Bryce STARFIELDS and TORUS PLANET

Retro Lad

What is the very best that can be done "in-house" with Bryce's star field options without resorting to post work using Photoshop, or any plugins?
From my limited experience and testing of Bryce's star field options it appears that this is one thing that Bryce is not very good with, or for that matter Vue either.
I know that great star fields with nebulas, etc., can be made in Photoshop, and then imported into Bryce.

Horo

There are no deep space opjects in Bryce, only stars. The Random field is a bit difficult to use, you have to keep Intensity low, 33 to 50, otherwise, all stars have the same brightness, which looks odd.

The Custom Starfield shows our sky with all stars down to magnitude 6 (all visible by the unaided eye in a dark and clear night). If the camera rotation angles are all zero and the rollerball not changed for the stars, you have the stars of the northern hemispphere at the spring equinox.

If you want deep sky objects, you have to create it yourself. A modeler would be Universe Image Creator. I have an old version of it but don't use it because only images can be created, not spherical panoramas.

I apologise for the advertising, David and I have some sets that feature space backgrounds as HDRI (Deep Space HDRI 1 and 2, and the Space Construction Kit).

The disadvantage of Bryce stars is that they are disks, not points. If the camera uses a wide FOV, that's quite fine but once you have a narrow FOV the disks look odd.

Galaxies and nebulae can be made in the DTE, which is quite tricky but it can be done, protuberances of a sun as well. No easy way to get a nice deep sky out of Bryce, I'm afraid.

Retro Lad

Horo,

Thanks for the info.
I have been a registered owner of "Universe Maker" and its plugins for a long time. I never liked it's nebula options, though, and only used the stars, star fields, and galaxy options a few times.

DeviantArt space artists have posted some good methods for making star fields and nebulas using Photoshop. I have been so fatigued lately, that I haven't had the energy to try those Photoshop methods myself.
For that matter I haven't gotten to those tumbleweeds.

According to some of the Deviant artists it took them anywhere from 4 hours to 8 hours to finish a decent looking star scape with nebulas, etc.

Have you seen, over the years, any Bryce rendered space images of a Torus Planet?
Bryce doesn't seem to have an option for mapping a picture onto a torus accurately, or am I a dingbat and missed something.
Is it possible to map an "earth-like planet" 2D map onto a torus object, or for that matter paint a planet surface directly onto a 3d torus object?

Also, is it possible to sculpt a 3d terrain onto the surface of a 3D torus object to make it look as if it has mountains, rivers, valleys, etc.
I don't know why but a Torus Planet with a decent surface map and atmosphere has always intrigued me. Maybe it started with my reading of Larry Niven's "Ringworld" books, decades ago, although the Torus Planet is much, much, smaller of course and only about the width of an ordinary earth-like planet.

Horo

Ah, a torus planet. Never thought of that but I think I would start with a terrain lattice. As for mapping, I would try to create a torus in Wings3D (or Hexagon, or whatever modelling software) and create an UV-map. That might map correctly on a torus using parametric. But I'm only guessing ...

Fishtales

FlashGarcia

I'm not sure what you are looking for but this is a torus with the 'Earth' terrain texture from the Bryce library. No hills as displacement in Bryce doesn't work too well :)

Bonito Lil

But for Ringworld you have to map the terrain to the ~inside~ of the torus...

Fishtales

Never read Ringworld so I wouldn't know. Is it like Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs? I have read a lot of those books :-)

Retro Lad

I decided to post some of my "test" files results for this Torus Planet idea, so you can all get an idea of what I am trying to do.
The idea is an earth size Torus Planet, and not a Ringworld.

The renders below are just "rough drafts" and the starfields I used are rather crummy for now.
I generally used three toruses, one is the planet surface using Random for the planet map, the second is an atmosphere torus using a bluish color with transparency, and then a torus for the clouds.

Fishtales

asterlil said:

But for Ringworld you have to map the terrain to the ~inside~ of the torus...

Looked up Ringworld and it is an artificial ring built around a sun with the inhabitants living on the inner face the surface of which is millions of times the surface of Earth.

Ringworld

orbital

One method I've used in the past is to create a large sphere and place the camera inside it. I then apply a volumetric nebula material from the presets. I also place some radial lights inside the sphere to brighten parts of the nebula. You can also apply a procedural gel texture to the lights which can be quite effective. For these images I set the camera with a wide field of view which seems to help with the stars. The problem here is that any objects such as the planets will become distorted as you move them away from the centre. This can be rectified by adjusting the size along the relevant axis.
You can add more spheres and just by rotating them around the camera gives different results every time.
When you're feeling up to it though give those photoshop tutorials a shot it's always good to have more strings to your bow.
Theres a few useful ones here
http://www.solarvoyager.com/tutorials.asp?SID=F1B309CD64D80342868763CBB4645827946
and plenty on deviant art. Some of the methods are trickier than others but some are amazingly simple to do.

Retro Lad

orbital

Thanks for the help.
Your Bryce/Mixed Media artwork at Renderosity is very impressive, "Where Shall We Go Today?", "Fathom", "Looking for God", etc.

Fishtales

This came out more like a doughnut world rather than a ring world :-)

Doughnut World.

Retro Lad

Fishtales,

It's tricky trying to make a torus planet that doesn't look like a frosted donut.
If the clouds are too small they start looking like sugar coatings. The transparent atmosphere torus can't stick out too much or it looks tacky

Torus planets would be designer engineered by super advanced extraterrestrials so the skies the limit. There could be Pacific archipelago island chain Torus Planets, or Forest covered Torus Planets, or volcanic prehistoric types.

Retro Lad

Here are three of my Torus Planet modifications. Zoom in a bit.
I tried displacing the planet surface texture so it looks like it has some height and contours.
There are seams that require postwork if I ever make some final renders.

CTippetts

I saw this:

http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/toruscutaway.htm

and the movie "Elysium", which I thought was as believable as Peter Pan. One of the problems I had with Elysium, (other than the fact that they could track people from space, yet couldn't hone a weapon in on them, and that their spy drones didn't have redundant optics, and that they could heal an entire body of all its woes in a few seconds), was that their atmosphere wouldn't simply be blown away by solar winds. I also recognized their "torus planet" had only living areas, and no support, or storage areas. The object itself seemed a bit weak, and prone to a simple blast or meteor destroying it completely. I also realized such a device, unlike a sphere, does not get half dark and half sunlight from a sun source. Either constant light, (such as in Fishtales version ... nicely done, I might add), or about 1/3 light and the rest in darkness.

So I built my own. It's sturdier than Elysium, and has rings for manufacturing, support, and storage facilities, plus a power control center. Clear plates, (who knows what material in the future ... perhaps transparent aluminum, but lets just say acrylic for now), between the vegetation area and the first inner ring are able to refract the sun source, so much more area gets sunlight. You can see that refraction in the angled view, as those pillars go straight down, but appear to bend. You can also see the refraction in the side view, as the vegetation area appears to go up higher on the far side, yet both sides are symmetrical.Those plates also keep the atmosphere in. It probably would not quite be the clouds as I depict, but more of a thick, uniform fog, which, instead of raining, would condense on the plates and the support columns to get to the vegetation. Most of that first inner ring would probably be water storage, so they could make it rain if they felt the need for such inconveniences. The outer side of the outer torus would be solar harvesting, providing more electrical power than a station that size could possibly use. Those support columns would contain elevator or rail type transportation systems. Visiting ships would not land on the vegetation surface, but on the inner side of the first inner ring ... possibly inside it.

Oh, the imagination. What a powerful waste of brain activity.

HAVE FUN!

P.S. I almost forgot to mention that this was done in Bryce 5.5, and the star field is two 2D Faces with a pattern I made using Paint Shop Pro "noise" with a gradient mask.

Retro Lad

Some discussion posts on the web about Torus/Ring type planets.

http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6465/what-would-the-problems-with-consequences-of-a-torus-shaped-planet-be

http://io9.com/what-would-the-earth-be-like-if-it-was-the-shape-of-a-d-1515700296