The BSolutions page contains tips and tricks you might find useful while working with Bryce. It holds easter eggs and workarounds, and explains some stuff that is not exactly self-evident.
I refer to the manual occasionally, so you will have your problems to follow if you don't own one. I don't answer any questions which are covered by the manual, neither here nor by eMail. Buy the software you are using, and RTFM.
The list of topics changed due to the release of Bryce 5, which is available for some time now and which is IMO a much more important update than many people have realized. Recently 5.01 was released - fixing a couple of bugs and adding a few new features as well. If you haven't downloaded it already, then get it:
Bryce 5.01 Upgrade Page [Mac & Win, english, french & german]
An additional remark... don't be shy to correct my English, its not my mother tongue!
This page was brought to you by Klaus Busse, aka the creator of BSmooth, the alternative terrain modeler for Bryce!
I rearranged the chapters and now use CSS - which makes my life easier and enables quality printing of this page. Sorry, but I will not adapt the page for older browsers, please update if you've a problem.
Okay... here's the topic list:
This content requires Quicktime 5! QT4 might be sufficient for some of the content, but I really recommend that you get the most recent QuickTime installer for both Mac and Win.
There's a lot of stuff where you might wish to Bryce's default settings. Here Bryce uses a very powerful approach:
When you launch Bryce or when you create a new document, then it's trying to open a scene file named default.br5 in the application's folder/directory. This file can include a huge number of options, i.e.:
If no default.br5 exists, then the factory settings are used.
In the Camera popup menu you can move the Camera to the director's position and vice versa. "Camera -> Director" moves the Camera to the Director's view position.
New users often have problems like:
This happens if you are in camera view. switch in the camera poup to director's view and all this stuff works. The reason for this is that Bryce tries to prevent you from accidently change the camera setting. Actually you can use a camera like a trackball, if you drag its origin to the object you would like to have in the center. To understand this topic it is really requiered to read the manual (pages 349-362)!
Camera angles have changed compared to B2. This is a bugfix. The camera angle in B2/Mac was useless because it has had nothing in common with the actual viewing angle, which dependents from the image size!
This is another great feature that you're going to love. Some notes that are not too obvious at the first place:
Each of the 2 Metaskulls at the left is one group, while the 2 on the right are ungrouped. Also notice material blending, and the use of y negative metaball to create the eye holes.
Well, the manual is a tad short on this great feature, so you already might have been frustrated. But believe me - Trees are great, and you'll love them. Let's start with the basics of tree lab exploration:
The three most important rules to master the tree lab are:
Okaaay, you got it, but how to achieve that? You get small trees by reducing the number of "Segments" to a value of 1-5. Actually, I usually start with 1-3. Small trees are fast, and if you would like to master the tree lab, then you have to experiment. For the start your tree should redraw fast enough to explore the options without coffee breaks.
Now some additional hints:
With the Bryce 5 Service Pack 1 a new easter egg feature was implemented: Saving and loading of trees as *.BTO files. It's an easter egg, not an official feature and it has its quirks. Anyway, relax and enjoy.
To load a tree, hold down the alt key and click the tree icon in the create palette. Patience: Keep the alt key pressed until the file dialog appears, or you get a standard random tree!
Cursor handling during the whole process is mostly random, just ignore the cursor completely (at least under OS X). It may work while the watch is showing, or the application might be still blocked while the arrow is there.
Saving a tree is pretty straightforward, just hold down the ctrl-key and click the tree icon.
BTO files are pretty small and also compress just fine, so it is a great format to email your trees or to put trees on the net! However, occasionally they might need several minutes to get loaded, exspecially with bigger trees like the files provided by Corel - so for your own home use saving a tree as an object preset usually is faster.
The terrain editor holds half a ton of easter eggs... I will cover only a few here:
The terrain editor has evolved quite a bit with Bryce 4. The most important menu is the new fractal menu. Okay, let's start at the top: The first menu entry is the classic Bryce fractal. If you choose this, then you are not able to select any of the advanced options at the bottom of the menu. These options allow to influence the terrain's parameters and to create tiles.
Note: This means that you have to choose any of the new fractal types to use the advanced options! The new terrains cover all sorts of interesting morphologies. Try several different samples of each (by repeated clicking on the "fractal" button after the terrain model has been selected from the list). Each click will give you a new member of the selected terrain family, and each member may appear very different.
Okay, now scroll down...
Directly beneath the terrain models are three randomization controls (marked cyan here): "Random Extent" switches on and off randomization of the terrain patch's size in texture space. "Random Position" controls randomization of the terrain patch's position in texture space. "Random Character" toggles randomization of the parameters that control the "look" of the procedural terrain. If you switch all three off, the patch will not change when you reevaluate it with another click of the "fractal" button. This is very useful when you want to recompute a patch you like, at higher grid resolution. To do this, search for an interesting terrain while in low resolution, then switch the terrain size to a higher grid size, uncheck all three controls and recalculate the terrain:
Below the three randomization options are four tiling options: "tile north," "tile south," "tile east," and "tile west." These are only usable when all three randomization options are turned off. If you enable "tile north," the next click of the "fractal" button will give you the terrain patch that will adjoin the current patch, at its "northern" edge (corresponding to the upper edge of the patch as seen in the "top" camera view). Placement of adjoining tiling patches must be done manually. Note, that you can switch grid size in between!
The terrain editor keeps the last parameters between the runs, so you can reenter it!
In the terrain editor hold down the space-bar to get an eyedropper that will allow you to select a level of gray from the Terrain Canvas. The color is taken in the moment you release the space-bar, do not click with the mouse to sample! Now you can paint with this elevation in the Terrain Canvas.
Okay, To make a long story short: You can use most filters built for Adobe Photoshop directly inside the Terrain editor. Unfortunately, this great feature is hidden quite well, it is in this little popup in the Filter tab:
Apropos tab: With "Tab" you can switch between the three tabs in the Terrain editor...
Apropos II ... You can also use the filters in the Picture editor:
With KPT6 you get a 16-bit terrain-editor with realtime linking, pressure sensitive brushes and a cool preview with reflection maps. No, I'm not joking. The key to it all is the PGM format (I'll cover this format to a greater extend in a later note). Bryce can export &import PGM, and the same is true for KPT Gel.
Here's how it works:
In Photoshop you create a picture which is 3 pixels smaller than the wanted terrain size (ie, 1021 x 1021, 509 x 509, 253 x 253, 125 x 125, or 61 x 61). Don't ask for the reason of these 3 pixels, I really dunno. Trust me this time ;-)
Now you choose a clean reflection map and start painting (note that you can scroll, pan, zoom in &out). When you are done, then export the picture as a PGM file by choosing "Save Heightmap..." from the preview options menu:
Note: These menu items are only available in KPT6 and the localized versions of KPTX Gel. If you own the original US release of KPTX, you have to use the undocumented hotkeys cmd+shift+s to save the current Gel as a PGM, and cmd+shift+l to load it. Special thanks to Scott Tucker for reporting this!
Well, the last thing to do is to import the PGM file in Bryce via "Import Object...".
And now to the bang at the end: You can even use this to create terrains that are tiled! Create a file of 2045 x 2045 pixels, export and watch what happens on the import to Bryce! Great work of the Bryce engineers - eh?
This easter egg allows an unlimited number of interesting designs to start from: You can also use the Deep Texture Editor inside the Terrain editor to create new terrains!
There are two different modes available:
Here's how it works: Hold down the appropriate key(s), and click on the picture button in the elevation tab:
Hold down key(s) until the DTE pops up, or you will just get the usual image dialog!
Now you can explore all possibilities of this tool to create terrains! Note that you can also access the texture presets from the DTE with the "Texture Library" button, so you can save your terrain creations!
After you leave the DTE, wait a couple of seconds until the terrain is calculated ("Ed Gruberman, you have to learn patience.").
There's one flipside of these terrains though: As this is a completely unsupported and unofficial way to create terrains, the resulting terrains sometimes refuse to be edited. It seems to work ok in the Terrain Editor, but the changes are not comitted.
Stop complaining: This is an easter egg!
BTW: Cmd+click opens the picture editor!
Twist Path on Point:
Press-Hold 'Alt', Click-Drag on Point
Continuity of Path on Point
Press-Hold 'C', Click-Drag on Point
Tension of Path on Point
Press-Hold 'T', Click-Drag on Point
Bias of Path on Point
Press-Hold 'B', Click-Drag on Point
Unity is the default state for an object. If you press the "=" key, then the object is reset to unity. Unity includes size &rotation. The fun thing is that you can set this unity state, even for groups!
You find the menu entry "Set As Unity" in the popup on the "General" tab in the object's attributes dialog:
I recommend to use this especially if you're trying to build up large hierarchic objects. It keeps the transformations in order so Bryce does the things that you think it should do.... and I can assure you that it's quite a lot of good work Bryce's doing here behind the curtain!
In Bryce 3.0 a side effect of setting an object to unity was that it was aligned to the grid. You're missing that? Okay, then press opt+"=" to align objects to the grid.
I have searched some time for it and so may you... it's in the popup on the "General" tab in the object's attributes dialog:
You think that the torus editor is quite boring? Okay, then lets have a closer look here...
First note that since 3.1 the torus editor can produce self-intersecting tori (great to produce your own coffee beans!). Now the real tour starts...
Hmm, I'm sure I still have overlooked something... however, this wasn't that bad.. right?
To change the preview picture of a material, adjust the preview to the object and orientation you would like to have as the materials icon, then cmd-shift-click onto the materials icon and it gets replaced by the current preview!
You can also change the text of the texture's caption and description: Choose the preset you would like to change, now click on the caption or description respectively and you are in edit mode!
Textures are the basic building blocks of materials. Wouldn't it be nice to have a preset menu for textures like the one you have for materials? It would and it is: Instead of the simple click to get the texture list popup, hold down the shift key while clicking on the texture name or the button right beneath...
Voila! Now you get the graphical texture presets dialog which makes selecting textures a lot easier, and allows you to import and export them as well!
This is a nitpicker's problem which doesn't play a role in 99 out of 100 cases.... If you are using the pipette in the material editor to duplicate colors, then it's sometimes nice to know that the pipette samples the color of the interface, not of the color field you may try to duplicate!
The color fields only have a very small area in which the exact color is shown (marked red in the picture, in the yellow area the color components are one less the exact color). If you need to duplicate the color exactly, then sample at the right edge of the color field to get the exact value.
You would like to place the sun or the moon at a certain location of the picture? Then you're going to love this easter egg...
But now fasten seat belts. Hold down cntrl+alt and click into your scene view to place the sun at the cursor position, or use ctrl+alt+shift to place the moon:
The sun or moon respectively is shown as asterisk. Coool...
Since Bryce 3.1 black holes are a virtual reality. You don't know it yet, but you own a strong source of anti-photons... [ok, ok, physically this is not quite correct ;-]
The light value in the light editor can have values between -999 and 999. Beside very bright lights you also can use negative lights, which suck their color from their surrounding.
Of course anti-photons produce a shadow which is brightly lit by photons as it's shown in the image below, so you should normally switch off shadow generation for these lights to avoid light pollution ;-)
Thanks to Eric Tscherne for providing this picture!
Raytracers don't reflect lights in a mirror. Of course you can see lit objects in the mirror, however, light falling on the mirror is not reflected back into the scenery.
Since Bryce 3D you have the nice option to switch off shadow casting for an object(see the manual for details). If you use this on a reflective object, you can exactly model the reflection of light by shining with a second light from behind through your mirror:
In this picture you see the reflection of the lit spheres in the mirror (nothing so far) as well as the light casted back into the scenery! Nice trick - hm?
For me this is probably the #1 reason to recommend updating to Bryce 5. Actually, this version has a complete new render engine, additionally to the previous one! It provides excellent quality - and can also drive your render times to days. It's all up to you. Seeing the vast number of new features in the render options, you might appreciate some tips here:
I was begging for it for soo long - so now after it's finally implemted in Bryce I can not resist to explain it to you ;-)
The effect of TIR is responsible for the fire in diamonds, cool underwater scenes with real air bubbles, convincing glas and a lot more effects.
This scene is accurately modeled - but the old Bryce render engine [= TIR switched off] creates a pretty flat image. Interesting note: There is already a little TIR effect here [notice the rendering of the sky at the top of the picture]
The very same scene with TIR switched on - and with some DOF, but this doesn't matter much here. Now you can see the sky only at steep angles, while most of the water surface appears reflective. If you ever dived then you know that this is the way the water surface looks from below.
Diamond using the default diamond material from Bryce. It has some specularity, but beside this you can view right through the stone. It looks flat, and has low contrast.
Now switch on TIR, and suddenly the diamond reveals its fire! Actually a brilliant cut is specifically designed to maximize TIR to throw back the incoming light.
Another goodie: TIR does not cost additional render time. Even better: Using TIR saves render time, because it needs less rays to render. Actually I still have to get my hands on one single file that takes longer to render with TIR on! If you have one, let me know ;-)
A lot of objects in nature do not create sharp reflections, i.e. pearls, brushed metal, matted plastic. The same is true for refraction, think of frosted glass or translucent plastic. Now rendering it is part of the new Bryce 5 render engine, and it expands your range of materials quite a bit.
Well, so we have blurred reflections and blurred refractions... but how can you control then? How can you use sharp beside blurred reflection? The answer, my friend, is ... at least not in the manual ;-)
Actually the key to control the amount of blur is the grey value of specular halo for the material, which makes sense when you know what it does in a normal rendering. Also keep in mind that you can control this value using a procedural or picture texture!
A reflective, and a refractive surface. The value for Specular Halo is 0, 50, 100, 150, 200, 255 [from left to right]
A value of 0 gives nearly the same effect as the classic Bryce render engine, while increasing values blur the objects more and more. Notice how blur increases with the distance of the reflected objects!
DOF is another great feature, but overusing it can easily spoil your image. It simulates the effect that only things in a certain distance are really sharp, and anything in front or behind it is blurred more or less.
The emphasis is on more or less, and you really have to think about it when you use it. The hard and fast rule is:
Use DOF to show the scale of your objects. The more DOF you use, the smaller your objects will appear. Look for instance at the following image:
DOF blur makes this image looking like a toy scene. In reality, at least the sky would have to be sharper.
The same DOF blur on a small object. Now the blur enhances the impression of an object which is small, thus adding credibility.
IMO there is one render option that you should always switch off, which is true ambience. First, the implemetation itself has its quirks, and second there's a better alternative to create ambient lighting - something I call Fake radiosity:
Using blurred reflection can get you results that are pretty close to radiosity - both in quality and render times ;-)
The following points will help to get you started to create good fake radiosity materials
Default rendering. Without using additional light sources you have no detail in the shadow except very little admospheric effects
Switching on True Ambience brings some detail in the shadow, but it doesn't look very convincing, and doesn't take diffusive light in account at all. It also increases image lightness quite a bit.
Fake radiosity, replacing ambient lighting by reflection with maximum blurring. This allows very good light interaction, and doesn't brighten up the image. You have to touch the materials for the scene though, and the render times are potentially massive.
Sometimes a texture becomes blurred during anti-aliasing, so it would be nice to switch it off just for this object - right?
TaaaDaaa - starting with Bryce 3.1 you can do that! I.e. this feature works great for leaf textures - the both spheres below were rendered together, but antialiasing was switched off for the left texture:
It's also useful for the new volumetric textures that came with Bryce 4.0.1 (in the following two examples antialiasing has been switched off for the right half). The difference is subtle, but noticeable:
Here's how it's done:
Thanks to Bill Munns for reporting this!
Terrains have no volume by default, so they are not rendered if you simply assign a volumetric texture. To render a terrain with a volumetric texture, you need to check "Solid" in the terrain's option menu:
This menu is well hidden, you find it left of the rainbow in the terrain editor:
To control the flow of an animation, sometimes a wireframe test render would be nice - right? Hold your hat, you actually can do this! To render a whole animation as wireframe or even flat shaded, switch to the appropriate mode (in wireframe mode I would suggest to set the background structure to flat gray) and choose Render Animation from the File menu. After setting up the Animation features, hold down the shift key and click on the render button! A few moments later the movie is done! Finally your new 3D-Card is accelerating something ;-) ...
Since version 3D there's a new light type in Bryce: Lights with ranged falloff. Especially if you are using a high number of lights, then you absolutely need to use these! The renderer is highly optimized for it and you save a lot of render time.
However, to use them you have to have control about the range of these lights... to gain control here is easy though: Alt+drag the light editor window sets the range of these little gems ;-)
Fortunately Bryce 5 got a new light editor that allows a more straight forward control
Don't expect a useful tip here, the following is just fun. I'm also not sure if it's a good idea to put them on the moon - I would think that they should be more useful here on earth.
Anyway: Enter the SkyLab and go to the "Sun &Moon" section. Now hold down the cmd key and click on "moon image":
Select one of the names (you should be able to assign the names using the credit screen) and you are set (see Ales here ;-)
This is really odd. Look what I've found in one of the resource files:
The Bryce Ski Club (opens in a new window)
The picture holds the Bryce team at MetaCreations! The guy who's lifting his left foot is Brian, and Ales is the little guy in front of him ;-) BTW: It's incredible how they've managed to get him so small, he's a *big* guy in reality ;-)
I have no clue how to get there from Bryce... it's in the encdhtml.dat, so looking in the area of HTML export seems to be a good idea. If you're successful, you know my email ;-)
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