Does anyone know of any tutorials on making detailed greebles?

• I'm thinking of the kind of thing that is coloured and textured and you can use that textured version to UVMap (or just to use as a pict texture in Bryce) a greyscale version that you've taken into Bryce's terrain editor to create something similar to displacement...???

Hey Fran, I have looked at the greebles several times for quick city animations, but have always hit a wall when it comes time to texture. I have not seen any detailed tut's on the texturing of a greebled city, when I start to do this myself, I have found that it is much easier to make the city from scratch so that it fit's a texturing scheme that I plan to use. This makes the total project time shorter than a greebled city and then trying to make all the textures fit. Just my two cents. If you do figure out a better process, or find the tutorials please share them. I would love to improve this area of my skill set also. Regards Vince

[ ](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2576491&ebot_calc_page#message_2576491)Hi Fran and Vkirchner. Perhaps you remember my cityscape tut using Photoshop to create urban cities in Bryce. Well instead of using building image textures to cover the buildings you can use whatever material you desire and I think the whole tut lends itself well to creebling as well leaving you some wiggle room to texture the tops and the sides differently using two textures. All you need do is to squash the imported heightmap when it's brought into the Bryce terrain editor or right from the editing panel using the "y" coordinates editing tool. The tutorial can be downloaded from my site in PDF format. The download URL is listed below.

City Heightmap Tut

Good lord! Sorry about this, it got away from me while I was editing. I meant to shrink the picture down to the size of the one above it and to link the reader to a seperate window when they clicked on it. As it stands now you will be taken directly to the entire thread. Really sorry about that. What pisses me off the most is that I'm not allowed to delete the post and start over.

Quest

Quote - City Heightmap Tut

Um yes... I've saved that for some future use, but what I'm looking for just now is tuts for painting textures onto a city I have already designed myself - although it's not completely finished as I keep tweeking it here and there.

So I'm looking for tuts for painting city building textures.

Quest - Thanks for the link to the tut, I had not seen this before so it will definately help.  My type of work is for ground level driving animations, so much detail is used to make it realistic.  Lotsa work, lotsa work!

Thanks
Vince

Quote - Quest - Thanks for the link to the tut, I had not seen this before so it will definately help.  My type of work is for ground level driving animations, so much detail is used to make it realistic.  Lotsa work, lotsa work!

Thanks
Vince

Ground level detail!  Yes! That's what I need, that's what I'm looking for, tuts for that kind of thing.

(of course, I'd also like the detail of parts of some buildings to be pretty good too, for when the camera swoops up and around... kinda thing)

Quest - How can the greeble be used to make it more realistic. I looked at your supplied images, the textures appear to be angled on the surfaces, or the surfaces are angled to the textures? To use this for what I do, I would need to make properly scaled sidewalks, roads, buildings, and of course the textures. I do not mean to push for answers that I could find myself, but I am a very new user to Bryce (1 week), normally a Rhino user, but if I have to spend 2-3 weeks trying to obtain suitable results, my time would be better spent on actually building the city by hand. So that is the only reason why I ask for a few more details from you. Regards Vince (Bowing Humbly)

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.

Although your buildings will still be tapered unless you use extremely higher resolution there is a way to derive more detail and even isolate each individual structure for UV mapping. This entails using other software resources like Uvmapper Pro to select individual structures from the greater model and apply UV mapping.

 

From the imported heightmap Bryce will create a terrain based on the resolution you’ve set in the terrain editor. In order to gain access to the individual building structures you will need to export from Bryce to “.obj. format. Unfortunately Bryce creates very large meshes even when you set the export size to 64x64 resolution, which would ordinarily bring most machines to their knees depending on the size of the model. Here I’ve subdivided my heightmap so as not to choke my machine when importing as an obj file into Wings3D and 3D Studio Max from Bryce. See illustrations.

3rd illustration.

All in all I personally do not think that it is worth the trouble of subdividing terrains and nitpicking through UVMapper, a very tedious and time consuming task indeed. If your intent is to produce high-level detail models throughout an animation then the way to do that is the long way, by hand.

 

Hope you can utilized some of this information in your quest.

Quest - Thank you so much, this is by far the best writeup I have seen on the Greeble plugin and how and why it does certain things. Now it make a lot more sense. I think this can be used for background buildings as mentioned, but when I am trying to see small deformations of the buildings because of the shape of the windshield, the detailed building is the only way to go. But you have given me a lot to think about, Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Thanks Quest, I've saved this now.  (took me a while as I don't have photoshop available, so I had to learn how to use Microsoft's PhotoEditor in order to cut the image up so I can get it onto a word document.  (there are various restrictions on downloading stuff here at the college you see,)

I hope I can then go over to the Karten Suite (Cyber Club) later - either tonight or maybe over the weekend, and I might, might, be able to save it to my pen drive)

Thanks for explaining it all, I'll hopefully be able to look at it in more detail later.

If not, I'll just have to be patient for a couple of weeks, til I can get back to broadband at home.