Hi everyone, I plane to buy Bryce5 but as I'm not very sure that it will work well for what I expect from it, I would like to have your opinions. Is it REALLY possible to export a scene of Bryce5 into Lightwave (5.6 to 7), WITHOUT loosing informations ? Is that stuff really that good, easy to use and fast rendering ? Thanks by advance, Jean-Paul.

if you have lightwave you dont need bryce you can export bryce terrains out as lightwave scene files with the textures intact its a nice shortcut to avoid modeling a mountain range but the render in LW is far superior to bryce

another way to get Bryce landscapes into lightwave is to render a hieghtmap of the terrain you make. Then use that on a subdivided polygon as a displacement map. You can also use the texture and apply that to the terrain. griggs

why bother with that when bryce will save your terrain as a native lightwave scene file with the textures YOU chose in bryce converted for LW but all of your other bryce scene elements Water, skies etc. will be left out Only the terrain will export as a .LWO

a couple of reasons jpg's are really small, and your not limited to .lwo poly limit. Griggs

you have the option of choosing a format other than jpeg for the LW image maps when you export from bryce( tiff, .bmp and photoshop uncompressed-.PSD ) and you can export the terrain geometry in a variety of formats that can imported into the modelor such a .obj, .3ds . dxf all of which gives you the option of increasing the polygon count during export. Not that high poly count is that crucial since most mountain ranges are typically depicted in the hazy distance

Well, I exported a Bryce 5 terrain to LW 6.5b and it was OK except that the texture map was sort of dull even at 1024 as a BMP. I decided to mix this with my own mixes for terrains and it comes out really nice. I notice that Bryce 5 exports terrains in a better way than Vue 4 but as Vue it doesn't export DEM's 100% intact. Cheers!

As you see there are always more then one way to do things. Grey scale height map from bryce used as a displacement map in lightwave on a sds surface. around 180,000 polys this only shows about a quarter of the terrain. Griggs

Thanks very much to all of you. I'll first download the trial version of Bryce and will follow you suggest. Cheers, Jean-Paul. To Griggs: Is there a tutorial somewhere which shows the way to use displacementMap as you do to reduce nombers of poly ?

Attached Link: http://www.lightwave3d.com/tutorials/surface/texturing/texturing_landscape.html

Here is one that shows the basics of displacement mapping to make landscapes. For the bryce end you need to make your landscape with the terrain editor. Make a altitude render from the top, if you want you can also make the texture by rendering a color map from the top. Then use those renders as the lightwave displacement map. Griggs

You can also get heightmaps from bryce by exporting as .pgm, you can convert those to other apps like Lightwave by using PSP 7 Griggs