Fran, Vince my cityscape tutorial offers only a fast and dirty way of using Photoshop and Bryce together to create a randomly arranged cityscape which can be used as a background fill in scene projects which do not require in-your-face, detailed, close-up reality. It can be used in scenes where you will be using ground-level close-up detailed models in the foreground and fill the background with a rough yet photo-realistic cityscape. Or scenes as viewed from the air as through a plane window looking down on the cityscape. I only offered this thinking that if you needed greebling like on say a spaceship, alien way station, and on the cheap, the buildings can easily be textured differently to provide that effect.

 

The tutorial is geared towards a quick way of fulfilling the artistic need of providing a huge number of model buildings with just enough detail to give the illusion to the passing eye of urban sprawl without the artist having to lumber for weeks if not months on end over time consuming detailed models to fulfill the need. Quick, down and dirty is the essence of my tutorial. Although some extra measure of detail can be achieved using this technique, if ground-level, photo-realistic detailed modeling at every turn of the scene is your goal then this procedure is not for you.

 

In order to understand why it seems that either the model or textures are angled the mechanics of how Bryce handles the heightmaps and how it UV maps the models is in order. When the heightmap is created in Photoshop it must abide to Bryce’s “rule of 2”. Bryce will distort by stretching any image imported if it is not 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 and so on to make it fit its rule of 2. The larger the heightmap image resolution the more detailed the model will be. More detail equates to more mesh facets at the price of taxing the CPU to calculate for the more facets. So in an effort to reach a happy medium I use 512x512 resolution on the maps. This lends itself to Bryce slightly tapering the building models into spires. The higher the resolution  the more crisp the buildings but Bryce will bog down. So these buildings are slightly tapered to compromise for CPU time and keep Bryce from crashing.

 

After much experimenting I found Object Cubic to be much better and easier to use than Parametric mapping for this model. But Object Cubic treats the entire model as a cube. The map in this case consists of several building images composited together and forms a horizontal rectangle. If you can image the model having four sides with its top and bottom and the image (map) wrapping itself around the outside meaning that each side will get a copy of the map placed on it. Every structure within the model that lines itself up behind the side will also receive that map. The structures will then seem to line themselves up as tin soldiers and receive whatever image it lines up with but this will happen on all sides of that particular structure. So it would behoove the artist to angle the camera towards the model so that the viewer does not immediately realize this obvious patterning effect. Please click on the accompanying illustration to expand for clarity.