I was just messing around and wanted to see how a car would look like in AgentSmiths Chomper scene and This is what I got.

First Car rendered in Default Bryce 6 scene.

Here it is again inside the chomper scene with chomper material added to the body.

Not so smooth...... So whats going on here??

select the whole model... the from the little menu thats showing... click the "E" for edit mesh... and click the smooth sphere..   do 45* see if that will smooth it to your liking......

The car is in .LWO format... I decided to do a quick import in Carrara and see how the model would fair there and this is what I got.  Interestingly enough I had to do something editing of the materials as most of them came in transparent.  So what am I doing wrong in Bryce to get the different results? Is it the way the Material is mapped on the surface? Wrong Light settings? HDRI Settings?

Impoirting meshes into different programs can have various effects on how the smoothing acts.

Actually, the car has not changed at all in the two different Bryce scenes. It is just the nature of the reflections that show off how unsmoothed that cars mesh actually is in that 2nd scene. (It's just as bad in the first scene, but there is less to reflect, so less to see)

Just smooth the car out after bringing it into Bryce, and it will look better than ever.

In Bryce, select the (entire) car, click the small E beside the mesh, then take the slider to 46 degrees, and then click the left Picture Icon to start the smoothing. After it is finished click the check mark. Smoothing can take a while to calculate.

You'll have to manually smooth out the surfaces in Bryce, using "E" option Tom271 mentioned. Unfortunately I don't think that Bryce automatically smooth any mesh out when it's imported, at least it never has for me. I've been rendering some cars recently and no matter what model it is, and they are Lightwave objects, I have to always manually smooth them.

I swear that Tom's post wasn't there before..........I think I need more coffee.

I was double clicking the Smooth Icon...something I remember doing from Bryce 4 to smooth things out and didnt even think about playing with the slider, and what a difference that slider makes and it wasnt terribly long to do.  Now I think I need to tone down the reflection a tad bit.

Someone needs to do various car tires with nice treads.

I was thinking about doing the treads and than I thought I probably have to use some kind of Alpha channel Method.

Alpha channels is one of those things that I havent got my head wrapped around.  I see people doing amazing things with them in photoshop, but I havent quite got the concept how they work.

I could do some in Solidworks, probably make a shape and array it in a circle, then apply to something that will be a tire. Just time... real life is creeping in this week. Deadline with project is now and been pushing hard on that. I need a good holiday. Maybe I'll do a sunset island render next and imagine myself in it. Sipping away some exotic drink in my own private virtual world..... :-)

Bryce doesn't actually smooth the mesh or add polys, It scatters the diffuse rays reflection off individual triangles. If you get up really close you may still be able to see flat sections especially along the edges of the model or in shadows if you have no ambient texture applied.

Hey AS, on cars and materials - I swear I saw an Audi driving along in the lane next to me on the M4 the other day and I'm sure someone nicked that red material I started and you removed the bump from and tried out on that chinese dragon model.

Looked pretty good too!

Now if I had a car model - like the one in this thread, I'd try out that material on it - like a shot.

Usually if you want something to import with nice smoothing in Bryce, then .obj format is the way to go. A lot of the other formats don't seem to carry over the smoothing data/groups as well and you'll see polys. .3DS is particularly bad that way. (Although sometimes having hard edged polys can be a good thing.)

Fran, if you're interested in cars - I may have a few unusual freebie models floating around. If you're interested in a Viper in particular, some guy called Hellborn did a free one in Wings3D. But that's going a long ways back. I'm not sure if he or his model are even around anymore.

I would certainly be interested in car freebies.  I did once try modelling one in Wings - can you say B-O-X?

gggg

Looking back over this I also see some comments about tires. For those who know enough of their way around Wings-- it's not hard to do some nice tires with treads. Easiest way is to make treads separate from the main tire blank, duplicate rotate duplicate rotate... Then combine. You'll have a poly-bomb (those who dare separate after completion might be damned), but it does make for one really nice tire. I may have a few sitting around that are made like that, if anyone is actually that interested.

As for the cars Fran might be interested in, she'll have to check here Rendo-mail.

Hrm, no time to play with this, but how about tire treads as some sort of bumpmap? Place on a cylinder... etc.

That would be the simplest solution.

Even if you went as far as to export a tire off the car out of Bryce, into UVMapper Classic, and made some sort of basic uvmap, so you could just paint on a tread. That would work great. Wouldn't have to be perfect in any way, just so long as whatever uvmap you clicked up would make just the flat part of the tire accessable to painting.

What is this Agent Smith's Chomper scene?

do a search in these threads  AS has a nice render of the Daz Chomper Robot.

**HMMMM!  A forum search is returning nothing.   Typical.

Ok finally found it. Quite nice!**

I tried a bump map to make treads with mixed results. First I had to remember that Pi was my friend. When I got an image that was 3.14 times the radius of the tire by the width I finally got a tread that didn't distort when applied. Next I had to get the zig and zag of the tread to meet back up at the ends so the tetxture could be seamless. I used the drawing thing in microsoft office. It has a nice snap to grid function. I could zig and zag between points of the grid and get the same spacing every time.

The tire was on an imported 3ds car with no mapping. I needed to apply the texture as a cylinder but the top of the tire was the top curve not the hub. I finally figured out by playing with rotating the x, y, z by 90 degrees that I could switch the top of the tire to the side of the tire and get the bump to map correctly. I think it was rotate Y 90 and leave the others zero but can't remember for sure.

I slapped everything together then decided to cut the wheels to steer for the road I had made. When I Turned the tires the bump stayed at 90 degrees. Here was no tread on the face of the tire and a little ghost tread floating in space where the bump should be if the tire were straight.

I played with rotating X to make the texture match the tire but gave up and finally discovered that if I used parametric texturing and rotated Y 90 the texture would track with the posing of the tire.

If you can get a mapped tire it's definately the way to go but it can be done without it.

I think bazze has made the tires available from his muscle car image (on his website).

Bumps don't always produce the right shading if a shadow falls on 'em. That's why bryce still needs real displacement mapping. But it is a stopgap of sorts.