Remembering innovative 3d renderer, Bryce
When I was a young teenager, my artistic ambition was to be a science fiction illustrator, but I emerged from 5 years at art school as a fine art painter. Years later, Bryce presented the opportunity for a nostalgic revisit to the fantastical imagery of my young imagination. I wasn't really interested in making sci-fi imagery as such any more, but sometimes I couldn't resist. This was a major mainstay of many 'brycean' artists, some with amazing talent (and many less so, but they had a go making pictures and that's always good) so, for me too, it was persuasive to explore this kind of thing.
However, the problem with a lot of CGI (and particularly back then) is the lack of polygons / resolution leading to very straight edges and sharpness that I just don't see in the real world. I tried to get around this by hand drawing a lot of the objects to make them feel handmade, weathered, and spookily uncanny in a way that didn't have the hard edges of a lot of CGI. I think my most successful example of this is Winter Palace (below) which is a very direct interpretation of a simple line drawing from my sketchbook. Looking back at it now I think I was on to something.
Just look at that interface
Although I spent many, many frustrating hours playing with Bryce and producing loads of achingly slow renders on underpowered hardware, I realised I never really was going to get close to what I wanted to achieve, and that it was never going to be worth my time. It was shortly after that I got into photography and discovered that the real world contained what I was looking for after all, and when it didn't, I could paint it.
Look how small these images are - the minuscule processing power and resolution of turn-of-the-century computers are to blame - they filled my screen once. There is so much modelled detail in some of these structures - invisible due to the scale - hours and hours of work. I haven't got the original files anymore, but I came across this folder of more tiny renders. Some of which just about still hold up, and some that are just quaintly naive now. They do however, mark a milestone in my journey, so here are the best of what I have.
