Hi,

This is my first post in this forum. I have been trying to learn a little Bryce texturing this week mainly by following this very good tut:
http://users.pandora.be/walter.vandijck/DTEtutorial1.htm

I am trying to make some rocks look wet. Even better I would like the rocks in the tutorial to look wet near the water line - so altitude dependant wetness.

I have tried the built in wet rock texture but it is not really shiny enough. I tried upping reflection and metallicity on that same texture a bit and also tried linkiing them to the texture grid in combination ABC like the other values in  "wet rock".

Can anyone help with this texture? It seems quite tricky.

Thanks a lot

--> my stuff:
Bryce 6
Poser 7
Carrera 5
Hopefully Haxagon 2 soon.

Greetings!  This is an interesting. I like that tutorial. I've been playing around with some texturing, trying to make something look very wet. I'm sure there's a solution or a work around, but I haven't found it. In the past for some distance wetness which I really wanted to show up, I used to smooth a rock, which gave it the appearance of being very polished, as if it been through a rock tumbler.

Hi,

After some research it seems I need to modify the subsurface scattering  to get this effect.
Here is a great link to the theory. There is a section on wet materials.

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html

Quite tricky indeed! I don't know how to apply this even in Carrera for example where they have SSS.  Maybe I can try your trick in Bryce plus simply darkening the material in some places.

l3la

Yup, wetness is increased Reflectivity and Metallicity, with reduced Diffusion. And, yes to have it react that way in only certain areas you would need to mask it off, which I wouldn't want to tackle that with a DTE mat, I myself would go the image map route.

A truly large part of making something look wet is also just tricking the eye. If it is near water, and if there is maybe some sea spray in the air....the eye/mind will make up the rest.

Attached Link: http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=983334

If you're not averse to "cheating" with postwork, you can make two renders and then erase the top layer to reveal the lower layer. One render with the wet rock mat and the second with the dry rock mat. Here's one I did.

**AgentSmith:** Thanks for your help. I will have to learn UV map usage in Bryce now.

Death_at_Midnight: Actually how do I make a smooth rock? Do you mean something in the surface roughness? What is this called in Bryce?

frogdot: Thanks for the link to a great  example!

I am posting the original wet rock texture which I increased the reflectvity and metallicity on unsucessfully. I will post an updated one when I get something that works.

Attached Link: Wet ground tute

Ok silly q possibly... but .. could you somehow shape a sym lat to look something like a rock and then try the route of something like terrain layering with different materials and blended tranparencies affected by altitudes?  Just a thought and probably way off the mark.. but interesting to ponder none the less.

also dont know if the link is of any use or not?
It says wet ground tute however it may give you smoe more ideas

The E button brings up a small editor that enables some smoothing of an object. It won't make the rock look wetter, unless maybe it's combined with some other technique, but it does make the rock look smoother/polished, and with a low or 0 bump map, it can look very smooth.

Attached Link: Complexity thru terrain layering

that's what i'm talking about with terrain layering tho and using different textures on the two terrains or sym lats.. with the smooth one set to show thru at lower atltiude.. and the rougher one higher up

this tute here is off the beaten track a little but it will kinda show you the general idea of what i'm thinking re the layering and differernt textures etc.. and how it might offer another method/possibility of further ideas on how you might be able to go about getting the mixed surface your after

A lattice can make a very good rock.

Hi,

Thanks to everyone again. With the ideas you gave me I realized some obvious things such as Bryce has a "rock" function. This gives really nice results with the built in textures.

Death_at_Midnight: Thank you for the further info. I also needed to figure out that you need to click the picture of the sphere - it's actually a button.

Whimsical: Now I understand what your suggestion is. Another way of getting the two textures without UV mapping. Thanks for two tutorial suggestions which will be fun to do.

I am really slow at this still so I probably won't have good results for a couple of days. I also had to take a day off to install Bryce 6.1 and Hexagon.

l3la

Attached Link: Robin Wood's Tutorial Including WET ROCK

Some of the materials in Bryce are already height dependant and can create the impression of wet rock lower down while higher up the rock looks dryer, see this thread: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2908041&ebot_calc_page#message_2908041 Also Robin Wood does a nice tutorial on wet rock - it's the Intermediate Bryce Tutorial: Lesson 3 : Page 4 - just after how to make a soap bubble, her website is in the link above.

Here's my quick attempt at the wet rock material, if you look at the rocks in the river they are darkish looking - as if wet - the big rock looks dryer at the top than at the bottom and if you look at the rock pile further back in the scene, the higher rocks are much lighter than the lower ones.

Ok use the second "b" tab on diffusion, add the "basic altitude"  from the menu, top of the list, should be a blue and white gradient, then adjust the water line with the "A" and the "B" settings on the filter menu in the DTE.

Using Bryce6.1's HDRI made all the difference to the wetness for me.  I used the "Outside" HDRI Image.

Thanks FranOnTheEdge and Clay. Both of those renders look like charming rock pools with a good illusion of wetness on the rocks. Looks like Bryce can do a nice job.

I did do more practice on height dependent stuff before I got sidetracked to work on SSS in Carrera and a dolphin Blender. I have a nice render of a Daz tutorial on Bryce landscapes that just needs a couple of birds.  Eventually I will catch up with trying to work in all of the info you guys are passing on and I am going to get back into this as soon as I get home since I am traveling for a week.
I hope to post some results next week.

Thanks again!

a dolphin blender?  Is this a new way of making fish soup?

I look forward to seeing what you get in the wet rock department.