Hi,

Hope somebody can help me figure out how to do this in Bryce.

I am modelliing a Tent Roof from an historical picture - it has some fancy type flaps hanging down - when I created the texture map for the model I made, I tried to use an Alpha mask to make invisible the white bits along the bottom of the flaps - it didn't work. How do I do this? I have thought about Booleaning but it means creating a model to create the pattern - thats something else I could do with figuring out.

If anyone has any advice let me know please

Thanks

Peter

...I didn't wait for any answers, I went round doing a search for a Radial corregated effect to create a Grayscale image for the terrain editor - I looked at Jamo 3d - very cool plugin for Photoshop - and it's a free plugin, but it could only do linear corregated effect. I needed a circular one. I have Eye Candy which has an effect to create stars - it made a very useful corregated effect and it was circular. problem was the indentation was very angular so I kept lowering the terrain and smoothing to knock off the edge.

The results are in the second picture with the terrain made into a negative boolean. also included is a small thumbnail from the original picture of what I was trying to acheive - It seems to work out fine...but maybe somebody has a better way.

Thanks

Peter

I would copy the original picture to ME Word and select the drawing toolbar. Using the tool that defines what parts of the image are to be invisible, I would select the white parts of the image I nolonger want (below the corregation). Copy this back to PSP of Photo, save and import to Bryce. The long way around I suppose but it's worked for me. In Bryce, make sure the 'transparent' setting in the mat editor is set correctly. You can do this by trying different settings and watching the nano view........ Hope this helps.

Sorry.....that should be MS Word (Microsoft)

Thanks - I better explain how I created the model - basically I made an obj, then imported it into UV Mapper, made the template, then on into into Photoshop, took the original picture and copied the tent then adjusted it for the texture map? I tried alpha masking the bits which should be invisible. I didn't think MS Word could do this...but from what I understand you are saying - could I do this with the texture map? Peter

Sorry, PM....This is a trick I learned when trying to customize pics for use in MS Publisher. It should work with any pic you can place on a MS Word page.....

if you have office you might as well do it over ms photo editor. it's actually a very useful little tool.

I had never thought of using MS Word in this way, thanks for the tips guys.

MS Word is a strange beast - I am going to investigate Thanks Peter

Aye, good solution, although it takes a LOT more polygons than just alpha channeling the cuts. You made an alpha image, but it's not working? Is the alpha just true black and white? Is it showing NO tranpsarency, or just not making the parts you want to be transparent, so...? Try clicking the "Blend Transparency" option. It's on a little tab in the Material Lab, at the top, in between the main mixer bank and the channel bank, or whatever. I've never had any problems getting the alpha-type transarency to work. Just, in Bryce, they call it "Blend". Hope this helps... Only one drawback of this function, I've found that it doesn't work well at ALL with volumetric world running, or volume lights. They, for some silly reason, were never set up to recognize it, or I'm an idiot and doing something wrong! (laughs)

Thanks, I think I tried Blend Transparency, but it didn't work. And it does show the black and white in the right places....but I will go and check again.. Peter