Hello, I've been playing with bryce for a little while, just on and off really, as something to pass the time. I've been involved for a long time in the production of worlds and maps for multiplayer games, but i'm having trouble transfering any skills that i may have obtained from this over to bryce. I'm used to working with a world where everything is snapped to a grid, and I'm finding that there is no really easy way in bryce to align objects. Perhaps i'm missing something? If you switch to the overhead view in bryce, you get an impossibly high shot of your scene, and still it is hard to align brushes. As I say, i must be missing something, as I've seen some truely remarkable works here, and i'm sure that they can't be made just by lucky aligning of the objects (particularly the architectural scenes) any help in this area would be much appreciated, I'd really like to be able to use bryce in a more accurate and efficient manner. thanks, Paul

far to the right of the work space, towards the bottom, there is two lil magnifying lenses...one with a plus, one with a minus... you can use those to zoom in any view... also, to the top of that same menu bar, there's a spray can looking thing, once it's zoomed in, and you think you got it right, use that spray can to "spray render" some of your joints to see if they line up. Have fun! Jen

Shift + move arrows will move the objects in predefined increments of half a grid length along one axis. Moving with cursor arrow gives you a quarter of a grid rectangle. alt+move is free moving. For turns, one click on Rotate while holding shift means 45 degrees. Then there's Align options in Edit menu. Snap Together will bring the centres of objects together. BTW, see that magnifying glasses beneath the wireframe cube in the lower right corner of the screen? Need I say more? :-) The default is centering on the selected object in parallel views, but you can use the hand to move the screen along.

When you click on an object a little menu pops up, under the 'A' for attributes, you can align your objects in the Bryce world precisely using the coordinates....:)

thank you, jen, for a very speedy response to my question. how stupid of me not to see the zoom tools, i'll pretend that they weren't there in bryce4, eh? one more question, to you or anybody else.. is there an easy snap to grip option? and if so, how do you alter the snap size? thanks again, Paul

ahh! flooded with replies and i've only just said thankyou to the first generous helper. thankyou to all, erlik has answered my question about the grid snap, and zhann, the A scared me, i just ignored it :) thanks again to everyone.. i think i'll go play with my objects now, paul

Attached Link: http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/tutorials/bryce/keyboard/shortcuts.html

Also under the edit pallete there is the symbol of 3 bars with a sphere in the center, click the triangle to the lower right of that and there are snap commands, one of which is snap to grid.

wow, thanks very much for that link, ICM, i wasn't even aware that you could have solid openGL rendering, that's really useful and aldaron... how stupid of me yet again, i should've seen that set of tools, "rtfm" springs to mind, i dare say thanks once more, Paul

No one has mentioned the attributes box. When I am playing in Bryce, I seem to spend most of my time working the numbers in the attributes box. Everything by the numbers! Keeps your objects where you want them. ALSO, very important: when slecting an object, always use the Ctrl key and select from the list, even if there is no more than one object under the mouse. This prevents you from moving the objects just by selecting them. I have made this a habit and now I never select objects with a single mouse click.

I'm with Redneck on this one, too. I spend as much time in the attribute matrices as I do physically manipulating objects, these days... Good questions though, Paul, if you've played a lot with UnrealEd or similar programs you will find Bryce's lack of any real collision detection obnoxious, but not impossible. The spray render will help you make sure things are lined up, because oftentimes the only way to be sure is to check the render itself. One thing that MIGHT help is the "brushes" way of thinking. There are no brushes in Bryce, I know it was just a phrase but it's also an entirely different way of thinking! UnrealEd does have some advantages, in this manner, and I would LOVE to find or create an Unreal level converter for Bryce, it would make doing interior modeling soooooo much easier!

I see what you mean - both redneck and yourself, shadow - about the attributes box. It'll take some getting used to though... just out of interest, what's special about 20.48? Why create everything in such a random size? I assume that it's got something to do with the grid size? Anyway.. yeah, i've used unrealed a fair bit, but mainly worked with qoole and editors based on the quake engine, which in many ways is far more like bryce than unrealed is... with that you have to cut away from your world, but with both bryce and quake based mapping, you just seem to add "brushes" into the world (again, not the correct term, i'm sure) what would be really nice would be if there was a way to display your world in bryce in a 4 window layout, so as you could see 3d, top, front and side views all at once - is there perhaps a plugin of some sort that can enable this? as you said, a converter would be very useful. when i first started using bryce I spent a long time trying to get unreadED files into bryce, because the stair tool for unreal is really nice (or i think so anyway), but after a month of searching I gave up... i wonder if it's possible to convert bsp files into bryce, i've not tried, but i shouldn't think it'd be overly easy. thanks for your help, it's going to take me a while to stop thinking of everything in terms of squares and grid units i'm afraid. still, it seems a bit odd that there's not easy way to have a grid overlay in bryce, and one that you can edit the size of. anyway, back to playing, if i'm lucky i'll learn. Paul

Remove the decimal and you get 2048, look familiar? How about 1024, 512, 256, 128....see where this is going? :)

ahhh, cunning :] shame about the decimal though (yes, that's it, blame it on the little dot)

You could also buy Real World Bryce 4 by Susen Kitchens, it is the bible of Bryce and will give you lots of hints, tips, etc. and probably more information about Bryce than you could ever handle. 8) Catlin

well, it's funny you should say that :] i purchased that from amazon ages ago, i just couldn't really be that bothered to read it. there was too much in the way of boring explainations (spelling?) for my liking. I guess some of it might be handy.. it's a bit heavy to pick up mind

Oh I know what you mean, but if you have a major misunderstanding with Bryce then reading the part in the book about it can open up all sorts of ideas on workarounds and it usually sets me off making a new image because of something I've read. You only have to read the part about what's bothering you at the time, the rest can wait for when it's needed. 8) Catlin