To view Bryce Island, use any Quicktime movie player. Peter's Player, available on AOL is highly recommended since it allows you to read the whole movie into RAM, surrounds the movie with a nice black matte, is one of the smallest and fastest players around, and has a host of other nice features. For optimal playback; Using Get Info, assign your player enough RAM to load the entire movie.
How it was created The scene file and spreadsheet are in the ÑBryce Island Extras folder. The Stone Pond in which the reflecting sphere sits and the "Bryce Island" lettering were created in Illustrator and "rasterized" in Photoshop to a pict file then imported into Bryce... these "height maps" can be found in the scene file. The pond file was rasterized without anti-aliasing which gives it the carved look. The basic shape of the Island was started in Bryce and modified in Photoshop to create the cove in which the plaza sits. The movie started as a 30 frame sketch, went thru about 7 iterations and many experiments (fog/nofog, lighting, flight paths, etc) before ending in the 225 frame form on the disk. After all the scenes were rendered DeBabelizer was used to strip out the alpha channel, dither the 16M colors down to 32K colors, and assemble the resultant frames into the Quicktime movie format.
Quick and Dirty movie preview hint: As you are creating each frame of the movie, before saving it, render it for four passes (takes about a minute or two) then save your frame. After you've entered and rendered all your frames in this way you can then preview them using KPT QuickShow by setting the Show Images to .2 seconds. Although this is not 15fps you can still get a good idea about how your movie looks and check for any mistakes you may have made in creating the frames.
