Commenting on the Blog…

Commenting on the Blog…

webguyOn the Internet, I am a reclusive hobbit called Hamfast, who likes potatoes, all green growing things and playing with Bryce, Hexagon and who has a consuming passion for JRR Tolkien. In reality I am a retired medical illustrator who has drifted into the dubious job of manager/network guru/computer security advisor and general IT "expert" of the Faulty of Health Sciences for a local university. I am reclusive in nature – like my Internet alter-ego, and prefer spending time in my garden, with my wife and our only child, Christopher, who is almost 11 years old. Playing with computers is a hobby, as is my artwork, but that is all laid out in detail on my website on Bryce-Alive.org.

So forgive my paranoid nature by enforcing registration before you can comment on the BryceBlog. With the latest update to WordPress, I have a lot more protection from spammer comments and thus I have elected for now to reduce the security level for the blog to allow you all to comment. Let us keep an eye on it and see what transpires. At the first sign of the Blog becoming a comment spam target, I will put other measures in place.

On a more exciting note, if you would like to become a "real" contributor to the Blog and post you own articles on our beloved software – Bryce – then please contact me and we can set up something. We already have the famous Bryce enthusiast – Rosemary Regan – and I have had some interesting mail from others with all sorts of comments and suggestions. These will be integrated into the blog as soon as I have obtained permission to post them.

Commenting on the Blog…

When doing clouds – think big!

ArtifactsFree-standing clouds in Bryce have never worked to me – until recently. I discovered a glaring fact when watching the shadows cast by the clouds on a wheat field in the Caledon district. The cloud didn’t look particularly big but the shadow must have been at least a kilometre across. I realised that a cloud is a big thing.

My clouds in Bryce were simply too small so the cloud material (set to Fuzzy Shade mode) just lacked the minute detail and scale that a normal fluffy cloud would have. I normally create clouds with squashed spheres and apply a simple cloud material to it – volumetric clouds just kill the rendering time, and the dreaded intersection artefacts when two volumetric objects intersect (the image thumbnail enlarges to show what I mean), make the exercise more frustrating than rewarding. This time I cranked up the size and made the cloud colossal (in comparison to the terrain) and it actually started to work. My advice to you – think big! :idea: