The Chrome Robot Tutorial - Page 2

The first thing we need to do is create our robot in Poser.  Once you have loaded your figure, try to decide how you are going to pose her/him/it.  Before you pose your figure, select and position any props you choose to use.  In this tutorial, I use the Sexy Helmet by Davo found on Renderosity's Poser Free Stuff page.  (If you should see this Davo, thanks for a truly great prop).  If you use this prop, once positioned, set the head as it's Parent so that it moves with the head.

The figure I used in this demo is the UltraMorph Woman for Poser 4 found at Renderosity (I'm sorry but I forgot the creator's name).

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Figure 1

Once you have your figure posed the way you want, export it as a Wavefront OBJ.  Now we are ready to Bryce!  Open Bryce and import your figure.  Figure 2 shows how I configure my scene but this part is not really necessary.  It's just more convenient for me because when I move objects they go left and right or front and back as opposed to angular movements.

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Figure 2

Move your figure as far forward as possible.   This will help when adding detail later.  See Figure 3.  Remove the ground plain, we don't need it.

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Figure 3

Now we need to choose the sky and materials for the figure.  Bryce has a chrome preset but I don't use it, it's too blue for my tastes.   Instead I use a combination of the sky preset Because the Night and metal preset Brushed Silver.  See Figure 4 &5. If you have seen my images, then you have seen the result of using this combo.  The reason for the Because the Night sky is the fading of blue to black to blue again.  It gives the Brushed Silver the Chrome look we want.  

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Figure 4

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Figure 5

Below is the result of the above combo.  It may not look like much yet because more light is needed.   Figure 6 shows the default sun position for this sky preset.

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Figure 6

Figure 7 shows how I set up the lighting.  I use three spherical lights, two in front at the right and left sides of the figure and slightly above, and one behind the figure for back-lighting.  All three lights' intensity are set to 18 with Cast Shadow set to off.  Although I forgot to circle it, you can see the position of the sun has changed.

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Figure 7

Up to this point, we have given the figure the Brushed Silver preset but if you are using the Sexy Helmet prop, we need to give the visor a different texture.  Use Select Mesh at the bottom of the Bryce screen and select Visor sexyhelmet_1_1 as shown in Figure 8.

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Figure 8

Figure 9 shows a material preset I have used occasionally but this preset is only available on Bryce 4.  I have used other materials such as Green Lit or even used a colored glass material.  The material below looks cool because it looks like the visor is lit up but its limitation is the position of the bright orange spot.  If the head of the figure were turned facing left or right, this material wouldn't work very well because the orange spot would be off-center.

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Figure 9

Figure 10 shows the result of every thing we have done up to now.  You can see that the material for the visor is a little off-center here.  I also mentioned the new position of the sun earlier so you can ignore the circle. 

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Figure 10

In figure 11, I placed my figure "in" a room.  I have done this with several of my images but in truth she's not really IN the room.  The room in the example below doesn't quite look so good only because additional light is needed.  One thing to remember is that the robot's material is very shiny and reflective so you would want to control the amount of reflections.  Figure 12 shows how I constructed the room around the robot.

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Figure 11

I build three walls, a floor and a ceiling and place the robot figure where the fourth wall would be.  I don't use a ground plain because it goes on forever and cast too much reflection on the figure.   The ceiling is extended out further otherwise you will see a break in the shadow of the ceiling from the sun.  Now that I see it, I extended the floor a little to much, it doesn't have to be that far out.  At this point, design the room the way you want.   To make things easier on me, I removed the room for my final render.

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Figure 12

When you are finished, render to disk.  I render to the size of 1024 x 768 as seen in Figure 14.  We need the image large enough when adding the detail in PhotoShop.  Once finished, you could re-size your image.

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Figure 13

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Figure 14

Now we are done with Bryce and are ready for PhotoShop.  On to the next page or if you need to, go get some coffee.


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