Posted By Christopher M. Park At So 24 Jun 2007 10:45:11 CDT
My third image in Bryce 6.1, and my first to include a model from Hexagon. The cube was created in Hexagon by starting with a simple cube and then creating free tessellations on each side of the cube. I then manually inset vertexes and lines to create the carved look. The final piece of the puzzle was to add an appropriately colored/transparent/reflective texture in Bryce after import.

Overall I find this to be one of my favorite images from this series so far. Normally I'm not much of one for heavy oranges in my color palette, but I really like the way it all turned out here. The crystal's being lodged in the mountainside also reminds me a bit of Transformers, which I loved as kid (fitting, given that the live action movie comes out in a few weeks).

I've actually been trying to create a crystal of this sort ever since I saw the crystals from the first three dungeons in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That was back in 1998, when I was first getting into rendering, and was never something that I mimicked convincingly (that's where the "Gemstone" images during that time range originated from). Needless to say, I was pleased to finally be able to realize this sort of luminous crystal effect.