Okay, I want to add lots of the objects, materials and textures that I had in Bryce4 to my Bryce 5.

How many are safe to add? How many are too many?

Plus: How do I save those library files once I have everything in there that I want?

Fran (Oh, I mean "save" as in for back up purposes, in case Bryce does this scary emptying the presets folders, that I've just heard about.) F

Message edited on: 04/30/2005 17:29

I would think it would be alright to add as many as you wish, unless you have a small amount of system RAM, you might just want to go slow. Ah, saving/backing up, VERY important! You can select a catagory, and then selct what mats you want by the same way you would select files in Explorer, with shift or ctrl + click. When you select them, a hard to see red outline will appear around each .mat thumbnail. When you have all the ones you want selected, just export to another location for backup purposes. AS

Yes, but in what do you save the files? In Windows Explorer? I can do that standing on my head, it's doing it any other way that I may need instructions for.

Hold on, someone made a "how-to" little screen capture at one point, let me see if I can find it. ;) AS

Okay, now WHERE you back them up can be important also, if you can;

Back them up on a SEPERATE hard drive, and/or burn them to a blank CD/DVD.

If you can't do that, at least back them up outside of your Bryce folder, that way if your Bryce program explodes, you can still re-import later.

SECOND great reason to export mats (and back them up)...if you for any reason don't want a mat and delete it...it doesn't actually delete, Bryce will just remove the thumb for it.

From time to time, selecting which mats you want to keep, exporting them out, then manually deleting the preset, by hand, in windows explorer, and then re-importing what you just exported, will truly get rid of any hidden but not truly deletd .mats

AS

Message edited on: 04/30/2005 18:43

I'm afraid I'm a hoarder, I never want to get rid of ANYTHING. Well.... you never know, do you? (guilty expression) Fran

As for usage, I seem to find you can get about 250 or so in the materials section before things get whacky. Now one thing you can do is to create subdirectories, under the User section. It's a great way to categorize stuff, such as metals, organics, building materials, etc. Copy the user.mat (you'll find it in c:Program FilesCorelBryce 5PresetsMaterialsUser)
and copy it as another name (if you have nothing in the user file so far, so much the better)

Once you've created the files, you can import each mat into whatever category you like (each filename will show up as a file, see attached). On to stage 2.

Message edited on: 04/30/2005 20:11

Message edited on: 04/30/2005 20:11

If loss of material files is a real issue, can the material lab file with all its contents be identified and saved? Like Franontheedge, this concerns me because you guys have gotten me off my duff and am trying to create my own mats so hopefully my files will be growing. Sure don't want to lose

Sure, when you save a .mat, everything that could possible make up the materail is saved in the .mat file, even if it is an image texture that makes up the mat. You can never be paranoid enough. I back up anything of mine that is Bryce on two hard drives that are seperate from the hard drive that has Bryce installed on it, AND, I also make monthly back-ups to DVD. AS

*Note, when you use say a .jpg as a texture in Bryce, it will actually use it uncompressed...so, lets take a .jpg that is 800x600 and 300kb, in Bryce, uncompressed, it could swell up to 1.4 Megabytes.

Thus, a saved .mat, and/or a whole saved Scene file (.br5) will get much larger when using images as testures.

AS

Message edited on: 04/30/2005 23:04

About the subject of exporting MATs out, then making new libraries without the 'bloat' of stuff that's not supposed to be there and should have been deleted....

That is, you delete an item from a library but it only deletes the thumbnail, not the actual library item itself.

Does the new version 5.5 of Bryce suffer from the same bug?

BTW, doesn't that bug exist for all the libraries not just the material presets?

It's a chore to carefully de-bloat my libraries, mainly the ones that get deletions a lot. To counter that I created various temp libraries so I could lessen the number of libraries to de-bloat, mainly when I'm testing and experimenting with MATs. - Works for me. :-)

"Does the new version 5.5 of Bryce suffer from the same bug?" Let me play around with that and find out, I don't remember trying it out before. AS

I have 'blank' presets for materials, objects, skies on my site under downloads 'Bryce'.............

So do I follow your saving method AS, (ie from inside Bryce, not from Win Explorer) when I want to save what I've accumulated in Bryce 4, so that I can add it to Bryce 5? (and will the same apply to getting stuff from Bryce 5 to Bryce 5.5 - if I ever manage to download it at all?) BTW, I'm more likely to want to save the entire user file/s, rather than just parts... does that make a difference?

Oh, yes. Bryce 4 mats are absolutely importable into Bryce 5, no problem. And, yes the same thing from Bryce 5 to Bryce 5.5, yet if I remember right, you can ALSO go from B5.5 back to B5 if you want, the presets are cross compatible. Parts - Entire user file, imo. For (a Bryce 5.0) instance I will go to "Metal" catagory, select what ones I want, and all those will exported as ONE single .mat file, which holds all the various metal .mats (kinda confusing, but it works, trust me) AS

pakled,

"import"? but that means I have to do it one at a time - it'll take forever! Isn't there any other way? WAIT... wait, oh, I see. You've first saved everything as a directory like "User" or "Metals" - THEN you "import" the whole shebang. Coool.

Message edited on: 05/01/2005 04:40

X-post. Yeah, you understand it. ;o) AS

Firefly? Planets? X-RAY STUFF!!! CoooOool! Hey, sounds like you've got some interesting stuff in there!

And "Saved Scenes" - how terribly organised of you. Mine in comparrison looks a mess.

It's a pity one couldn't have sub directories inside a directory like inside "Metals" it would be nice to have, say... "Rusty" "Corroded" "smooth" "new" "old" "Space-ship" "Floors".... oooh, things like that.

(still wondering what beautiful materials are inside "Firefly")

Message edited on: 05/01/2005 04:49

Yeah, I wondered why my edit took so long to upload.

Firefly...lol. I found a Bryce DTE mat on a personal website one day that simulated a furiously flapping insect (moth, firefly, etc) I went to download it, and the link was broken. I tried back later, again, and again, and again, no luck. I wanted the ^%$! .mat! I e-mailed the author, no luck. I gave up. One day....MONTHS later, I ran across the link, tried it and it worked. I worked so hard to get it, it got its own personal folder, lol. AS

"It's a pity one couldn't have sub directories inside a directory like inside "Metals" With Bryce 5.5 you CAN have that. Now you can't export a single master catagory, and have all those sub-catogories export along with it, But bryce 5.5 does have better organizing with its library presets. AS

yeah, you don't want to lose it now, huh? Um... any chance it might be shareable? (licking lips hopefully)

Sure, it IS a free mat, I just can't get ahold of the author. hold on.

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/~bryce/Firefly.zip

OooooOOOOoooo, nice B5.5! And it looks a bit less busy on the daz site - so far. I've actually managed to start one of the downloads. Now if only we don't have another powercut today. Had one yesterday, right in the middle of the first attempt, then Daz got too busy to let me in, and the next 5 attempts just got that "page unavailable" thingie. Gosh, if you knew how envious I've been of those people who were complaining about b5.5 - I mean! They'd managed to actually GET it!

Arrrghhhh! I'm downloading from Daz!!! (looking hungrily at the buzzing firefly) Now I'll have to wait... (that's just not part of my nature you know) Thanks for the link AS, much appreciated.

The link is in the backroom, so it's going NOWHERE, lol... AS

Got it. Hopefully, I've also (finally) managed to download Br5.5 as well.

Today had been a GOOD day!

Message edited on: 05/01/2005 06:39

uh...FranOnTheEdge, actually I do do them one at a time, into the 'mat' file or category. If there's a faster way to do that, let me know. Ordinarily it's just something you have to do once..personal preference, etc. And they're right..once you add them to the 'category', they don't seem to go away. I've had a 'category' of 20 meg with no (remaining) mats in it.