I really need some help with this guys. I'm not going to give up on this one so please help if you can.

I would like to place dust coulds around the feet of the Mechs and make the dust come out a bit towards the small bot but i'm having trouble with it. When i make the dust clouds they either look like wisps of smoke or dirt being flung at me. I would also like to get the dust colour close to the terrain colour if that is posible.

I wait with baited breath for the replies from the masters of bryce :)

Message edited on: 12/29/2004 09:34

Why not try a torus with the same material as your terrain. Place it at the base of the mech's foot and adjust the transparency to make it dust-like.

Here's how I would do it. These are spheres with the volume texture "heavy pollution" preset. The one on the left is a squashed sphere with "object space" mapping. The one on the right is a stretched sphere with "world space" mapping. In both I lowered the ambience slider to 10. You can play with the color to get a closer match to your ground color. I threw this together for you. I call it, "Watch where you point that thing!" :^)

Spheres are better for volumetric materials. With a torus the texture is less transparent where you are looking through one surface to another. What happens is the left and right edges of the torus look brighter or fuller than the middle. The easiest way to control dust and get it where you want it is postwork. You could try rendering just the ground a little brighter. Then use this image as the pallate for a 50% dense paintbrush in paintshop or photoshop. Even the big guys that use maya use add-in programs like After Effects rather than try to use the same render program so don't feel bad. If you really want to use bryce clouds its possible. It depends on your worldspace and model scale so I could probably not give you numbers you could just plug in.

First if you want dust You have to know what the original ground color was. You can't have pink or blue dust coming up from your brown ground. I used the color picker in paintshop to grab three representative colors from your image. These are going to be wrong because your sky has a lot of yellow light. Using these in your image will probably double the amount of yellow you should use. Since you have your ground texture you can pull the RGB values off the texture editor.

Once you know what colors are used in your ground write them down. If you use exactly the same tones it will be hard to distinguish where ground ends and dust begins. I added 20 to every value to make the dust lighter than the ground. If R was 88 I used 108, etc. I picked one of the volumetric clouds. In this case it was smoke stack from the presets. I entered the three colors +20 into the color presets in the texture editor.

Next I did a simple render using cyllinders and applying the cloud texture to spheres half sunk in the ground. The spheres are actually kicked out in front of the cyllinders. If you center them on each other a quirk of the camera makes the dust look like it's behind the post.

Jaymonjay, i tried using a torus. I used a shpere with it and i almost got the dust cloud looking like i wanted until i noticed that the texture was brown on one side. tjohn you have the dust cloud on the right foot the way i want it, the foot that is off the ground i'm going to try and make it look like dust/dirt is falling from it(without post work LOL) electroglyph, thank you for the quick tut you put together, i'll work on it using that. I have a small problem though, i have no idea how to get the RGB gage up in the DTE like you did and i don't have any programs to do post work in or that i can use a colour picker in. The image i have posted was a quick render of the original with out the yellow in the sky or any haze. The texture on the terrain is actually a red colour which i tweak in the DTE to turn it the red/brown colour. Thanks all once again CD Formally LT

Attached Link: http://www.bsmooth.de/BSolutions/

If you look back at the DTE image I put up you will see Component 1 on the first box. The three buttons on the left are the three colors used to create that texture. If you hold the "ALT" key down and mouse click one of the buttons you will get the advanced color picker to pop up instead of the standard palate. If you click on the letters RGB, CMY etc. you change to different types of palates. RGB is great but the colors are usually fully saturated. I have better control over the gray scale component with the CMY palate. We did a DTE challenge a while back and there are some great tutorials available out of the Bryce banner at the top of the forum. One of my favorite for all around which buttons to press is located at the link I posted.