Bryce Landscapes

One day I decided to try my hand at making a volcano, which was all well and good, but I thought something was lacking. I made several, with different skies, different landforms, and one belching black smoke.

The Bryce CD came with some interesting landscape forms, already built. Ken Musgrave had a form he used to make a lovely atoll. Well, after I got done playing around with it I fear it was a lot different. But the setting sun imparted too much warmth.

So I combined my volcano with my warped version of Ken Musgrave's atoll and came up with a frozen land and an ominous volcano. As I played around with the idea other things occurred to me: make the light colder and bluer, that will seem icier, and if it is a volcano, but not spewing smoke, it would look more dangerous if there were light inside of it. And it should be more isolated, without competition from other mountains. I also accidently got a fractured block sort of sticking up in front, and that seemed like a good idea too. To keep things cold, the light inside would also lack all trace of warm red. So the active volcano emits cold light, which has the added benefit of making it more mysterious. Maybe aliens or elder gods have some workshop going in there.

Every time there's a Bryce upgrade there's a new feature to play with. In this case it was a new way of rendering atmospheric effects. Takes forever, but you couldn't make a sandstorm without it.

In this case the Bryce upgrade provided a tree lab. Well, who could resist? I sent a copy of this creation to a friend who taught me all I know about identifying local plants. She emailed back that while she liked it she couldn't quite figure out what some tropical plants were doing at such a high elevation. There's the real world, and then there's the digital world. All these plants live in the digital world.