A better way to make buildings and graphics

[Bjornlo]

I've been using photoshop to make the things I've release here. It is a great tool and fine for retouching. But it is sort of a pain if you get something wrong.
ie: if the forground image is too large, good luck fixing the background after you resize things.
Lately I've been playing with render tools (Bryce, POVRay, Poser and so on).
Initially these programs seem awkward and clumsy... and not everything is easy to do on them. For example, I recently made a prison. I put bars on the windows... each bar was a seperate item... 7 bars per window several dozen windows... multiply this by every other feature and you've got a very complex slow to render item. I added barbwire and the number of items nealy tripled. Off went the barbwire, ehehe...

Bryce is currently on sale at Fry's for the amazingly low price of 39.00. I paid 79.00 for it only a month ago. This is a great buy on what is probably the easiest to use 3d tool out there. (Yeah it does bug me that I paid double).


I made a few buildings and wonder splashes. Making things with a 3d tool is intially longer, but it is very easy to change things; the end result is less time used.
Didn't like the sky? change it. The shadows aren't quite right? Move the sun. And so on.

Wanna see what I made, click here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2702429&postcount=44

lemme know what you think.

 

[Pounder]

I tryed POVRay for a while, it is amazing what you can do with it, especially if you have talent. I don't have the patience or the talent to use that program.

I do all my work on a combination of 4 programs, MSPaint, IDraw, Slowview and MSPhotoedit. All are free and have proven to be easy to use and effective.

 

[Pounder]

BTW, we all know there is only one master on POVRay and that's aaglo.

 

[Bjornlo]

I haven't gotten anywhere with POVRay yet. But you're right about who the master of that tool is. Aaglo's work is so impressive that I just had to play with the tool he uses.
I used Photoshop, MS PhotoDraw, Paint.net (free update to MSPaint) and occasionally a few others.
Most of the new stuff was made in Bryce and touched up in photoshop. It does take a while to get things setup Bryce, but once you do it is very easy to change things. I originally got the angle in the Knights Templar castle wrong. Just reload the file, change the angle (changed the sun to improve the shadows too) and render for a few minutes... and voila. I tried out 5-6 different skys for the Seattle space needle... quick and simple to fiddle with.. And sort of fun too.
Although somethings that are fairly easy can be time consuming. For example... the jail was by far the most time consuming to do and the results were only so-so (in my opinion).
I like how simple to get going Bryce is. Much simpler the POVray.

 

[WildWeazel]

POV-Ray is amazingly powerful, but also very touchy and hard to get right. I just don't know how aaglo does it.... I wish I had just a tenth of his skill.