I'm sure this has been discussed many times but i couldn't find a ref for it in the archive, sorry. Anyway, Is there a way to stop 'stepping' of greyscale image derived terrains in bryce? Even massive res terrains from high res images do this. I remember Bsmooth ( the old mac only plug in by Klaus Busse ) was supposed to help this ( I must dig it out! ) but wasn't there some way of doing it in Bryce? It was something about bryce only having 256 levels of gryscale or something?. . . . any help would be appreciated, cheers, Jonathan

I've always got around it by cranking up the res, so not sure why you're having troubles. Can you post an example? And with 24 bits, anything is only going to have 256 levels per channel?

Any smooth curves on terrains derived from images show steps where they should be smooth, or rather where i would like them to be smooth. As an experiment try a render of a sphere with default grey mat on a grey default ground from above. Save the image and bring it in to the TE to drive a terrain. The curve of the sphere will be stepped no matter what res terrain you try. bsmooth sorts this for it's own constructions which come in v smooth but not for imported images so Am not sure how to proceed, I was hoping to import some groovy Mojoworld terrains into Bryce as greyscale images. it exports at any res you like, but they get stepped to hell. . . sigh. . . J

There are only 256 greyscale levels,not only in Bryce.The 24 bits are used to control the three colour channels, 8 bits per channel, giving 256 levels, The greyscale levels are produced by setting the three colour channels to equal settings from 0 (black) to 255 {white}

Exactly. It's 8-bit vs. 16-bit. 8-bit=256 levels of grey 16-bit=65,535 levels of grey Bryce's fractal generator in the terrain editor creates terrains at 16-bit, so there will be no stair-steppping. BUT, when you draw in the Terrain Editor, it's 8-bit. Bring in an image to use in the Terrain Editor, it will be 8-bit, as Bryce has NO way to import a 16-bit image...normally. How I myself get around this; I use Photoshop to create a 16-bit greyscale image, that is saved as a .tif, and I use a utility made by bikermouse to convert it to a .pgm, which Bryce WILL import that as a 16-bit Terrain. The smoothest of Terrains is the result, its a beautiful thing. AgentSmith

I tried saving from Pshop as a PGM earlier as I had a vague memory that PGM was significant, but I couldn't get Bryce to 'see' it. You can't use the clipboard for 16 bit stuff it seems. . . Maybe the file i saved wasn't greyscale. i shall fiddle with this further. thanks for that ;-) j ( on a mac g5 osx3 )

use import object not a pic in the terrain editor

The only way to bring a .pgm into Bryce is to go to the text menu at the top; "File>Import Object". Pgm's also usually need to be in a dimension to the power of 2 (256, 512, 1024, etc), otherwise they may look inccorect or just flat as a Terrain. AS

And if you save Bryce render as JPG, you will get artifacts no matter what. Bryce JPG export sucks. Either TIFF or PSD or BMP.

Thanks Guys! I imported the PGM as an object . . . but it still has steps where i want it to be smooth! ;-( I need to play with this some more coz it sure as hell looks smooth in Photoshop. best to you all, J ps another disappointing thing is that the non documented ME trick ( command - alt click on the picture buton ) that brings up the DTE and lets you make a terrain out of it's contents, is subject to stepping, so I guess it brings the DTE stuff in as a picture. . . the thing is I'm sure I've had smooth terrrains both from MJW and the DTE before. . oh well.

Yeah, I believe MJW is all 16-bit now...I think it is anyway. Now, depending on what I have made in Photoshop, sometimes it absolutely needs to be blurred before it will show up as smooth as possible in Bryce. I've Gaissian blurred images anywhere from 2-6 pixels before they got all smooth. Of course depending on what you have, 6 pixels will cause you to lose detail, if its fine work. AS

Also, JBA, are you using the largest (4,096x) source-map size possible in the terrain editor? Just checking!

can't mojoworld export terains as .obj? i think it does.

I would think it could

Yes it can. OBJ, 3DS, DXF, WRL or LWO.

Attached Link: Harrison2

Check out this guys models. Harrison2...probably one of the best Bryce modelers around. These items were all modeled in Bryce with lattice and terrains created from grayscale images he created in a 2D application (Corel Photo Paint). and Booleans. Study them closely and see just how fine they are. He told me the secret was to use a small bit of Gaussian Blur to keep it smooth. Like AgentSmith described above. Tom

Interesting object, Harrison seems like a cool guy! Still, he's really going about things the long way. And the sheer inaccuracy of such a modeling technique just bothers the hell out of me, especially after years of AutoCAD and Rhinoceros. There are literally billions of redundant polys using terrains to model with, and of course it would be nearly impossible to animate a character built this way... BUT... But! Perhaps they'll include real displacement mapping in Bryce 6? It's a pretty standard feature on most packages now, and Bryce's raytracer shouldn't have much problem with it...

Attached Link: H2Locomotive

"Still, he's really going about things the long way." I agree...In fact, I was stating that very thing in a recent thread. lol But, H2 can still out-model me any day of the week,and I've got quite a few higher end modeling apps. Did you happen to step through the promo images at his store? Some of them (Like the train cars)have the wireframe screen captures on the last page. Also...the locomotive model that goes with those train cars is free. I've provided a link. It's an awesome model to download and study. Tom

Yup, lots of extra poly's, yet a trade-off is that Bryce handles its terrains VERY well. You ever try to handle just a 500,000 poly model in another program? On the other hand, Bryce handles its multi-million poly terrains with great ease. But yes, still a little overkill with those extra polys, lol. Absolutely, keep your fingers crossed with Bryce 6 accepting displacements. DAZ is now probably very tired of hearing about displacements from me. ;o) AS

How about displacement being turned into mesh? :-)

That's basically what a Bryce Terrain/Lattice does, but a displacement could be uv mapped! I don't see why not. AS

We'd first need decent UV mapping tools! :-)

Most displacement mapping is done in Photoshop or Zbrush. Bryce already does UV mapping, so all it would need is to be able to apply displacement to any surface. Bryce need not have an internal paint system to make displacement a reality...

Terrains are all displacement mapped planes (square faces).

Yes, they are. But we'd also need displacement for other primitives and models imported into Bryce. For instance, you cannot have a displaced Earth model now. Just a bump-mapped one, which doesn't look good enough. So, a displacement that will work on curved surfaces, too. With a possibility to export them, a la ZBrush. :-)

Displacements can work on any surface mesh, since during ther creation they can be uvmapped just like any other map. And, yes, being able to go ahead and export that created mesh out of bryce would be cool too. (like ZBrush) I'm hoping big time DAZ will give Bryce Displacement support in version 6, as most other software has adopted it, and, it would give a great tie-in to ZBrush, AND DAZ Studio already supports 16-bit displacements, so it's just a no-brainer to have Bryce support it also. Lets hope it comes in version 6, and not until version 7. AS