Ok, first question. I'm playing around with 2D textures. Why don't they show up at all in the shade? This is going to make it hard putting extra lights casting no shadows just so I won't have a grey patch. I've manipulated the diffusion, ambience, specularity, metalocity etc, they don't seem to make a difference. I've also tried making the texture a material, but it still acts the same. Is there something here that I'm missing?

question #2 Is this correct to get a bump?

From that second screen shot - I can tell you that the problem with the upper image missing textures in the shadows is due to not putting the bead in the A dimple next to Ambient (below Diffuse) Yes that is correct for bump! :)

Put the texture in the ambient channel, too. Ambient controls what shows up in the shadowed part of the texture.

Oops, kromekat, crosspost. :^) 2 minds in the same rut...

That may have sounded a bit cryptic!? In the Colour section, Click in the dimple on the Ambient A channel. Picture textures always work best when using both Ambient and Diffuse as anything casting shadow across the texture stops light hitting it 'diffusely' and therefore the ambient channel simulates reflected/global light which is still visible in shadow. btw - the best settings for natural looking objects in bryce (i have found) are to make diffuse between 80-100 and ambient from 10-20. You only really need to up the ambience for special effects or self illuminated objects like computer screens or lights etc.

lol! - tjohn got to the point and i crossposted & restated it! :D

P.S. There are no dumb questions here. We all learn something from each post. Peggy

Wonderful! It was so simple, thanks guys! I just made that little change and its all better now. Thanks for the tip on the diffusion and ambience #'s too. One more question and I'm getting in deep here. Is there anyway to bring in to the DTE pictures or images for playing around with? Thanks again.

No images in the DTE, that's the editor for Bryce's mathmatically derived textures. But there are 2 blend modes in the material editor that allows blending of images and the DTE. If you have an "A" channel setup and cntrl click in the "B" channel you'll get a second component which is blended based on the height of the object. If you then cntrl click on the "C" channel you get the ABC blend mode where A and B channels are blended using the alpha channel info of C - black is pure A and white is pure B anything else is a blend based on the grayscale.

Check my post from about yesterday or the day before. It's about textures and you have two links to tutorials on mixing images and DTE textures in one texture. the other posts also have links to similar tuts.

Ok, I'll check out those links. Thanks. I noticed that the picture editor in the terrain editor lets you blend them, but the regular picture place doesn't have that feature. Or am I just not seeing it? Oh maybe Dan answered that, I'm going to try ctrl click on it now and see if that works. Thanks again.

maybe that's me, but I prefer to mantain the ambience between 0 and 10, when I go over this value everything take a slight "cartoonish" look. Stefano

Thats true, but it does of course make a difference depending on what you have the sky ambience colour/value set at.

I generally tweak till I like. But its good to get some starting points and tweak from there. I'm going to have to pay closer attention the ambience #'s since I've got two different opinions here. Ang

Ang, trust kromekat. Apart that he's way more expert than me, I have a real special "hate" :) when it comes to ambience. I usually set it to almost zero (and I pay attention to the color being the same in the RBG values) and then play with the general setting in the SkyLab. But, as always with our Great Toy Bryce, the secret is tweak, tweak, tweak :) S.

lol! - well thanks Doublecrash! - I think it's more as you say - just keep tweaking, but the general rule is (IME) no Ambience and you have totally black shadow areas which is unrealistic (save for a nightime scene maybe), too much and your scene looks washed out and unnatural - so a little is best to give the impression of some global illumination. :)