Cloud City

Step 8 – The Floating Garden

The next model we will build will be a floating garden. It will consist of models from the user presets created for the city plus a glass “bubble” structure, which will house the garden. The tutorial for this section will follow two parts, the first to create the bubble, the next to create the trees that will be housed in the bubble.

Create a torus and click on the button next to the torus and enter a value of 27 in the box marked radius.

Duplicate the torus (Ctrl-D) and enter the attributes menu by clicking the button next to the bounding box. Enter a value of 90 into the Y-rotate field and click on the checkmark to accept the changes.

Select both tori and duplicate them (Ctrl-D). Group the two duplicates together (Ctrl-G) and enter the Object Attributes menu. Enter a value of 45 in the Y-rotate field, then click on the checkmark to accept the changes, and ungroup them (Ctrl U).

Create a sphere and align it in the center of the tori group. Resize the sphere slightly to fit inside the tori group (19.5 on the X, Y, and Z-size should about do it). Rename the sphere “glass” in the Object Attributes. This is the material that will be assigned when texturing the model, so giving it the name will help when selecting which materials are assigned to which object. Select all the objects and group together (Ctrl-G), this will become the “bubble”.

Now to build the ground for the garden. Create a sphere and press "P" on the keyboard to give it positive attributes for Boolean operations. Create a cylinder and give it negative attributes by pressing N on the keyboard. Align the cylinder with the sphere as in the example and reduce the height of the cylinder through the y-axis. Select both and group them together (Ctrl-G). Name the group "gardenground1" or something similar.

Reduce the scale of the group in step 5 by a small amount and align it so it sits inside of the bubble built above. This will be a platform or ground for the trees to sit on inside the glass bubble.

From your Objects Library, load the structure model.

Reduce the scale of the structure similar to the example shown below:

Align the structure with the top of the bubble:

From your Objects Library, load the dome model.

Reduce the scale of the dome similar to the example shown below:

Access the Object Attributes by clicking on button next to the bounding box. Enter 180 in the X-rotate field and click on the checkmark to accept the changes and flip the dome.

Align the dome top with the center bottom of the bubble. Select all groups and group them together (Ctrl-G). Name it something like "gardenbubble".

The next part will be to create some trees to sit inside the bubble. The trees will be created using the standard default tree from the Tree Lab. Because the floating garden will appear quite small within the final scene it is not necessary to create any custom trees in the tree lab because the detail would be lost.

Create a tree by clicking on the tree icon in the Create palette. Duplicate the tree about nine times and arrange them similar to the example below:

 Move individual trees up or down to give the foliage a less uniform appearance.

When you are happy with the appearance of the trees select all of them and group them together (Ctrl-D). Access the Object Attributes by clicking on the button next to the bounding box and change the name to “trees”.

Reduce the scale of the trees so that they can fit inside the bubble. When placing the trees inside the bubble, make sure that all the roots of the trees are planted in the ground of the platform so that none of them appear to be floating. You may have to do a couple of test renders to make sure that there aren’t any roots or leaves protruding outside of the bubble.

Once you are happy with how they look, group all objects together and name the group "Floating Garden 1".

Now we'll texture the garden, so select the floating garden group making sure that the trees group is not selected.

Open the preset Materials library and select the "Hammered Steel" material from the Masters Series Cloud City sub-library. This is the same Hammered Steel material from the metals library, but with the ambient channel changed from orange to a dark grey.

Now we need to change the material of the sphere named “glass”. Hold the Ctrl key down and click on the area where the glass sphere is. A grey menu will appear allowing you to select that sphere specifically.

With the glass sphere selected open up the preset Materials library and select "Glass Bubble #1" from the Masters Series Cloud City sub-library. This is the same "Glass Bubble #1" material found in the Glass library but placed in the Cloud City one for convenience.

Do a test render and you should have something that looks like this:

Save the Bryce file as "Floating Garden" for later use. Please note that if you save the garden to the Objects Library with the trees included, you may crash Bryce on trying to load the garden later or if you try to export the object from the library. This is why you should save the garden in a Bryce scene file instead of saving it to the library. If you load the garden that is included in the Objects Library, you'll see that the trees are not included.

Step 8   Adding the Clouds