I'm fairly inexperienced with Bryce, and I'm looking to create my own procedural textures, to break away from the stock textures, and flat looking image wraps. Here's what I'd like to know:

How do you create bump maps (or displacement maps, if supported)?
How do you create altitude sensitive textures?
How do you create randomizing textures?

Thanks a million in advance.

Attached Link: http://www.annsartgallery.com/donut.html

You can do all three in Bryce. Oddly enough, even the best tuts out there only tap the basics of the texture editor. Bump mapping is a Poser term I think (I'm new to Poser so forgive me if its used with other programs). Bryce has a slider in the main texture lab that lets you choose bump height, same thing. But that's just scratching the surface. You can go into the deep texture editor and choose any of the 3 screens that add/blend and click the B channel for bump height. And you can go deeper than that and open the noise slider and click on the upper left green button and change octives, fractal type, and mode. You can add, subract, blend, etc all three into the final procedural and if that's not enough, back in the main texture lab you can choose three additional procedural textures to blend in with it. In other words, you won't be bored at night. Altitude sensitive textures are also doable in Bryce. You should have a texture called highlands which is altitude sensitive. I made a variation of that to texture my donuts in the tut above. Been working on a snow top mountain (for some odd reason, Bryce snow textures like Bryce Classic put the snow at the base of the mountain). Flipping that around is not as easy as it looks and I'm still putzing. It is doable. Randomizing textures is easy enough, you can randomize bitmaps or procedurals. To randomize your procedurals, click on the upper right down arrow in the three view texture box in the basic editor screen. You'll get a box with several catagories. Pick a category and you'll get a ton of textures to choose from. Or, you can go into the deep texture editor and click on the lower right button for any of the four windows shown. Remember, you can click on the way the three upper windows link and interact and change that too. Also, you can go in the deep texture editor to the filter and put in a number of different preset fractal equasions or enter your own. There's a lot of undocumented features in the DTE and many more I can't begin to explain in this reply. Guys like Doc Mojo who wrote part of Bryce have gone on to make programs like MojoWorld which take fractal math in 3d images to a whole new level. I've never seen a decent tech manual on the DTE and wish someone would write one. I don't even know if Corel understans what they bought from MetaC. The link above is a tut on making donuts in a freeware program. The texture is an altitude sensitive variation I made from one of the terrain procedurals. I think the original was Highlands. When you get a chance, and when he gets his server back up, Brycetech has the best DTE tutorial available. www.brycetech.com

Oh, displacemet maps, didn't touch on that. You mean transmaps? Like alpha channels in a .jpg or bitmap? Bryce does that. Look for tutorials on hair transmaps when importing Poser objects to Bryce. its not as tough as it sounds. I've been playing with a Darktree demo and quite frankly, other than the ease of interface and ability to tweak and use stock procedurals that Bryce doesn't have, it really doesn't offer a lot more than the DTE. Well, it does, but for the money, I'll stay with the DTE and keep at the learning curve.

PS, download the donut texture and add it to one of your bryce models/terrains and make another terrain/model with the Highlands terrain precet. Take mine apart and see what is different about it.

Eric, when you're already talking about the textures, is it possible to add a picture as a transmap into a Bryce material? Like, I would use colours and bump, but would also use a pic as the alpha channel. I tried with bump channel, but I simply cannot get the placement I get with the material.

Bryce does not support displacement maps, they are something entirely different. "bump map" is fairly universal in 3d Programs, but it is only Poser that uses ".bum" maps, which sometime causes confusion. AgentSmith

Here's a Screenie of Clay's Fire that I tweaked with altitude sensitivity. It seemed like a no brainer to me, but it's a bit harder to use than Clay's Fire by default. As for adding a pic as a transmap, it's very possible. Add the pic to the second slot in the Picture Source Editor (you can leave the first slot blank if you just want a transparency map), and that will affect transparency (or bump), it depends on where you assign your dots. The basics of it is that the second slot there is the alpha channel.

Here's a screenie of a pic applied as a transmap. Be sure that "Blend Transparency" is checked off in that little menu near the cursor!

OK, last one, I promise. ;) This is a screenie of the same picture (spiral.pct) but this time it's applied as a bump map instead of a transparency map. And if you're wondering what .pct is, it's a Mac file format similar, and about as useful as .bmp

Wow. Thanks Eric, john, Smith. Awesome stuff. I guess I'm gonna be busy for awhile.

Also, Eric, donut tut made me hungry. Thanks again.

Johnpenn, thanks a million. But it appears the transmap is not what I was looking for. Yes, the texture is now okay, the placements are also okay, but the colour is way, way too bright. I cannot get the colour I had before even if I lower diffusion and ambience to zero. If I apply the pic without putting a copy in the alpha channel, the same thing happens as with bump map. Bummer.

Johnpenn, you have my rapt attention! Please, don't stop now. I get so lost with all the strange terminology (I'm learning though) that your screen shots are always a joy to behold. I understand them immediately! I've also appreciated you doing this same thing in other threads... er, I wasn't really lurking :) you just didn't lookup and see me!

Erlik, I might know what you are talking about, I think it happened to me before. I think what you need to do is set the diffusion dots differently. Don't have both of them in the same channel of the pic. One of them, I don't remember which is probably causing the brightness you're talking about. For me, it was a white background on a pic blowing me away, and I set the Diffusion and Ambience Sliders to the default (not on the picture channel) -- But I can't remember if it was the top sliders or the bottom ones. I hope that fixes it for you.

I'll try, although I think I actually need an alpha channel. Cause I got wood grain, and I want it to appear worked, like in the plankwood material. It would be great if I could drop a .tif into the texture's alpha channel and keep the colouring.

OK, well only since people seem to learn by the pics, I'll post this one too. I'm just glad that I can help, man have people helped me along hte way, it's nice to give a little back. So, I went to everyone's favorite Italian website, animax.it, and d/l'ed this photo texture or what appears to be the top of a public picnic bench. I made a quickie bump map from the blue channel (inverted and touched up a bit). Here's the result. Is this what you are talking about Erlik? I've put the alpha channel (bump map) on a separate channel, but there's no need to do that. The bump map could just as well be on the A channel, in the second picture slot. Again, hth.

Nope. Unfortunately. This one, I know ... more or less. :-) It's a nice technique, but doesn't help. :-( The problem is, it's that I probably painted myself into a corner with the particular texture. I cannot post a pic, because I'm just rendering a WIP of the challenge picture, but it goes like this: I have a curved wooden surface (yes, I'm playing this close to the chest :-)), for which I adapted a wood texture from the library, so I got a lacquered wood appearance. Applied the texture, played a bit with frequency and rotation, and I got it to have the grain lines along the X axis, with the streaks getting closer to each other at the ends of the surface. Now, I wanted the surface to appear made of little ... planks, I don't know any other name for them. When I apply a bump map in B channel, I either a) lose the appearance of the grain, regardless of any amount of fiddling with the rotation and offset, or b) the bump map gets oriented along the Z axis and I cannot get it to align along the X axis. That's why I'd like to put the picture into the texture itself. Like, above, you have the three pics of the texture in the ME, and the middle one is alpha channel. That's where I'd like to put the .tif. Oh, well, I think I can and have to live without it. I'll position the object so the surface is not that much visible. You'll see it soon, as the challenge pic is about three quarters done. Thanks for the help.

The "alpha" channel serves 2 purposes. 1. is an alpha map 2. as a bump map Could you post a pic of the Material Editor of this material so we can see what's going on?

this is the first one, with just the material.

And this is the second, with the alpha pic in the B channel. It comes up as parametric, I change it to world space, but neither makes any difference.

this is (uncompletely) rendered material.

And this is with the alpha/bump. Notice the swirling of the original material?

Have you tried mapping to object space? You might even want to try Spherical or Cylindrical mapping depending on the object. Also make you bump map just black and white for more contrast. Wht you have now would barely be noticable, which probably why you aren't seeing anything.

Tried both. :-( The only thing that changes is what swirls. It's either the texture or the bump map. And I'm not concerned with the distinctiveness of the bump, because I can always raise the value, but with the direction of the swirls. Ugh. Well, I'l leave it as it is, without a bump map. Thanks.

You can set the bump map to be on channel A and channel B if you hold down a modifier key as you click the additional channel. It's the Control Key on a Mac, I don't know which on Windows. That might do it for you.

Attached Link: http://home.carolina.rr.com/kattman/Tuts/BryceTransmap/BryceTransmap.htm

Just in case you are struggling with importing a Poser transmap, here's a site that will help. Keep in mind that when you flip textures etc in the editor, the real one on your hard drive updates and you'll see it inverted next time you go to Poser to play again.

Eric: no, it's not from Poser, it's my own muddling in Bryce. John: Ctrl+Shift+click on another channel, IIRC from here. I don't remember if I tried that, but I feel like I tried everything and anything and that nothing worked. Anyway, the image is about 90 percent done, that texture is hidden, so I'm giving up. Temporarily. I'll probably discover something that works in a month, when I'm working on something else. :-)