Calyxa's Curios - Digital Landscapes

Digital landscape applications are programs to run on your computer in which you create a virtual world, and then take pictures of that world.

Bryce was my first love. With Bryce, you start out with a simple stage set. Create a mountain shape and put it here, create another mountain shape and put it over there. In addition to mountain shapes, you can create simple 3d objects and combine them mathematically to create much more complex models. The problem with Bryce is that when you turn your camera to a place you haven't put anything, the scene is very boring. The current owners and developers of Bryce are at Daz 3d.

MojoWorld is my second love, and I worked at Pandromeda when MojoWorld version 1 was released. MojoWorld is Bryce on steroids. Instead of a stage set, however, MojoWorld offers you an entire planet. This means that if you turn your camera around to look behind you, there's still a landscape there! The landscapes are created with mathematical formulas. All you need to do is fill in the values.

Terragen is the latest upcoming star. For a long time, there was Terragen 0.9, but not too long ago, the Terragen 2.0 technology preview has been made available. It has a full planet mode which in some ways is similar to MojoWorld. I haven't worked a whole lot with Terragen yet, but when I tire of Bryce and MojoWorld, Terragen is where I'll go next. The makers of Terragen are at planetside.co.uk.

Some of the works in My Bryce Galleries date back to when I was using Bryce version 1. The main gallery links to 8 different sub-gallery pages. Each sub-gallery then links to 8 different images. There's another 'secret bottle gallery' linked off of a couple of the individual images.

There's also a proof-of-concept interactive version of one of the pictures. As of Bryce version 4, the capability to export HTML image maps was added. My Interactive Bridgepaths scene has a couple different buttons to push.

I have created my own oracle deck that I call Elemental Hexagons. A big part of what made it possible for me to go from simple hand-written notes on thick paper cut-outs to a professionally printed deck was that I spent the last decade and more working with 3D digital art programs.

The Elemental Hexagons deck is an oracle deck based on the Periodic Table of Elements, and the Tarot Major Arcana. Of the 60 cards in the deck, 18 of them make use of my own 3D artwork in creating the final imagery for the element.

For example, the picture here shows a photograph of a statue of Ptah over a landscape created with MojoWorld.

I created the 'miracle tree' technique which uses two symmetrical lattice objects in a boolean operation to create tree-like shapes. I wrote the Miracle Tree tutorial a few years ago. This image here uses the miracle tree techinque to create the elaborate heart of this house.

This image was the first one that I made after gaining a greater appreciation for using Bryce's symmetrical lattice object. I later wrote a tutorial on using clipart as source material for this type of object.

Bryce can create more than just landscapes. Combining spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones, and other shapes, one can build just about anything.

This image is my re-imagining of the Gate Room puzzle from Riven

A fellow MojoWorld user wrote these two tutorials, dissecting the default world file which came with MojoWorld 1.0 and MojoWorld 1.1.

Rather than discussing any specific world creation techniques, the Sample Worlds Torn Apart tutorial examines the details of how these two different default planets are assembled.

I'm very proud of this particular planet file, though like most MojoWorld planets, it looks better from some altitudes than others.

After the Bryce Miracle Tree technique, I was looking for something similar to do in MojoWorld. MojoWorld allows for the planet surface to be displaced by the material, and with that, my Stone Roses technique was born.

Nothing in my Suggestive MojoWorld Gallery is not safe for work, but all of it uses computer generated landscape imagery to be suggestive of certain pieces of anatomy.

The gallery link above goes to a page without any thumbnails. There are some vague text descriptions of each of the linked images. The image to the right is a small section of the last link on the gallery page. It is from a planet called Sine Warriors by Armands.