A scripture in the Bible quotes an well-known saying "One sows and another reaps". This mini-tutorial is the result of someone else sowing and me reaping the benefit. If it wasn’t for a question posed by "Ludwigs" in the BryceTalk forum of the DAZ3D community, and Horo’s answer that mentioned the use of Bryce optics to solve the question, this mini-tutorial might never have been blogged at all. My thanks to Horo for his idea, and full credit goes to him. I just tweaked and refined the idea and made it pretty. Of course if anyone out there can add to this idea and improve on it please feel free to contact us at the BryceBlog.

The original question was why the horizon (either the water or land plane) in Bryce was always flat and not curved like a planet should be in real life. The reason is simple: The Bryce "world" is essentially a flat surface that goes off to infinity in all directions and thus will not show a natural curvature. Horo’s suggestion was to use a glass sphere as a "lens" near the camera to distort the image to give a natural curve. I took it a bit further and placed the camera inside the glass sphere and let the glass refraction bend the sky into a planetary curve. There’s how I did it:

Create a new Bryce scene and choose a sky that will suit a planet’s atmosphere

Something like Brinnen’s "Gritty Turbulent Sky" is ideal for this sort of scene with enough haze and fog to give a nice atmospheric layer.

Then select the ground plane and set its material to black (in Bryce 6.1 it is under the "Misc" material library) also set the Diffusion and Ambience channels to 0. This will create lovely velvety space above the planet.

Now for the magic. Create a Bryce primitive sphere and move and scale it so the camera object fits within it.

The apply the "Glass, Standard" material found in the default materials library of Bryce 6.1. (it is also in earlier versions) The natural refractive qualities of the glass wil act as a "lens" to distort the sky.

Just a quick render will already show you the magic starting to happen. I left the grid lines in the screen capture so you can see where the ground plane is and where the glass sphere is in relation to the camera viewpoint.

Now you can add your own extra magic. I browsed the Internet and downloaded a free 3d mesh of the "Orion" shuttle from the science fiction classic movie "2001 – A Space Odyssey". It can be found at the 2001: A Space Odyssey 3D Modelling Archive . I imported the model into Bryce 6.1 and added a couple of lights. (set with a zero falloff to give a harsher outer space lighting effect)

Now the render is almost complete except for one thing. I prefer the planet to be below but it cannot be because the sky is above and the sky is the "planet".The Banking Camera gadget comes to the rescue. It is off to the left just above the Trackball control. Just drag this gadget to the left or right to bank the camera.

Bank the camera 180 degrees…

…and render your final image. Very simple to do, but very impressive results! The positioning of the glass sphere is quite tricky, and lots of glances at the Nano Preview window will be required, and there will be some distortion of any objects like spaceships especially if there are lots of straight lines and geometric elements with straight edges

Save the image (and the scene file!) and import it into your favourite image editing program and add any special effects – like stars, nebulas, laser beams etc.

Here is the final result. From beginning to end this scene took 35 minutes to set up , tweak and render!

I am sure there are many more uses for Bryce Optics. Be sure to let us know if you have discovered something. Horo said himself "Bryce can do everything!"