Bryce Camp Image Map Website
Construction History
The Bryce image map website is the product of collaboration at BryceCamp among various participants, working in a few late night sessions.
Here's the run down of what and how we did what we did, and the things we learned. We hope you learn along with us.
Monday night – Brainstorming
"Who wants to work on the Bryce image map collaborative web site? We'll meet together Monday night after the show-n-tell session."
A group gathered together after the evening session to discuss what to do. Susan introduced the idea for the web site and explained a bit about how image maps work in Bryce and how we can make a set of scenes that have web links to them.
How image maps work:
Bryce's image map feature is a hybrid between Bryce's mask render and Object attributes.
In mask render, any selected object will be rendered as a white mask
in a black background.
Selected objects in scene...
...rendered using Mask Render.
In the object attributes dialog box, the object may have a URL associated with it.
Then, when rendering, all web objects are selected–to satisfy the mask render requirements–and when the HTML image map is exported, Bryce combines the mask render area with the URL link information to generate both a JPEG image and a text HTML file. The HTML image map has the URLs for objects.
The rendered scene...
...with image map hot spot areas (simulation).
The possible uses for image maps in Bryce:
As a three-dimensional space, the same objects can be viewed from more than one perspective. Combine several different settings, viewed from different angles, and voila! you have a navigable environment. Since a scene can be viewed from different angles, and the same objects can be in different scenes, it's possible to render the scenes from different perspectives and export a set of imagemaps, allowing the viewer to navigate from scene to scene in a web browser.
An example
Fortunately, we had experienced Bryce Image Map creators among us. We
took a look at Calyxa's
early experiment using Bryce image maps.
So, what do we do?
We tossed around some ideas, and listed objects or parts of scenes that we all had, to see what scene environment idea would suggest themselves.
This was our list of items and potential environments:
- A bookcase— magic bookcase that opened up to reveal a secret
passageway
- An Egyptian Crypt
- Psychedelic dolphins–hey! They can be swimming about in a basement
(underground) grotto
- Chinese ming vase
- A slide projector, and slides
- A stairway
- Trees
- An outdoor garden
- A fireplace
- Fishbowl
- An armillary sphere
- A statue
- Pictures on the wall, containing some of our Bryce images and maybe even pictures of ourselves.
- And a bunch of walls, from that day's terrain with Chris Casady (architectural terrains)
A Reality Check
The ideas flew fast and furious. We found that our enthusiasm for potential places and scenes was much greater than the time available–Monday night, Wednesday night and Thursday night (plus the odd moment snuck in during the day classes).
So, with some regret, we trimmed down the ideas until we had something more workable.
The resulting plan
We had objects. We had environments. We matched the objects with their environments.
To help, we drew a diagram that roughly represented the places, and listed the items that were there. We drew links so that we knew which item in the scene would link to other environments. (this image of the Thursday night BryceTalk shows the diagram on the whiteboard)
Then we assigned responsibility. Who will work on what part? Knowing what we were going to do, and who was going to do what, we called it a night.
<Intro | Next
>
|
