I'm playing around with creating a ruin entirely in Bryce... for the moment anyway. Made the simple shape then started eating away at the pristine edges with terrains... which is working but now I have 2202245 polys...

a) is that a lot? and
b) is there a simple way to reduce the polys?

depending on the detail you want, you may have to have the large poly count BUT you can change the poly count of the terrains you are using.

select the terrain
go to the terrain editor
click the  grid and lower the resolution
that effectively lowers the resolution of the terrain.

but, keep in mind..lower poly count = lower detail.

luck
BT

Can you manage to get the same kind of errosion w/ using less number of terrains?
i.e. One big terrain one for the whole door area, instead of a couple smaller terrains. By 'bigger' and 'smaller', I mean scale, not resolution.

I usually just use rocks, but the detail for upclose camera probably wouldn't be there. AgentSmith has been using other programs to lower the poly count on exported objects. Maybe export the object, reduce the poly, then import back into Bryce.

Big fancy programs like Maya can reduce polys. Once you make a terrain and collapse the mesh you are stuck with the polys you have. I'm assuming you have bryce 6. You have to control the mesh resolution before you boolean.

There is a wireframe resolution button on the right side of the Bryce desktop. You have three settings, Motion, static, and selected. Click on selected and you will see numbers 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. The lower the number the less polys in the terrain. Make a version and save then start by setting selected resolution at 8. Group and collapse and look at the mesh. If it is too smooth go back to the saved version crank the resolution up to 16 and try again.

Another idea , although I've never tried it, create a terrain large enough to rough up the edges of entire doorway; then, use brush in terrain editor to brush out the uneeded part for boolean (terrain is now "U" shaped.  This should lower count, I think.

Yes as Electroglyph suggests, the more sophisticated programs do allow the artist to reduce polys even as you watch. Perhaps then it is time that the newer, upcoming updates of Bryce take this into consideration and find at least a plug-in to fill the function if at present one doesn’t exist.

You should go to http://www.rodluc.com/ The art of Luca Rodolfi. Visit his freestuff, scroll down and download the abby ruin. Download the obj version and load it with textures. Copy and paste a version with the bryce default gray texture applied and look at the two side by side.

Basically, Modeling only buys you something in a scene if you can get the camera in a position where you can see the edges. Everything else in a ruin can be done by textures or making sure edges don't parallel. Abby Ruin  is an excellent example of putting detail only where it's needed.

Um.....

Well I've downloaded the Abbey Ruin...
Is it supposed to be viewed from just one particular... direction or something?  Or is it only for use in ... 3dsMax... or Maya?

Cos all I see in Bryce is a mess, looks like the model exploded or something, bits everywhere..., plus some of the walls look twisted, or lacking a hard edge... or 6. 

I dunno, something's not right.

Quote - Another idea , although I've never tried it, create a terrain large enough to rough up the edges of entire doorway; then, use brush in terrain editor to brush out the uneeded part for boolean (terrain is now "U" shaped.  This should lower count, I think.

Sounds like a sensible idea, I'll look into this one.

I thought I might have to start all over again, but was hoping someone knew about the poly reducing thing, so I wouldn't have to... oh well... (shrug)

"... Vizzini said, go back to the beginning, so..."

That Abbey Ruin model is 317,455 polygons...And they are almost all triangles.
I guess I have different idea about what 'Low Poly" means.
~ backs out of thread cautiously ~

Well... sorry! maybe it's not such a good example after all. Wasn't it Bill Gates who said, "No one will ever need more than 64K of memory."

I'm sorry but I've also done a little experimenting with just one shape. Reducing the wireframe cuts the size but not that much. Good old terrain exporter seems to be the way to go. Let me demo.

I created a bryce cube and applied Brick wall 2b texture to it.
I rendered an image then used paintshiop to create a bumpmap.

I created another image that is just a mask to chop out some of the bricks.

This is what happened. Images across the top are untextured. Images across the bottom are textured. In the center is the original brick wall. Neat clean and not very damaged looking. To the right I generated a terrain from the first bump map. I set it positive and made another cube negative just so I could group and collapse to get a mesh. As you can see the top wire setting of 128 produced a 583753 poly mesh. I cranked the wire settings down to 8 and only managed to reduce the  poly count to 523527. 

I also tried exporting the mask version on the left in the same manner. I thought the mesh would be smaller without all the pocks in the bricks or the mortar grooves. I was suprised to find that the export was the same 583753 polys.

I used the export menu from the terrain editor for the mask image and accepted the default resolution when the exporter popped up. This produced a 3ds file with 7303 polys.

I guess the lesson is export your terrains first then use mesh objects to boolean.

**electroglyph,**Don't apologise, any information is good.  From the looks of it, yours is very good.

I've used the terrain exporter and photoshop - only twice, and I'm trying desperately to remember what it was I did with it... I think I made a material, exported it to photoshop (via the terrain editor), added some layers to the image, and re-imported it to the terrain editor... I think.  But the procedure of exporting & importing is vague in my memory now, and I can't remember the 2nd thing I did in it...

I really do need to do more with it, learn more about what you can achieve in the terrain editor, I'm sure there's a lot of scope in there.

By the way:- "I used the export menu from the terrain editor for the mask image and accepted the default resolution when the exporter popped up. This produced a 3ds file with 7303 polys."

Why 3ds? 

None of my progs use it although Bryce is supposed to export it, but not very well.

It didn't have to be 3ds. I just like them because:

3ds doesn't parametric map like obj files but it takes procedural textures in cubic, object top, etc. just the same. 

3ds files are generally 1/3 the size of the same obj files.

Before you go too far let me stop you. I found out that exported terrains don't have bottoms and exported lattices are just double terrains not closed objects. Any terrain object you export from Bryce to 3ds, dxf, obj format winds up being an open object. Bryce won't let you boolean with open objects. (Rhino you can combine open and closed, but its $1000).

I've been playing around with terrains and this works best. Here's the picture . In the center is the original terrain 524288 polys and a bryce cube 6 polys. I set the terrain negative and the cube positive. I copied the two. I set the static and selected wireframe resolutions to 128. I found out that if you change the wireframe resolution after you group it doesn't change the final size resolution. After this I grouped and combined the two. They produced a combined mesh 528473 polys. I exported this by going to the top bar in bryce and using the export object command under the file menu. I loaded the exported object into Bryce this came in as a group with only 4179 polys. It's possible to ungroup and apply a different texture to the cube or the hole.

I pasted the original terrain and cube again. and moved them to the left
I went back into the wireframe resolution and set it to 8.
I grouped and combined, exported, and imported again.
Notice the new object is only 62 polys but the hole is rounded off and much of the detail is gone.

blender has poly reducing so import it there reduce the polysand export, u know its free.

Hi Fran - this is a feature in Cinema (poly reduction).

Electroglyph,
Ah, interesting, I've copied that, I'll take a look at that.  Thanks.

Incarnadine,
In Cinema is it? (suddenly perking up) Hmmm, I must look at that too... ta.

ysvry,
Hmmm, blender too eh, ta.

Not many people seem to know that Metasequoia LE (free, no strings, small fast download) has good, intelligent poly reduction, (also smoothing and rounding if you want to go the other way towards mega-poly counts).  It imports/exports COB format, as does Bryce, and you can do UV mapping in it.   More people should use that app.

Attached Link: MetaSequoia LE

In case anybody wants a link. ;)

Am i kind of missing the problem? I thought bryce effortlessly handles hundreds of millions of polygons? I mean, i've used hundreds of millions of polygons before, and apart from large file sizes (which shouldnt be a prob with todays harddisk sizes) there didnt seem to be any problems? Even with just 512mb of ram!

I think its unneccesary work to work with imagemaps and god knows other tricks to reduce polycounts if booleaning terrains works just fine... To reduce unneccesary strain just reduce the terrains resolution to the amount of detail needed. Obviously there's no point in using a 4096x4096 terrain on an object thats gunna take up 25x25 pixels...
I'd say make things high-res, save them in seperate scenes. Use families to allow for easy selecting of sets of terrains. W
hen ur deciding on final composition, import the objects one by one arrange the objects location and import the next object.
If at some point during the importing process you get the feeling that you really should get to reducing poly-count strain on your system, you can start reducing terrain resolutions as u see fit.
Objects in the distance need less detail then object in the front. objects that take up large screen areas need more detail then objects that take up little screen area.

No, you didn't miss the problem, I wasn't sure if there was a problem, which is why I asked if that number of polys was high - not being sure what Bryce 6 thinks is high, and knowing I'd planned to do a lot more eating away at the model with terrains, if it wasn't too high a poly count.

There's only this one ruin model - at the moment - so not something I can save parts of - especially as it's a round tower.

But if this technique worked, and I could produce a decent looking model this way - i.e. decayed and crumbling enough - then I'd probably want to do a few models in the same way, so then save and import etc.

I'd been collapsing after each terrain booleaned away part of the ruin, making for a less complex model, but I may stop that, and just group them all, since once collapsed you can't more the terrain any more....

I may also decide to texture the terrain before booleaning, since then you leave the texture behind on the eaten away portion of the ruin....  Hmmm...

" once collapsed you can't more the terrain any more...." good to know that fran,
Well i think reducing poly count is the way to go as long as it doesnt show, KEEP IT SIMPLE, thats my motto. Benefit is also faster rendering.

As far as i know bryce's architecture was traditionally based on parametric geometry, which probably means it deals with terrains much differently then it would with a pure 4-million poly imported mesh. At least i've never heard of someone importing a mesh with hundreds of millions of polygons in bryce yet i have heard of people using hundreds of terrains and/or lattices, which should amount to hundreds of millions of poly's.
So though i havent tested this, my suspicion is that, unless bryce's internal architecture has been built specifically to cope with huge amounts of polygons, a collapsed mesh (which is essentially become a poly-mesh) might actually be less economic then an un-collapsed mesh.

Yeah, so yet another reason not to collapse the mesh.  Thanks Rayraz.

no prob :-)