Asteroids and Comets, Oh My! by NefariousDrO
Open full image in new tab Members remain the original copyright holder in all their materials here at Renderosity. Use of any of their material inconsistent with the terms and conditions set forth is prohibited and is considered an infringement of the copyrights of the respective holders unless specially stated otherwise.
No AI - This artwork was created entirely by hand or with traditional digital tools.
Description
It's a really great time to be a space geek, we've got landers on Mars, China (China!) has put a lander on the Moon, and now other countries are planning on the same. We've got probes that have orbited asteroids, we've crashed a probe into a comet, and now another probe is fast approaching yet another one, and Near Earth asteroids are getting mapped with high-frequency radar from Aricebo, just to name a few of the exciting things that are happening.
Which is good because I've been lacking for inspiration. What I've really loved has been that the closer we look at both comets and asteroids, the weirder they get. Shapes are all over the place, some are probably little more than balls of fluff, like dust bunnies or snowballs. It seems that nearly anything is possible, and indeed, probably happening.
So this is another attempt on my part to make something in Bryce (admittedly, not the tool that is meant to be doing this) that is a bit more like the comets and asteroids we've seen. I used a mixture of boolean objects and Bryce's "Metaballs" to get the shape, then made my own texture and used some pretty heavy procedural tricks to mix the shape up a bit more.
I do hope you like it as much as I do, I feel like each try at these gets a little bit closer to what NASA is actually finding out there.

Comments (13)
cloudy with a chance of Bryce meatball asteroid's? Cool work - funny you should mention Comets and Asteroids as I just finished watching Armageddon!
Nicely done...Bryce can really do most things if you know how to work with it's downfalls...nice workaround to create the asteroid,and another fine space background too!
Cosmic dust bunnies..... That become killer rabbits when they hit the Earth's atmosphere! It still amazes me how you get this level of realism from Bryce! I could never get it to do much more than crash and give me cryptic error messages whenever I tried anything more than working with simple shapes and/or Booleans.. Maybe I'll eventually figure out how to do this in Vue... Anyway, awesome work, Mike! Your space renders are always outstanding!
For a Bryce work, it's really good! ;)
I love this. It looks like Idas, only it's not Idas, because I don't see Dactyl, its moon. I love your textures and the quality of light is stunning. This is rather brilliant and I can definitely see this as a backdrop to something marvelous. The textures are what draw my attention the most. I love the regolithic texture. You're definitely a master of this form.
cool looking
Excellent! Great lighting, too.
Cool...very cool...!!!!
great asteroid Very well done!!!!!!!!!!!
Very nice work. One of these days, an asteroid will be sitting on our laps... Close calls so far :) Aloha
Great shape and texture too. If you use some negative metaballs in there, you can even fake a crater...
Very well done !
Nice work.