Hi, I am glad to be back after a long time without a working computer. Now I dared to buy an Athlon XP 2200 with 1 Gb of RAM, but Bryce continues to be slow on me :-O About editing terrains: It took me a long time to find out why my terrains became stepped after editing the maps in PS. As most of you already know, Bryce works internally with 16 bits grayscale resolution (65536 height levells) and I was importing/exporting my maps by copy/pasting them from the 8 bits (256 levells) picture editor format. I found an excellent solution for that and for all my terrain editing needs. I bought the Leveller 2.2 Althought I have no commercial interest in that software, I feel I had to share my experience with you, since I don't recall any thread about Leveller around here. I believe it is the most professional solution around for dealing with terrains. Some of it's many amazing features are: * Works with 2 side by side resizeable windows: Top map and 3D map * 3D window updates any map editing and renders from mesh to raytrace modes. Edit pointer shows up in both windows * Create/edit terrains and water planes in 32 bit height resolution, with sizes up to Bryce's planetary resolution * Apply textures to the terrains * Terragen style camera/target * Real world units and grids; it displays mouse coordinates oon terrain * Add marks to interesting sites and memorize camera positions * PhotoShop style selection tools * Lots of plugin filters and tools * Scaling and clipping * Dig roads following terrain slopes * Boolean operations with terrains * Import/export many different formats, including Terragen and PGM, the only 16 bit grascale format accepted by Bryce. The only thing I miss is the abundance of Bryce's fractal generators, but you may always apply those in Bryce. As people are producing new filters and tools for free download, I believe that this shortcoming will be solved in the near future. And it costed me only 75 bucks. Nandus

Hmmm...I've used 24bit images in the Bryce terrain editor, even after saving the Bryce file they can still be pasted/exported back out as 24bit. (They have the same color count going out as they did going in) I've never copy/pasted out of photoshop, I always saved my terrains, then just opened them up in the terrain editor, so I never ran into that stepping problem you mentioned, good to know though.

Hi Nandus, If you're using WinXP there's a trick to get some extra performance from Bryce. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE once, this will open up windows task manager. Select Processes from the menu. Locate Bryce process and right click on it; this will open up a pull down menu. You can set the priority to HIGH and this will make Bryce work faster. To keep the priority at the chosen state minimize windows task manager, dont shut it down. Hope it helps, TT.

Hi AgentSmith, I understand that the 24 bit format you mentioned above is the usual 3 channel x 8 bits RGB format adopted in many files like those with BMP extension. That format may be used by some programs to extract 16 bit height information (red + green channels). Bryce doesn't do that - it converts the map to 8 bit, resulting in only 256 height increments. If the terrain has a high relation height to base and the camera cames close, the effect is annoying. If you want to see the staircase effect, try this: copy a terrain from the Terrain Canvas, or from the picture editor, and paste it on a new PhotoShop file, RGB or Grayscale mode. You'll see that the grayscale channel has identical 8 bit info as all the RGB channels. When you render imported RGB map files in Bryce through copy/paste, or both types though Picture Editor Load, you get steps resulting from the internal conversion from 8 to 16 bits (256 to 65536) filling the info blanks. Compare a zoomed-in native map render with the same map exported/imported from PShop (without any Bryce smoothing). The staircase effect is much more visible when you render an imported black-to-white PShop gradient map. Although PhotoShop works with 16 bit grayscale mode, all the important painting tools and filters are disabled, so there is no point in using that mode. There are other formats like the PGM - Portable Grayscale Map - that use up to 16 bit gray info in one single channel. PGM is the only format available in Bryce for import/export it's 16 bit native resolution (there is one RayShade format that I don't know about). So far, the only program I found that edits and imports/exports PGM to Bryce is Leveller, with the big advantage of rendering the map in a 3D window. I hope this helps - it took me a long time to understand the effect. Fernando

Hi Ttops, Thanks for the tip, I'm doing that in Win2k. Fernando

Color me confused. First you say Bryce converts pics down from 16-bit to 8-bit: "Bryce doesn't do that - it converts the map to 8 bit, resulting in only 256 height increments" Then you remark that Bryce converts up from 8-bit to 16-bit: "When you render imported RGB map files in Bryce through copy/paste, or both types though Picture Editor Load, you get steps resulting from the internal conversion from 8 to 16 bits (256 to 65536) filling the info blanks". I'm slow to comprehend this, lol. All that I do know is that the terrains I make in Photoshop look exactly the same in the terrain editor. Since my Photoshop terrains are 8-bit and don't go over 256 colors, I'm sure they are compatible with Bryce terrain editor, without any stepping. Also, any terrains that exsist in Bryce, I can extract, and compare it with the original I made, and there is no difference, down to the pixel. BUT, what I (believe I) understand is that Bryce can handle 16-bit maps, and the only thing you have found to create 16-bit maps with is Leveler 2.2? AgentSmith

I use a lot the terrain editor with map, and never had a problem.. If i import a 1024x1024 pic in the terrain editor I choose a 1024x1024 terrain resolution.. and it works!..

This thread has been enlightening, as I'm experiencing the stepping on a terrain I want to use as a draped fabric, thanks for the pointers :)

The problem you were having with your fabric terrain Zhann, was just not using a large enough terrain in dimension and using just some blurring. In fact in that post of yours, thread #14 shows that you blurred your terrain too much. Too much blurring will cause "steps" in a terrain. This kind of stepping here comes through the reduction of colors in a map (image). Different problem, same effect. AS

The image was a 2272x1704 grayscale...The steps I was trying to elimante were on #2, actually #14 was a decided improvement, and I've been tweaking it since the post to connect the folds on the drape. pidjy hit it on the nose, I now use the same res as the image size and it seems to solve some of the problems I was having...:)...It's not perfect yet but I'm gettin' there...:p

cool ;o)

I know its confusing, thats why I said that it took me a long time to understand the problem. To complicate things, English is not my native language :-)
Let me try to explain it in a more organized way:

1- Bryce's Terrain Editor always generates 16 bit maps with 65536 gray levels for the height of all terrains, no matter if they are native or imported, 256 x 256 bit or planetary resolution. The native maps render without noticeable steps or edges. Imported maps are another matter.

2- Since the human eye cannot distinguish much more than 256 levels of gray, all paint program tools and filters are designed to work with 8 bit resolution and are unable to edit a 16 bit gray map. PhotoShop can create and save 16 bit gray scale files, but the usual editing tools and filters are disabled in this mode, and Bryce wontt read those files. So 8 bit resolution is OK for the eyes, but it's lousy when used for height.

3- The other editable formats available for export/import are standard RGB color formats like BMP, TIF and JPG, that use 3 color channels with 8 bits each = 24 bits of color. The problem here is that we work with grays, not with color.

4- Some programs can record and recover the height info, combining 2 or 3 color channels to get 16 or 24 bit height info. Since neither PhotoShop nor Bryce can't do that, all RGB 3 color channels will end up with identical 8 bit 256 gray levels. You may check that looking into the PhotoShop Channels.

5- When importing those RGB map files, Bryce will have only 256 height data info to work with. So it makes a stepping conversion and theoretically the final 16 bit resolution terrain should have 256 height steps, where each step stands for 256 higher resolution levels. It's difficult to measure this, because the final renders always show some extra noise, as you may see in the picture above.

6- The only practical way to interchange terrain maps with Bryce in its full native resolution seems to be the PGM file import/export ( File Menu or Terrain Editor Export ). This format has one single 16 bit channel accepting 65536 gray levels. But how to edit PGM map files?

Unfortunately Bryces manual says nothing about this (and about other important stuff). The info here comes from my research on this subject and please correct me if I'm wrong.

The majority of height field editor programs I checked work only with RGB files. Wilbur reads PGM but doesnt write to it. Up to now only Leveller does the whole trick. I also found that we can use P3dO Explorer to open PGM maps.

For most landscapes scenes this terracing effect is of no importance. However, when modeling detailed objects with lattices, or for doing camera closeups in imported terrains, the only way to get rid of the steps is to apply global smoothing and loose relief details, since its almost impossible to apply local smoothing in large terrains using the Terrain Editor paint brush.

I believe that this subject is very important to improve our brycing and I would be glad to have some feedback from you all.

Fernando

Whooosssh!....

I'll study everything and get back to you, I understand the basics. The problem seems NOT to be that Bryce won't handle 16 bit images, but that there needs to be a (2D) editing program to handle 16 bit PGM images (i.e. Leveler) I'll look into Leveler (and all the bit info, it's a lot to digest) AgentSmith