Written: June 1999 Landscapes & Learningby John Rawlins
“We’re all teachers here.”
It’s an effort for most of us to keep up with Chris, even in the fully-equipped computer lab. Each of us has either an iMac or a Windows PC in front of us, and the room resounds with frantic mouse clicking as Chris deftly switches back and forth between Bryce and Photoshop to fine-tune the grayscale image that will become a 3D terrain. When he announces it’s time for a short break, I ask if he can please pick up the pace. It takes him a moment to realize I’m being facetious. Chris, an animator for several major films including Star Wars, is not someone who can teach everything he knows in a day. Reluctantly he decides there’s not enough time to show us how to make sand dunes. Most of our brains are filled to capacity anyway.
For the evening, Chris has scheduled a show and tell. Jaws drop as one breathtaking image after another appears on the big screen in the front of the room. Cathy Novak has been creating tarot cards using Bryce, Painter and a battalion of other programs. Her merry, skipping skeleton is a joy to behold. Kenn Louis’ fanciful bugs and beasties elicit gasps of delight from more than a few of us. Many a fine image parade past us that evening, and more than a few of us openly admitted extreme envy. Susan Kitchens, author of several books about Bryce, and another MetaCreations staffer, gave the Tuesday lecture at Bryce Camp. Susan guided us step-by-step through the creation of a height-sensitive procedural texture, or in plain english, a wet rock. Susan learned the secrets of the Deep Texture Editor directly from Bryce’s creator, Eric Wenger. It took Susan’s writing skill to explain Eric’s jumble of electronic synthesizer terminology, quadratic equations and waveform graphs in her KPT Bryce Book and Real World Bryce 2. The Deep Texture Editor in Bryce 4 is easier on the eyes than previous incarnations, but it’s still the same beast underneath. Susan spent much of Tuesday’s lecture guiding us through a minefield of popup menus, razzing the “really, really intuitive” list of noise patterns. The menu includes such items as RND Saw, Techno, Voronoi DistSq 3, Voronoi D3-D2, Voronoi D4sq-D3sq... “Hey, what is Voronoi,
“Voronoi. He’s a mathematician,” replies the pyro. This man can only be Ken Musgrave, the grandfather of Bryce. Ken, who began his career working for the fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, wrote the original algorithmic formulae that make the foundation for Bryce’s naturalistic world. He’s also the only person at Bryce Camp who brought his dog, a gorgeous springer spaniel named Jasmine. Tuesday night, Ken regales us with a slideshow of 3D landscapes he created on SIG workstations back when it was generally accepted that this sort of thing couldn’t be done. He’s wearing an electric baseball cap with multicolored lights, perhaps as a visual aid. Since joining MetaCreations last year, Ken engineered the Photoshop plug-in KPT Noize and added acres of new terrains to Bryce. His next project is to rewrite the Deep Texture Editor. When his slides are done, someone asks him if Eric Wenger really understood his original algorithms. “Come on,” Ken quips, “back then even I didn’t understand them.” Wednesday morning brought us some unscheduled free time, so the students took over the classroom. Ken Tompkins, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton College, showed us some ancient stone carvings he recreated in Bryce. Later, Sandy Birkholz gave a wonderful lesson in creating nebulae. Calyxa Omphalos, whose beautiful work can be seen on the Bryce 4 CD, showed her unique method of creating trees.
Meta wound up hiring Robert and Jackson as interface designers. Robert created the interface for Bryce’s advanced motion lab, which made him a good choice for teaching us how to use it. “Everyone who animates in Bryce does the same kind of fly-overs,” Robert warned us. “They never look very natural ... unless you’re strapped on the nose of a speeding jet.” After demonstrating several ways to create more realistic camera motion, he blows everyone’s socks off with a demonstration of Canoma, Meta’s latest software. Canoma can turn photographs into 3D models. It was astonishing to watch as Robert took a photograph of a city street and turned it into a model you could walk through.
To prove a point, Bill did all his modeling, decals, terrain editing, even bump maps in Bryce. “When I started, the only other software I had was the Windows operating system,” Bill told us. “After I finished the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I wanted to see if I could do them all in Bryce.” The word Bryce has been carefully hidden in all seven wonders, and since Bryce has no features for creating text, Bill created the individual letters out of scores of tiny cubes. His images and animations are very impressive, even though his techniques border on the heretical. As part of his lecture, he showed several good examples of making complex shapes using boolean functions, the subtracting of one simple form from another to create a new object.
Like all truly great software, the latest version of Bryce comes with a built-in chatroom program, and Thursday night is BryceTalk night. So after dinner, we crowded back into the classroom for ninety minutes of showboating and bragging. Since the Digital Arts Center only has one internet protocol number, only Susan could log in, and the rest of us shouted at her what to type. Calyxa and her husband Chucko quickly snapped digital pictures and uploaded them to their internet server, so other chat members could watch us cavort in near real time. On Friday morning Scott Tucker took the helm, to demonstrate Bryce’s image-mapping powers. Image mapping or decaling, is
Scott ended his lecture by demonstrating a wonderful program called TextureScape, which creates exceptionally beautiful vector-based patterns. This little gem was bought by MetaCreations several years ago, but for some reason they’ve never updated it or even ported it to Windows.
Bryce Camp ended with a dinner on the patio of the Ojai Institute, followed by hours of singing, drinking, taking pictures and miscellaneous tomfoolery. Chris handed out some exceptionally sharp diplomas, and indexes to digital elevation maps from the US Geological Survey. Somehow he was photographed wearing a pinata on his head. Artist and animatrix Catherine Novak, who had presented the group with a platter of cheeses in the shape of the Bryce camera control interface on the first day of camp, put the nearby piano to good use as a swarm of semi-sober campers sang Duke of Earl and whatever else came to mind. This was followed by an impromptu recitation of little red riding hood in a language only tangentially akin to english, performed by one of our less introverted instructors. Several of us made multiple rounds of hugs and handshakes, not wanting the magical week to end. Can it be Friday night already? we seemed to ask. Can it already be time to go back to the daily grind, where nobody understands why I spend so much time sitting at the computer ... ? Somehow, a bunch of people with varying degrees of artistic talent, computer literacy and social skills, had managed to bond in the course of five days. We all felt that same tug as we scattered in our separate directions, across the state of California, a few going north, two or three to Colorado, one to Portland, some to the far east ... Rochester, Philadelphia, Union City ... Sure, we’ll stay in touch by email, and post our photos on the web as soon as they’re developed. It’s about a week later and already some of us are suggesting a virtual reunion using BryceTalk. We’re all still students.
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