How to replicate this?

anihilus

I have been trying to replicate the sky/ground in this image. My guess is that the artist used two could planes, metaballs for the "tornadoes" and grouped the whole thing together, then used a cloud surface material. I haven't come very close in my own attempts though. The materials I have tried behave very different on the metaballs (I know the shape of the metaballs is completely off, I haven't spent any time on that yet...). Any suggestions?
 

Slepalex

anihilus said:

I have been trying to replicate the sky/ground in this image. My guess is that the artist used two could planes, metaballs for the "tornadoes" and grouped the whole thing together, then used a cloud surface material. I haven't come very close in my own attempts though. The materials I have tried behave very different on the metaballs (I know the shape of the metaballs is completely off, I haven't spent any time on that yet...). Any suggestions?
 

Most likely the artist used photoshop.

anihilus

It could of course be photoshop, and I am certainly not a Bryce expert, but to me this looks VERY Bryce-ish. And so does a lot of his pictures from that era (early 2000’s). 

Dave Savage

The problem you'll have doing it like you've tried are that to get the Meta-ball material to map spirally, you'd have to use object mapping but then you wouldn't get the constant flow around.

There is a small possibility that you could make a 'Lattice' that serves as your tornado and with a flat top and bottom, it would line up with two infinite planes (top and bottom). You could then map the single object in Object space and using the Golden Tools angle the texture to spiral down. If you try that, you'd need to make the Lattice solid.

Other than that, Making something similar in Wings 3D (almost like a cotton reel and then using the "Twist" function) might work, but the hard work is still getting the material to look good when you import it into Bryce.

Hope this helps.

anihilus

Thank you for you comments!