Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=603885&Start=1&Artist=AceC&ByArtist=Yes

Hi, I'm trying to recreate the Poser appearance of the Millenium Dragon in Bryce 5. What's giving me trouble is the "shiny," or "damp," quality that the scales exhibit...

In Poser this is accomplished by unchecking "apply texture to highlight" and using a highlight size of 71%, but of course Bryce doesn't have that option.

I've been trying specularity maps (inverting the bump maps, and increasing their brightness/contrast), but the bumps seem to cancel all highlights out when set to around 10% or so.

Attached is a link to a Poser image demonstrating this effect...

Message edited on: 10/26/2004 18:08

Never mind, I read my own post and figured it out :-P To make up for the board pollution, here's my solution (for future searchers): Basically, Bryce appears to be using a different scale for its bump maps. By decreasing the bump intensity, I was able to get my highlights to show up. Using the bump map as a specularity map restricted the highlight to the scales... The way it would be in an actual reptile.

This is what it looks like... The material on the neck/hand is with the bump turned up to 100%, the material on the head is as I described above. The spec map could still use some tweaks... Evening out specularity on the horns, teeth, and tongue comes to mind.

try raising the reflection a bit at a time to see how that goes. I'm not sure if that is the correct methord for the affect you are looking for but give it a shot :)

One other thing you might try with the alpha component is to click on the mapping mode triangle and down at the bottom of the list set the item "Alpha Scaling" - this will render Specularity (or any other Alpha effect) dependent only on the grayscale values of the map and the level just controls the overall scale. HTH; Dan

Try putting a bead in the ambience and turn the slider down to about 10. This will let your color map show up in the shadows on your dragon (instead of the solid black shadows you're getting now). Bryce doesn't do this automatically.

tjohn i never thought about the ambiece, AceC could also try lowering the shadow down on the skylab which may help with the dark shadow.

Here's how I've done it... the first thing you'll notice is that I've gotten rid of the 'B' channel bump map that appears when you first import the model... don't know why it imports like this (and I would hope that Daz's new importer does it right...) since, IIRC, Bryce looks in the alpha channel for the bump...

so what I do is go into the picture editor, load the bumps into the second image (at the top... sorry I was in a hurry and didn't have time to mark these screenshots)... then delete the redundant bump maps at the bottom...

and this is the result... I've only done the head, nose and part of the neck here...

The process is a PITA... but I've done it for so long that I've gotten pretty fast at it...

actual 'shininess' is going to depend a lot on the lighting you use (this image just uses white sunlight)... also, making the specular halo color 'whiter' will increase the shininess (in the screenshot above, the specular halo color is not quite pure white, which tends to wash everything out)... errr.. make things look less polished.. ummm.. well I know the concept I'm trying to get across, even if I don't know the terminology... :o)

Message edited on: 10/27/2004 09:04

Message edited on: 10/27/2004 09:10

Next we'll talk about eyes... another PITA... ;o)

"The 'whiter' the specular halo color, the larger the highlights appear" is what I was trying to say... geez... sometimes my frain doesn't bunction properly... :oS at least, that's my experience... I could be totally wrong. ;o)

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com/tutorial/grouper/

FWTempest - Are you familiar with Grouper? In conjuntion with solo mode and the mesh selection menu, it makes texturing an object almost as easy as it is in Poser... Almost. Still working on trying some of these ideas out. Thanks a lot guys :)

yes, of course... I was in a hurry, though, and wanted to save that step... even after Grouping, the MilDragon has 10 textures that need to be tweaked... It was the mat tweaking I was focusing on, not the entire picture... Setting up the image textures this way should save a bit on memory usage... especially if you delete the redundant bump maps afterward... and allows you to use the same texture to drive the diffusion, ambience, bump, specularity, tranparency if you wish...

@ LunarTick's post #7... reducing shadow intensity or lightening the color would help some... but in Ace's original mat, he is using black as the ambient color, then pushing it up to 100%... meaning that any area not being directly lit will appear black... You'll notice that in my mat, the ambience is is being driven by the image texture... turning the ambience down to 10% (in this case) allows the texture to show in the shadows at a fairly realistic level (notice the underside of the neck which I tweaked, as opposed to the shadow in the ear or mouth which haven't been tweaked yet.)

Heh, oops. I really get annoyed when Bryce grabs more than one slider like that. I intended to have ambience set to zero in that slide...