Thoughts on creating this nest....

Fencepost52

Several years while I was doing some wetland monitoring, I was able to get these great photos of a momma sandhill crane sitting on her nest and of the eggs after she left. I'd like to try and create a similar scene in Bryce and am thinking of the best way to approach the nest. I've thought about creating a terrain for the majority of it using B/W photos of various crane nests I've taken over the years and then add a some individual leaves for added realism. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Art

Trish

First off let me say Beautiful photos. She is really pretty...I made this in Bryce using Metaballs and the multi-rep tool Check out page1 here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/26012/ ......you can do a lot with metaballs ... what artist Michael Frank showed us.. then go here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19391/P1425 you might get some great ideas from his work....for your project...Trish

Fencepost52

Ooohhh, Thanks! I've seen those before and totally slipped my mind....thank you very much!

sriesch

You may have a lot of difficulty wrapping photos over an object and having it look realistic. Unless the surface the photo is being applied to is perfectly rectangular in the same proportions as the photo, the photo will be stretched and distorted quite a bit. Although I'm not an expert on this, I would suspect you would want to avoid using a photo on the entire nest. Although modeling individual sticks and actually building an entire nest seems like quite a bit of work, perhaps if you could have a small variety of smaller primitives to simulate a few different size and shaped twigs with various materials, then you could replicate those to build up the nest?
I have also seen some 3D objects that make use of a large number of 2d planes arranged at various angles (plant leaves on Xfrog plants jump immediately to mind, along with various backdrops.) That might let you take a small piece of your photo (a few twigs) and apply it undistorted to that piece of the nest, then weave together a large number of these flat planes. That might cause problems with shadows and reflections from certain "facets" of the nest, but maybe not since I don't remember seeing any problems with my trees so far.

Fencepost52

Sean Riesch said:

You may have a lot of difficulty wrapping photos over an object and having it look realistic. Unless the surface the photo is being applied to is perfectly rectangular in the same proportions as the photo, the photo will be stretched and distorted quite a bit. Although I'm not an expert on this, I would suspect you would want to avoid using a photo on the entire nest. Although modeling individual sticks and actually building an entire nest seems like quite a bit of work, perhaps if you could have a small variety of smaller primitives to simulate a few different size and shaped twigs with various materials, then you could replicate those to build up the nest?
I have also seen some 3D objects that make use of a large number of 2d planes arranged at various angles (plant leaves on Xfrog plants jump immediately to mind, along with various backdrops.) That might let you take a small piece of your photo (a few twigs) and apply it undistorted to that piece of the nest, then weave together a large number of these flat planes. That might cause problems with shadows and reflections from certain "facets" of the nest, but maybe not since I don't remember seeing any problems with my trees so far.

Thanks for the feedback, Sean. When I was talking about using photos, it wasn't for texturing, but using pictures from a top view, converting them to black/white and using the B&W image to create a terrain. The use of various primatives and images on 2d planes is a great suggestion. Thank you!

sriesch

Oh, ok, I understand now. interesting idea. I'll be curious to see how it turns out.
I glanced at the Eagle 2.0 Nest (which I can't find in the store at the moment, product code ps_fr207 suggests it was a freebie although I seem to have accidentally installed it on top of the Eagle 2.0 product so I'm a little unsure). I wanted to see how they had done it. Here's a screenshot in DAZ Studio showing the wireframe and texture shaded. Looks like they have a solid center, kind of a rounded cylinder or flattened sphere dished in on the top, surrounded by a bunch of really low resolution segmented bent cylinders for the sticks:

Fencepost52

That's excellent! Thanks for the screenshot. I should easily be able to do that in Bryce and Wings!