Hi, I was just wondering if there was a way in Bryce (or any other 3D program like Max, RayDream, TrueSpace, etc.) to take simple 2D line art and extrude it into 3D object. There was a program called AddDepth by RayDream a while ago that would do this quite well. It simple pulled 2d art or text into a 3D shape. Will Ilustrator do this maybe? If no one knows what I mean, I can post some examples here. Thanks!! -Tim

There are many commercial & freeware/shareware apps that can do this with vector-based art or 3D DXF files. There is also a great plug-in for Illstrator called VectorWorks that will create simiulated 3D art within Illustartor (a great tool!). You might post some pix to see what you need.

Thanks for your reply. Actually I need one that will take a black & white tif, jpg, etc. of a shape and turn it into a 3D object. I just rememberd that 3DF/X by Asymetrix will do this (it's completely automated and very cool), but unfortunately you can not export the object at all. And working in 3DF/X is a nightmare. It's amazing to me that a cheap little program like this has this capability and nothing else seems to ... astounding really. Would the VectorWorks plug-in be able to simulate 3D on a non vector-based image though?? Thanks, Tim

um...Bryce can do this...in the terrain editor...its like importing clip art.

I thought so, and I've tried it but I can never get it to work well at all. Any tutorials on this? I'm sure there are ... do you happen to know where? Thanks, Tim

Attached Link: http://www.best.com/~calyxa/pearl/clipart.html

Bryce is remarkable. I just figured out how to loose the bottom half. You have to use the clipping bracket in the terrain editor (never even knew it exisited!) to do some bottom clipping. Very cool. Thanks for the link too, I'll check it out. -Tim

LOL..yep..the tutorials show you how to use the clipping bracket...too!

However you can get jagged effects doing it this way, especially with text.

If you're using it for text, or whatever kind of object you're making, make sure to keep the grid size LARGE! 1024 is what I generally use for latices and terrains. This helps so that you won't get any jaggies on the edges. Also if you're using photoshop for the grayscales, you'll want to turn the antialiasing off on the text in photoshop. Then if you apply a nice, little gaussin blur to the object you'll get very smooth edges, play around with the settings in your image editing program and in Bryce... Hope that helps, Jared

Thanks all for the tips! -Tim

Thanks for the clipping bracket info. I would just make a terrain as big as the original and place it back to back with the first one and then do a boolean subtract. If do right the flat part is gone.

This one really isn't a bryce answer for me, but it works... You mentioned other 3D apps like max? What I tend to do a lot is do the line art in Illustrator, then import the .ai file into max and extrude it as a 3D mesh. I also do 98% of my text extrusions that way for 3D type also. Rhino will do it also, but Rhino prefers .dxf line art to .ai files. On a bit map or something similar, I do the line art on another layer over the bitmap, then delete the bitmap layer.

I think there was a plugin for photoshop called cybermesh, that would extrude 3d models.