Morraine Lake

OT Harrison

The End Result...

Reference Picture

I found this picture while after doing a Google search for 'Rocky Mountains'. The location is Lake Morraine/Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park. You see where I acquired the picture from here.

Project Development

Tools

The ray tracing software I used was Bryce 5 by DAZ Productions. I recommend it for anyone wanting to do a landscape type picture. I found it easy and enjoyable to use.

Lake

I cheated a little bit and started with the lake texture first. Bryce comes with some pretty unique textures for water so I opted for one of those rather than trying to match the ugly blue in the reference picture. The result is the nice reflective surface.

Mountains

To create the mountain range I used the terrain object that comes with Bryce. It's basically a plane that you can manipulate into whatever landform you need. I used five to create the mountain range then added the texture. I also used the terrain object to build the grassy areas at the front and rear of the picture.

[Mountain Dev Pic 1] | [Mountain Dev Pic 2]

Trees

I tried to do trees on my own and failed miserably. Perhaps given more time it would have been possible but I opted to use the tree models found in the Bryce Presets. I found some that vaguely represented evergreens and modified their size a little.

[Tree Dev Pic 1] | [Tree Dev Pic 2]

Post Mortem

The Good:

  • Bryce is a very simple program to use.
  • I'm happy with the way the water turned out. The reflections look really nice.
  • For the most part I got the picture I wanted.

The Bad:

  • For some reason part of the mountain range looks flat. I tried everything to fix it but couldn't quite figure it out.
  • I was a bit disappointed that I had to use the ready made tree models. If we had more time I could have created one myself perhaps.