Hello everyone!
I'm new to Bryce and the 3-D world...
Here is my problem: if I apply a texture to a plane or terrain, the shadows casted by the objects onto the plane or terrain don't really follow the bumpiness/relief of the texture. Is there any way to make realistic shadows that take into account not only the relief of the terrain itself, but also the bumpiness of the texture applied to it?
In other words, either have textured shadows, or create a terrain with the exact same bumpiness as the texture you want?
I hope you see what I mean! ;-)
Thanks for your help!
Agn :-)

Well, yes and no. Bump from textures is not a real bump, it is an optical effect. So, no you can't make shadows that trace out an optical effect ... not in Bryce anyway. You could put them in by postwork. The only other way around the problem is to create a terrain that incorporates the bump. For example ... a wall made of a primitive with a bump applied is just a perfectly flat object ... no matter how bumpy the bump looks. But, if the wall is created by modeling a terrain into a cuboid shape, and that wall has a grayscale bump applied to it in the terrain editor, then Bryce sees that as a real bump and the light should affect it accordingly. Caveat, however, the more actual "bumps" you put into any one scene, the more polygons you have, and the longer your load and save times will be. (The render time itself isn't governed so much by the number of polygons as it is by the optics involved ...) If you look in my gallery at "So Much for a Quiet Saturday Afternoon", you'll see what I mean. In the outline of the towers, you can see that the "bump" is real. If the towers were modeled from primitives, it would just appear flat.

Also, (I believe) you can use the DTE to generate a terrain. So you could get a texture that you want for your terrain, and then generate the height map for the terrain using the texture that is driving the bump in your terrain's material. if that makes sense... sorry, I don't remember how to do this, but someone will.

...oh, and if you are using a picture texture to drive the bump then you can use that as a height map on the 'pictures' tab in the terrain editor. You can use the picture straight or blend it with the terrain map currently shown.

Thanks guys, it all makes sense.
I'm not familiar with the terrain editor yet, it intimidates me (kind of)!...
The idea of generating the terrain's height map using the bump texture of the material I want sounds really interesting. But I have no clue how to do that! I checked in the manual but didn't find explanations about it. I would be so grateful if anybody could give me a hint!!!

It's really pretty simple. The terrain editor is nothing much more than a gray-scale picture editor. The picture import part of the terrain editor allows you to bring in an image and then translates the gray scale of that image into a height map. Back to my castle towers ... all I did was take PSP and generate a gray scale image of bricks. Then I brought that into the terrain editor and made a terrain out of the image. The terrain then looked like a brick wall. If I had also made a color image of that brick wall, I could have used that in the materials editor to make a material that matched my terrain and would map to it perfectly. For my towers I just used a procedural texture, but I have done the mapped texture on terrain many times.

What they said...this is a really complicated thing, and i really have no idea.

OK... I think I get it for the picture import thing. But how do I proceed if I want to use one of Bryce's material presets instead of a picture? I tried to go to the picture part of the terrain editor and load one of the materials or textures presets but I can't open anything from there... I guess there's something I'm missing!

The terrain editor is separate from the texture editor. The terrain editor is for the 3D shape (accessed via the "E" next to your terrain) and the texture editor is where you apply your material or texture (access via the "M" next to your object/terrain). There should be some screen captures of how to apply a 2D image for the texture somewhere in the forum archives. Hope this helps some. :)

it can be done... it's an alt+click type of deal in the terrain editor, I'll try to find it tomorrow, I'm sure someone knows though...

To use the DTE as the source for a terrain hold down the ALT+CTRL (PC) or OPTION+ CMD (Mac)and click the Picture Button. When you exit the DTE make sure that you wait until the DTE file shows in the TE preview - it can take a very long time to process and there's no indication that it's working. Clicking will it's still digesting the info causes it to abort the DTE load. HTH; Dan

Thanks for the tip. I just need to clarify something... "DTE": is it "Deep Terrain Editor" or "Deep Texture Editor"? Should I be in the terrain editor or the texture editor when I do the ALT+CTRL stuff? Also, which picture button are you talking of? The one in the "Create" palette? I'm lost and I feel totally retarded!

Deep Texture Editor..search the forum here (search option), for some good mini-tuts..complete with pictures..

This time I got it!!! THANKS A LOT to everyone! :-))