Hi trying to create a forest scene and for the back ground I thorght I'd use some 2d 'flat' planes with a treepicture from a clipart cd on it. so far so good saved the pic as a tif or a bmp and applied it to the plane now I need a trans mask I think so changed pic to greyscale and fiddled with contrast. problem is ok this works but all I get is a washed out ghost of a tree all grey no colour what am I doing wrong or to put another way could you tell me the best way of doing this. thanks for any help Dave

pics might help.

Once you've created the greyscale, select the silhouette of the tree in your image editor. If in Photoshop, Polygonal or Magnetic Lasso is good for that. Now fill the selection with white. Invert the selection and fill the rest of the pic with black. So you get something that looks like the pic in the middle box on the screenshot danamo posted. Save as a different file. (Sorry for these newbie instructions, but I like to cover all bases. :-) That is the mask. In Bryce, put the marbles in the first channel on Diffuse and Ambient. Import the tree pic there. On Transparency put the marble in the second channel. Load the mask pic. Select Blend Transparency for the texture. That's it. The colours are washed out because Bryce uses black and white (grey) values of the colours on a pic to create a transparency mask. White is completely opaque and black is completely transparent. The grey values on your pic meant that you got varying deegrees of transparency of the colours.

Hi thanks guys I don't know why exactly but leo did it I think it may have been the blend trans setting. thanks folks Dave

An easier way to make an alpha, in your paint app, import your image, crank up the contrast and light a little at a time until it gives you a black and white, it will be an 'exact' duplicate, alpha mat, even small details will be captured...

Or you can use the Levels, after greyscaling it. This is a much more accurate way to extract an Alpha channel, but I'm only used to Photoshop, I've never used PSP or CorelDraw really...