her skin looked very 'flat'. I got around this partially by driving up the specularity of the skin material and even adding a touch of reflection, which brought out the highlights of the skin (in Moore's original, she's positively gleaming, and her skin is pearled with water droplets, an effect I wasn't able to reproduce).


3. I'm normally wary of reflecting or transparent surfaces, not merely because of their effect on render times (I want to see my results this week), but because they introduce uncontrollable elements to the image: the presence of a reflected element may break your composition, the colors of part of the image are no longer under your control, and so on. In this case, however, the reflection of the ship and the fuel tanks in the 'wet' surface of the walkway adds greatly to the effect of the image.


4. Building models methodically is indispensable when making complex scenes.

The original Chris Moore image was designed for Phillip K. Dick's novel "Ubik" (I don't remember any naked chicks and spaceships in "Ubik" - maybe I should re-read it more carefully ...). Hence the title.

Some of the models used in the scene are available for download.

Helmet [34K]

Starship [51K]

Fuel tank [54K]