It was a Friday - I remember that because at the time I only worked one day a week, and I had just come home from work. I was surfing the web looking for interesting desktop wallpaper, and out of the blue I came upon an incredible, arresting image: a tremendous island, shrouded in fog and rising majestically from a rippling green ocean. It wasn't a photograph or a painting though; realistic though it was, it was immediately obvious that the startling scene was computer generated. I e-mailed the artist and asked him how he had pulled off such a miracle, and he replied with one word: Bryce.
So began my love affair with MetaCreations Bryce, and along with it, computer 3D. I'm still not very good at it (far from it, in fact) but for some reason that doesn't stop me from learning all I can, reading articles, studying software, and churning out as many 3D models and rendered scenes as I have time for. In this two-article series, I'll share some of what I've learned with you.
Don't be a Cad, Cam!
Computer generated 3D has been around for a while... in the seventies, companies were using CAD/CAM (computer aided design / computer aided manufacturing) by architects and engineers to create precision technical drawings, and it was showing up in films as early as Disney's Tron, which came out in 1982. 3D leapt to the big screen in earnest in 1991's Terminator 2, which earned an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and it blew the world away a few years later when photo-realistic dinosaurs devoured people and each other in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
So what is 3D, really? What is the technology behind our favorite 3D games, like Doom and Quake? What is Bryce really doing when it creates its tremendous fog-shrouded islands? How were the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park really made?
Curves and Lines, Grand Designs
With 2D computer graphics, a point is defined by its height and its width - its horizontal and vertical measurements. In 3D space, points are measured not only by their height and width, but by their depth - their spatial relation to the camera viewpoint, and the horizon. In polygon animation, two-dimensional planes with three or more vertices are combined to form three-dimensional shapes. For example, the pyramid below (created in Bryce) is a three-dimensional model comprised of three triangles (each with three vertices) and one square (with four vertices).
 |
 |
 |
