CiCi Miniseries Issue #1
Inside Front Cover

This page is definitely a work in progress and I'll add to this fairly frequently.  I'll work on speeding this up too.

The title and credits will be very C/C++ like.  In so far as Java Script is C-like.  I wanted to stick to my standard coding style which has the prefix "p" for the parameters that are passed into a function.  You might say "But wait!  There are no types!"  Again, it's C-like.  The hexadecimal display may be blended a little more with the function in the final rendering.

Just in case you don't have your handy-dandy hex-to-char calculator, the hex reads "Parker Smart".  Yes, the space is included.  Keep your calculator handy when you buy the final copy; you never know what encoded messages will lie buried in hex.

Here's a link to the source code which I whipped up in Microsoft Access 97.  I didn't have Visual Basic on my home machine at the time (now I do) so I had to make do.

The artwork will be a few of my creations using Bryce 4.0.  I don't have a single pod yet, but I'll generate a close-up soon.

A single pod is made up of mostly your basic primitives.  A primitive is a basic building block in the 3-D world of Bryce or any other modeling program.  A sphere, cube, torus, and cylinder are good examples of primitives.

I started with an elongated sphere, which would become the main tank.  I changed the material to be a slightly green glass.  I added a torus to the base and copied it for the top.  The supports are two very thin elongated spheres which were stretched to extend beyond the tank's surface.  These two spheres intersect at about a 30 degree angle.  I copied the tank and set it's attribute to negative and grouped it with the other two spheres.  This gave the effect of the four chrome supports surrounding the tank.  I added a green spotlight at the top pointing down and one to the bottom pointing up.  That's pretty much it.  A little copy and paste, and you've got yourself an entire room of cloning pods.

One of the pods has a problem so its spotlight is red.  I added cables to the floor so it didn't look like these pods were floating out in space.

I adjusted the diffusion on the tanks to provide more interaction with the lights inside.  This provided a nice glow.

The images above took around 3.5 hours at about 1200 pixels wide.  The final rendering will have to be at least 1950 pixels wide in order to cover the page.  This will take some serious computing power and it may have to be left overnight.
Good night.