Early on in my Bryce explorations, I learned that by adding imported objects to a Bryce Scene, the level of realism went way up. I bought the program Poser, and putting Poser people into an image lent it a sense of scale. Even if both the little people and the landscape were not particularly realistic, the combination produced something better than the parts.

All of my friends knew of my love of the Volkswagen Beetle: I had driven my yellow bug Sluggo to thirty-six of the fifty states. But Wisconsin rust eventually killed old Sluggo. So I was delighted to find a 3D Beetle model already in my possession, and goofing around on day, I combined it with parts of another 3D model, supposedly a depiction of a Buck Rogers spacecraft. With the further addition of two stretched and squashed spheres to form wings, the SpaceBugs were born. The new model, in particular the beetle portion, was quite low resolution, so the SpaceBugs had to be kept small in any scene to hide this. In one or two of my images, I got the cameras closer, and the polygons which make up the model become apparent.

In an early version of Bryce, the SpaceBug model was unstable. Any attempt to edit the thing made it virtually explode, symmetrically, into its components. Unsafe at any altitude, to paraphrase Ralph Nader. I wish I had an old rendering to show this, but thankfully the behavior disappeared in a later version of Bryce.

From that point on, no Bryce generated landscape was complete without a SpaceBug or more in it. One hitch: they were all colorless metallic gray. So I added color to the last few images I worked on. A few of the vehicles nearer to the camera needed pilots, too. When I revisited Bryce in 2016, the re-dos of many of my scenes were to add color to the SpaceBugs, but most of the scenes also benefited in other ways, like improved camera angles and atmospheric effects. Rendering times improved dramatically too: that space station scene which took more than a month on a 1990s customized $5000.00 computer now took only six days on a $300 off the shelf box. Most of the scenes took less than a day, with some simple ones rendering in mere minutes.

Some of these images were simple studies, like the grey bug images above, and they took only an hour or so to make. Others were complex scenes with complex objects in them, and I monkeyed with them for weeks, tweaking the materials and skies and light sources until things were just right.

You can dream about the jet-packs you wished for, decades ago, but I'll just dream of zipping to other planets in Sluggo 2.0, my yellow SpaceBug!