Hi all,

I am looking for animated displacement, bump, normal and caustic maps. Are there any resources available out there? Maybe I wasn't looking in the right way, but Google was mostly giving me tutorials on how to make them in various softwares, instead of providing examples of ready made ones.

Also, is there a way to animate a shader in Carrara so that it would be rotating a map that I have? Or so that it would be scrolling a seamlessly tiled one up and down? I know that, for example, the noise factory option has a transform tab where I can set the noise to animate over time, but I don't see the tab in the Texture Map options. Is there a way around that? Are there plug-ins that can do that?

I have a ShaderGel plug-in from DCG and when I use a cellular-based color map in the shader for the Gel, I get an ugly seam line and the color map seems to wrap into a point in the middle of the light's influence. Seems to be some sort of weired UV mapping issue. What is the plug-in mapping the shader onto? and how can I get around the distortion?

Thanks.

The "Caustics Generator" is available in both freeware and commercial versions at http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/ 
You can make very good caustics animations with the freeware version. I haven't tried the commercial version yet. I've also used Caustics generator to make greyscale animated displacement maps for pretty credible waves in Carrara. To do this just add a lot of blur so the waves are not so sharply defined.

Quote-"*Also, is there a way to animate a shader in Carrara so that it would be rotating a map that I have? Or so that it would be scrolling a seamlessly tiled one up and down? I know that, for example, the noise factory option has a transform tab where I can set the noise to animate over time, but I don't see the tab in the Texture Map options. Is there a way around that? Are there plug-ins that can do that?"

Probably the easiest way to do this is to use a previously prepared AVI or QT animation as your texture. Carrara supports this. You can use video files, or image sequences. You can also use this to simulate a TV program on a 3d model television, a Drive-in movie screen, a flying billboard on a blimp etc.

Thanks a lot, 50parsecs! I downloaded the program and will try it out. I'll come back with more questions if I get stuck.

You're welcome Antaran. I'm working on a tutorial that explains how to use Bryce's abilities to animate terrains and how to turn that into an animated greyscale displacement map for use in Carrara.

I'd be very interested in the tutorial. I have Brice, and I tried working with it a few times, but Carrara is easier to use for what I need to do most of the times. But I think Brice probably has its special uses which I simply don't know about. What you are describing sounds just like such a use, so I'd be very glad to learn more about it. If it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you post a link in this forum when you publish your tutorial, please?

Will this tutorial be applicable to older version of Brice or just the newest one which just came out?

Thank you again for your help!

At least I know someone would be interested in the tutorial I'm working on, hehe. Actually Bryce does have some good uses which always keeps it in my toolkit, even though I render the majority of my stuff in Carrara. I will be sure to post a link to the tut. No worries about using an older version of Bryce.
I'm using Bryce 5.5 to do this, 'cause I believe material and terrain animation was broken in Bryce ver. 6. Hopefully they've fixed it by now.
Cheers, Edmund

I meant to also mention that this method uses a series of six, or more 512x512 greyscale bitmap images for importation into Bryce's terrain editor. Judging by your gallery, and the questions you asked; I'm assuming that you are comfy with using a bitmap editor, PS, or other? If not, I could send you some I have prepared. You could probably make way better ones. ;)

The Bryce that I have is 6.3. I don't have it installed yet. This is a relatively new computer, and I didn't need Bryce after I got it, so I never got to installing it. Is 6.3 the broken one? Do I need to find a 5.5 somewhere?

I'm not very comfortable painting in PS or Gimp and I know very little about noise filters, but I do know my way around those programs. If your tutorial mentions what you did in one of them, chances are I'll know how to replicate it in the other. :)

I believe that the broken material and terrain animation was fixed with the 6.3 update, so you should be able to use it to replicate the "tutorial".
 The greyscale bitmaps prepared in an image editor are really simple, no real painting involved, unless you want to. Just filling a document with a mid-grey, and hitting it with a series of filters. ;)

50parsecs:

I have always found the Carrara terrain generator difficult - the tools are like trying to sculpt ice with a sledge hammer.  Does Bryce do a better job at this?

I had about given up  on Carrara terrains, but Brian used to push me to try - he always took my complaints and ran circles around them.

Anyway - I would be very interested if Bryce handles this better.  I have it, but also haven't bothered to install.  I looked at it years ago and the interface scared me off.

You mentioned multiple bitmaps - are they combined somehow in Bryce to provide different terrain layers?

Thanks.

I originally started out my 3D experience with Bryce and quickly found that it had a very decent array
of terrain generators, filters and other tools that made it pretty easy to make terrains that fit my models, instead of the other way around. As a bit of SSP I offer this render from my gallery where I used Bryce to generate the terrain for my Carrara  render.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1843720&user_id=581189&np&np

  I built the bridge model in Wings, and box modeled a terrain "profile" of the canyon to fit it. I imported
the profile model into Bryce, rendered it from top camera using the altitude render, which gives a greyscale heightmap, and then I imported that into Bryce's terrain editor and "attacked" it with the erosion brush to shape it. All I had to do then was import the new heightmap into Carrara and adjust the dimensions of the resultant terrain a little to fit my bridge. Much simpler to do than it sounds.;)
 
Carrara's terrain editor has some neat tools as well, but is a bit harder to come to terms with, at least for me. I think the two apps strengths compliment each other. 
 
  In Bryce you can animate terrains, making changes with built-in filters, or imported bitmaps and setting keyframes for the geometry changes on the animation timeline.  I have made a few animated
creek, or river greyscale animations which import beautifully into Carrara's displacement channel.
In a ten second animation I'll quite often import 10 different bitmaps, one every second, at 30fps, and Bryce does a pretty nice job of "tweening" from bitmap to bitmap. I still can't figure out how to make it loop yet though, heh heh.