I've been a Brycer for about eight years now and in that time I've come to recognise where my strengths lie.  I like to think I'm a pretty good modeler when it comes to using the Bryce primitives, but when it comes to creating scenes/backgrounds for them, well, frankly, I suck.  I just never got the hang of backgrounds and they're always lame.

The point is, I've completed a model I'm especially happy with but I want to do it justice by putting it into a proper scene, rather than just creating a few bits of rock  for background and then photoshopping it to death to hide the flaws.  So what I need is advice and/or tutorials designed for the use of noobs.  I've enclosed a pic of the model in question - some of you might recognise it as an Eagle Transporter from the 1970s TV show 'Space: 1999' - that I constructed from reference photographs and which is as accurate as I can make it (the command module is the wrong shape but I couldn't do anything about that).

Anyway, I want to create some sort of lunar scene for it, so if anyone can drop me some hints on creating one, please do :)

 

nice eagle model...no immediate tips but as I'm also the Freestuff Moderator I'd like to propose you share your fine Bryce model with the Community in Freestuff...don't mind me...I always beg when I see a good model.. ...

batsarse..ouchywawa! wow.. whistling. Neat work!

well, considering it's supposed to be on the moon...you're looking at a bleak, near-featurless landscape anyway. Probably some smooth hillocks and lumps here and there. I know there were some mats of the planets in general (including the moon) out there as well.

There should be a goodly number of tuts on basic landscaping in Bryce.

Whip yourself up some images like these In a drawing program. I made a 1024x1024 . Draw the background  medium gray 128. Draw circles 224 at least 5 pixels wide. Don't get too close to bright white 255 or to black 0. Fill the inside of the circles with a darker color to make them deeper than the 128 background. Don't make them all the same depth. Add noise by drawing around edges to make them thicker in places. Add little random dots on the surface.

Take the image into the Bryce terrain editor and apply it in picture mode to a 1024x1024 terrain. Now erode the image a lot until it looks like craters.

Line the terrain edge up with your camera view so you can't see the square edge drop off. As a texture ash works well but I use a large lunar photo I got from a NASA website. Apply the photo texture to the terrain as parametric. Apply the same texture to the ground plane as parametric scaled. Change the scale value to about -7 XYZ. This should keep you from having infinitely repeating tiles that are obvious to see in your background. You can repeat more tiles add mountains whatever to hide edges. I used the Starfield Sky from the presets because it has no fog or haze.

Nifty stuff electroglyph

great moon surface tut there

I actually prefer that comand module shape to the original - reminds me of a Reliant scimitar

Way cool modelling!

Very nice Bryce model. That lunar surface tut and the result are great too.

Great model Batsarse!  And thanks for the tut electroglyph!:thumbupboth:

How do I draw circles in PSP?

Never mind.  I found a way.

 Thanks for the tutorial, electroglyph.  I'll see what I can do and put up the results in the gallery :)

That's a really top notch model. I used to love Space 1999. Never mind how you could be traveling fast enough to reach a new solar system every week but still be able to stop and visit. And Maya. How do we always manage to find sexy female aliens?

Dear Electroglyph,

Please can you say where you got that photo from?  I know you said NASA, but that's a massive, massive site, and a) I can't find it, or anything like it, and b) those I can find are massively long and miniscule in width and thus totally unusable...

I mean the greyscale is totally different to the RGB one, wider by a mile for one thing and if you copy the RGB and paste it above the greyscale one you can't even get it to line up - it's not the same even in that one strip.

So I need to use something else.

Please can you help?

OK, It's only 224K so I can just post directly to the forum. It's the center out of a 5MB whole moon map.

Thanks very much electroglyph, I didn't expect you to post the actual image.

That will be very useful indeed.

Lot's of the biggest, best images are no longer on nasa. What used to be free is now content on google earth, Universe or other apps that pay money.
A good but hard to use resource is.
ftp://pdsimage2.wr.usgs.gov/cdroms/clementine/Clem_NIR_V0.1/A_welcome.htm
There are some good images mixed with a lot of unusable ones.

Thanks for the link, I see what you mean about hard to use, but I'll investigate further, thanks.