Ocean Gypsy

Technical aspects: Once in the while I hear music that stirs me, and the instrumental talents and vocal arts of “Blackmore’s Night” did just that when I heard their music just a short while ago for the first time. The prose above are just a few verses from their piece “Ocean Gypsy” (originally performed by the group RENNISSANCE) It stirred me deeply and evoked images of an old abandoned fishing boat lying rotting on a wide forgotten beach. I hope I communicated the sadness and the melancholy of the scene.

I researched the fishing vessel and obtained photographs of a 1917 fishing boat from the archives of the American Maritime Museum. I used Rhino3D to build up the basic ship model which was then textured and “weathered” with a combination of bump maps, procedural textures and transparency masks in Bryce 4.01. The seagull was a modified bird that I found on the Amapi 3D 5.1 CD-ROM.

I got a lot of help from Jonathon Allen’s tutorial on low tide scenes, and a discovered a technique where I could simulate volumetric clouds using multiple cloud plane layers in Bryce 4.0. Only afterwards I discovered this tutorial which basically described what I had spent weeks trying to get right. If only I had discovered it sooner. The image required very little post production except a bit of cleaning on the boat, and some weathering of the planks in places.