Special Project: Making the Pixie

Finishing the Final Slides

Surprising to me was the amount of tweaking required even after the first slides were made at the service bureau. The resolution and image size provided by my computer monitor allowed careful proofing of highly magnified excerpts of the digital stereo pair. But a proofing of the entire composition at once was possible only at a relatively low resolution. This became more of a problem than originally anticipated.

When I received my first slide pair from the service bureau, I found that the pixie appeared to have too much depth compared to the rest of the environment. In a very subtle way, apparent only on the high resolution slide, she appeared larger in the z-axis than was appropriate. I guessed that this was a problem with the interaxial separation of the two virtual cameras in the Bryce model.

Another problem was the placement of the wings. On the first go-around, one of them appeared too close - apparently sprouting out of the pixie's cheek! To fix this, I had to adjust the horizontal position of the offending wing on the right side scene and rendering.

These and some other problems took an additional week to fix: with the flawed slide as a guide, I would make corrections to the Bryce model, re-render the faulty viewpoint(s) overnight (each rendering took about nine hours), resubmit the new files to have more slides made, then proof these new slides.

 

Epilogue

It has been a topic of discussion in various stereo-photographic societies that digitally produced images should be judged separately from those produced using more traditional means. The justification for some being that, relative to the physical labor and mental creativity that goes into the use of a real camera, it appears easier to produce award winning computer generated images by rearranging electrons with the push of a button. It is my hope that this article will at least partially dispel this notion. I do recognize that there may be other good reasons to judge digital work in its own class, but relative ease of production should not be one of them!

 

Next project: The Phantograms

 

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