Hello John,

I've been working on a lot of texturing recently, and it's pretty fresh in my mind, so ask away and I may be able to help as well. Although most of mine is picture based texturing; I can't really get my head around the procedural stuff.

Very good! Goa'uld battlecruiser is what springs to my mind. I've never tried Filter Forge, mainly because I'm too miserly to buy Photoshop and I use the Gimp. But it looks good. Happy New Year (and a happy new decade) to all.

nergal83 posted at 7:30AM Mon, 15 April 2019 - #4350060

the import is done well, but on a white background, no M for access to the editor and put in transparency, not serious open in photo cutter and cut in PNG, it does it too, thank you.

OK, so I'm guessing that you have started Bryce 7 and opened one of the .br7 files, and now you can see a tree on a white background in the middle of your screen. That's the image of the tree that I rendered before I saved the file, and I used a white background.

If that's what you can see, then you need to do this:

1. Click on Edit (just to the right of Create, at the top left of the Bryce 7 screen). The rendered image will disappear and you will see the tree object highlighted in red, with its menu to the right of it.

2. First, save the tree as an obp. Keep the tree selected (red) and click on the right-arrow to the right of Create, at the top of the screen. The Objects window will come up. Navigate to where you want to store the tree, and click on Add at the bottom of the window. The tree will get stored in the first spare (black) box, and you should be able to select it from there as and when you need it.

3. To get rid of my scene settings, close Bryce down and re-open it. Then open the Bryce scene that you want to use the tree in, if you already have one, and add the tree to your scene by opening the Objects window again (right-arrow beside Create), navigating to the tree, clicking on its box so that it is selected, and then clicking on the tickmark at the lower right-hand corner of the window. The tree should appear in the centre of your scene, and you can then position it like any other object in the scene.

4. As this is a tree object and not a mesh, you don't get the full range of options coming up beside the tree when it is selected, (there is no M for material) but if you click on the E in the menu beside it, that will take you into the Tree Lab, where you can change the settings for the branches and leaves, and change the materials for the leaves and trunk. You can change its shape by using the BranchTrunk settings on the left, but I find it best to make small changes at a time and save them, as Bryce does seem prone to crashing if you make extreme changes.

Let me know if this helps.

nergal83 posted at 9:58AM Sun, 14 April 2019 - #4350057

ok, thanks;

I've put the 4 Primeval trees as scene files in a zip here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tVTt4eyhZ3587pkqrGAx-_9vjSVH7bJO

In the root of that folder there is a zip called SceneFiles_Primeval and they are in there. I've made a small change to the trees to reduce the randomness setting to zero, as some folk reported problems with that, but it wouldn't have caused an issue with the import. Let me know if you can get them to work OK from the scene files, and if so I'll do the same for the rest.

I'm on Win7 64 bit too, but though I've got 32Gb of memory that doesn't help me with Bryce, as it has inbuilt memory limitations, and I also get a lot of crashes when working with obps. I find that if I import or delete too many at a time, it crashes, and I've got into the habit of only adding or removing a few at a time, then restarting Bryce before I continue. That seems to work, and the only reason for that that I can think of is that it's not releasing memory until it's closed down.

nergal83 posted at 5:51AM Sun, 14 April 2019 - #4350055

HI Judik, I use Bryce 7 pro, the crash happens on the import, I'm on windows7, 64bit, 16GB of memory, I did not try to modify it, I do not think it's the the weight of the object, or lack of memory, they all have about the same weight, but some of them matter without any problem and not the others.

OK, what I will do is give you the Primeval trees as B7 scene files, and we'll see if you can open those OK and save the trees. I'll try to upload them to my Google drive sometime today and give you the link. If it works for them I'll upload the others as scene files too.

nergal83 posted at 3:01AM Sun, 14 April 2019 - #4350045

hi Judyk, first of all thank you for this collection, but some trees plant the software, they are: Willow2 and 4, Big spreading tree, Primeval 1,2,3,4, Flowering shrub 1,2,3, Standard , Topiary in pot. And I do not know the reason.

Hi nergal83, it's probably a memory issue. Can you tell me what you are doing when the problem happens, and what the error is? Does Bryce just crash, and does the problem happen when you first try to load the obp into the scene, or when you try to change the parameters for the trees? The Primeval trees in particular have some extreme settings and I would not recommend trying to change the settings (branch angle, etc.) for these trees at all. Are you using Bryce 5 or Bryce 7?

wscottart posted at 4:05AM Sat, 06 April 2019 - #4349190

Still setting up my new machine, but will definitely come back around to try these. I am so excited to have Bryce up and running.

If you're new to Bryce I'm sure you'll enjoy it - I've used it since the late 1990s and since then other more sophisticated applications have joined it on my machine, but I still keep coming back to it. What impresses me most is the thought that obviously went into designing the interface, and the purity of the light in the renders. The main thing to bear in mind is that it has a limited amount of memory available to it, so it needs a slow and gentle approach - e.g. trying to add or delete too many objects at a time can crash it - and good housekeeping such as regularly removing unwanted presets to keep the memory use down is helpful too.

Have fun, and keep checking my Freestuff: there is a new model for Bryce up there today, and more to come in the next few weeks.

CrazyDawg posted at 2:34PM Fri, 15 February 2019 - #4346208

Judy nice work on the trees. I love the Battis Khamba Chattri model you did for Bryce,

Thanks for that! Unfortunately no-one seems too keen on buying it at the moment though, so it may be appearing on sale in the not too distant future...
But I'm pleased to be able to say that while I was texturing all those fiddly bits on the Battis Khamba in both Bryce and Vue at the same time, the one that had me tearing my hair out was Vue, not Bryce. Vue has more texturing options, but Bryce just seems to be able to map better to complex shapes, and the workflow is faster as you don't have to keep drilling down into so many menus. I still find it the most fun of the two to use.

I just found this thread, and it's been a surprise to me. I recently uploaded some Bryce freebies as "non-commercial" and got complaints from the forums over at DAZ3D (word got around) saying that they wouldn't be able to use the items in a render competition being run over there. I couldn't understand it, but looking at the comments above, I can now.

When I started with Bryce3D in the 1990s, my understanding, and the general understanding in forums I used then, was that the non-commercial tag meant that the components being sold (meshes, textures, poses, sky or lighting rigs, etc.) remained the property of the seller and could not themselves be sold on, or re-distributed in any other way, but that images, animations or image derivatives (patterns, logos, etc.) made using the components were the work of the buyer, and were the buyer's to sell or distribute, as long as there was no way of extracting the original components from the item being sold. From this thread it seems as if the general understanding is changing now - although I see that Rendo is still crediting gallery image copyright to the image maker, not to the maker(s) of the components used.

Maybe we need a clarification of this from Rendo and other sites involved? The TOS and copyright policy pages aren't helpful (as far as my patience in reading went, anyway).

My reason for using the non-commercial tag on the freebies was that I couldn't trace the provenance for two flower pictures I'd used years ago to make Bryce MATs. They were 90% likely to have been from some of my old photos, but I didn't want to risk distributing anything that I couldn't prove was mine along with permission to sell it on, which could put the receiver at risk as well.

Copyright law seems far more complicated now - and certainly more aggressive - and if good-faith community activities like competitions and freebies aren't going end up being stifled, I think it's important that we have a clear and simple definition of what "commercial" and "non-commercial" tags mean in terms of images, animations, etc. created from the products that we buy, sell or give away. So I've put the gist of this post in an email and sent it to copyright@renderosity.com, asking if they can respond. I'll let you know if I get a reply.

I've also got a couple of potential freebies (3D models) that were inspired by games, but are sitting on disk because I'm too scared to upload them for fear of infringement. I may change them to look less recognisable and upload them anyway, but I wouldn't feel happy about labeling these as commercial either, as it's still potentially passing on a risk.

Just a thought - if anyone needs to know how to apply the 2D tree images to a 2D face and get it looking right, or even how to create your own 2D trees from the Bryce tree objects, let me know and I'll post a simple set of instructions based on how I do it.

The set of 2D trees is now up in the Freestuff, and I've also uploaded a set of sky presets for Bryce 7, which should appear in the next 24 hours.

I've been told that a lot of people have been having problems using the OBPs - out of memory errors and Bryce crashing, etc. I don't think it's down to the trees in particular, more probably just the fact that adding / removing OBPs can be tricky. So to bypass the use of OBPs I've uploaded the original Bryce 5 scene files for all of the trees to Google Drive - you can get them here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tVTt4eyhZ3587pkqrGAx-_9vjSVH7bJO There is a big zip file for each of the sets, or if you just want to download the files for specific trees, there are also individual zips for each tree.

I'm really pleased that you are are enjoying the trees - much better to have them used out there than sitting unused on my hard drive. Also many thanks for all the kind comments. I've uploaded the last part of the tree collection (2D trees), so that should be appearing in the Freestuff in the next 24 hours.

Yes, I got a mail just before bedtime (in the UK) last night saying there had been an accident, and I re-uploaded both the sets of trees. There will be two more to follow in the next two days, one with some prehistoric-looking trees and one package of 2D trees for when you need a forest.

For some reason both of the tree sets I've uploaded so far seem to have disappeared from the Free Stuff, although they had been approved and put up. I've sent a support request to Rendo to try to find out what's going on. Sorry about this.

I've taken the plunge and gone for an annual subscription to the Vue Creator and Plant Factory package. PF is entirely new to me so there is going to be a long learning curve, and the Vue interface has changed a lot, so I won't feel qualified to comment much on the package until I've got familiar with it, but the first things I've noticed (comparing with Vue 2016, which was the latest version I had), is that rendering seems a little faster for complex scenes, that the render settings I've used for Vue 10 and 2014 now need tweaking for Creator (expected, I guess), and that the atmosphere presets I bought or created for Vue 10 work OK in Creator, which wasn't the case with 2014. I've reported a couple of problems, and so far the response from E-On has been helpful and fast (I got a reply on New Year's day). I went for the annual subscription because the monthly one is an automatically renewing option that has to be cancelled a month in advance, which I have a problem with, and because to be honest I think it will take me the best part of a year to get familiar enough with the two applications to decide whether the software is still for me.