hello how about this topic
Trish
Posts: 2,625
Has anyone been able to put XFrog plants and flowers into Bryce....again my brain is over loaded because the trees come out with square leaves it doesn't seem to read the transparent pattern....Have you render them and do they look good??? Thanks in advance for your response on this
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Am just downloading one of the free samples now.
I'll have a quick look, though I suspect what is happening is that the transparency map isn't set right when the .obj file is imported and will need tweaking to make the leaves right... or maybe there is no trans map in the download.
Presumably there is a black/white outline of the leaf shape in the mat lab picture library?
When the leaves are selected, go into the mat lab and check that Transparency is set to white and that the green blob in the transparency row is placed in the correct channel corresponding to the trans map.
I'm also just finishing off a render that will take another hour, so I won't be able to look till that's done... coincidentally, my render could have done with some good plants and trees. :-)
They look to good to be true and you know what they say about that....it showed up (can't spell) transparent in paint .net I downloaded them in .3ds and I found out if you click on each of their boxed products you get a sample from each of them also...I hope this works out I need some new trees and bushes also. I will try what you said in Bryce....Thanks Trish I did an edit on this post I just tried one of their flowers on a quick render and it imported good and looks alright
I see now that it is not ok some of the petals have a black area around them they give you 3 of the same flower each one with more petals but no leaves... this is silly it can't be a transparent problem if some of the petals are ok???? Its the flowers that are open I will try again and check the pictures that came with them
I guess the petals that are closed are all geometry and the open ones use a transparency map.
It doesn't matter if the pictures have transparency in a paint programme because as far as I'm aware, Bryce doesn't see alpha channels like that... Which may be the problem.
I've downloaded the cherry tomato plant, but still haven't had a chance to look at it as my render is still anti-aliasing... looks like it may still be a while.
ok heres my settings in .mat lab and I killed off all of the .tiff that had any black or grey and I still have a slight square shadow but maybe that will be ok when not viewed from this close...I don't know oh well it was worth a shot I wish you a better outcome.
ok got rid of the shadow changed the image format to .PSD sent in the leaf as a photo to Bryce but I don't think I am willing to go through that with each tree and bush leaf.........Huh .......
A also have some X-Frog plants. I had importet them and sent to the Objects Library. Since the leaves and things have picture materials, the Blend Transparency has to be enabled. Unfortunately, they cannot be set to translucency anymore, as we can if we use procedural materials.
First picture shows what I took from the library.
Second shows that you have to select each individual mesh.
Third shows that you must make sure Blend Transparency is checked.
Fourth shows a quick render.
Hope it helps.
Thank you Trish for this thread and specially to Horo for the tips.I tried a xfrog plant and i can tell you that the colors looks dead or made from plastic to me :) Maybe with some warm light might give life to the plant when rendered close enough.
Xfrog plants are meant to be used in Terragen 2, Maya, 3ds max ,maybe there additional shaders can be applied.
Horo, how about Nobiax's posts on ShareCG did you tried them ? He/she created lots of nice plants (or props) , including grass to populate plains, with realistic textures, an example is http://www.sharecg.com/v/66742/related/5/3D-Model/Tropical-shrubs .
I think these are created in Maya but im not sure, however i tried one to import some time ago in Bryce and didn't worked..:down:
I've seen plants at Nubiax more realistic than the xfrog plants.
If and when you have time ,if you can test Nubiax plants too,me and lots of new users will thank you forever :).I see Nobiax have alpha maps too ,so like The Savage 64 said the importing might not work?
Suggestion for admin : This thread should be renamed as " How to import external plants and trees into Bryce" and make it Sticky so new users will find it or created a tutorial and post it in the tutorial thread.
Also another thread with tips how to import and apply custom textures maps on .obj and terrains :-)
And Trish if you can give it a related name to your threads would be better/easier for (new)users to track tips and hints related to a subject ;-)
Did you make the transparency white using the HLS settings?
Because it looks like your white isn't pure white.
My render finally rendered and I've had a quick look and mine works after the tweaks I suggested.
Yes, it's a bit of a pain having to do that, but at least the models don't seem to have many components, so the one I did only needed 7 parts altering in the mat lab.
To get the HLS settings, click 'Option' when you click on the little colour preview oval.
This opens up a window where you can directly dial in colour settings instead of using the rather 'hit and miss' default colour picker pallet.
At the bottom of the window that opens up, you need to click the HLS setting and the middle row (the L setting) needs to be at 255.
That will make sure your colour is pure white and then the faint grey box should disappear.
Sorry if I'm telling you stuff you already know. :)
The full plant rendered out with higher render settings and saved out as HDR file... I might have desaturated the colour a bit too much.
Savage64, yours came out great don't worry about telling me something that I should already know.....I've been without a computer for 2 years so I am having to re-learn everything Bryce not that I knew all that much before but now I have 2t to play with so its a race to fill up the hard drive....LOL no I forgot about the HLS...Duh...
Horo, as always thank you if I could figure things out like you I could be on top of the world....silly thing is the older I get the more I forget
Criss333, good point I should think of better titles.....ok on your link to cg you will have to download a free program called 7zip to open her filebecause it is a 7Z file (I don't know why they have to make stuff difficult) for me today......man.....ok inside I only found 1 plant picture below .jpg and 2 targa images and the illusive .obj file I think the targas might have to be changed to another file format not sure I will work on this later today...
Really thinking hard about buying Zbrush.....Daz is supposed to have a built in plug in that supports its file format according to the big Z people but it eats the heck out of polagons(spelling) again it seams to me that if it will import into Daz4.5 then it should go right into Bryce through the bridge.....Horo what is the I guess you would call it render capacity of polys in Bryce before I would kill the program????
I think the reason it doesn't work "out of the box" is because the textures are saved as .tga files but I didn't test for that.
What is apparent is that there is no .mtl file with the .obj files, which means that Bryce doesn't know what textures need applying.
What I did do was to open the Diffuse .tga file that came in the download from ShareCG in Photoshop to extract the alpha channel, which I copy and pasted into a new Photoshop document and saved as a greyscale .jpg called Shrub5Trans.jpg (save it back into the same folder as the .obj file). Then I deleted the alpha channel form the diffuse .tga doc and saved that doc as Shrub5.jpg (again, save that into the same folder).
Then open Bryce and import the object (at this point the plant will come in looking like a load of untextured squares).
The example I used only has one component, I chose it because it's leaves were the most complex shaped ones, so mapping your newly converted textures is a breeze.
Select the plant object and enter the Mat Lab.
Put a blob into the diffuse row on channel A and click the P button on the preview window that appears.
Then click the button directly above on the top row (this is just importing a picture).
A new window opens to import your pictures
Click one of the blank squares in the bottom of this window and navigate to the folder where you saved the .jpgs and select 'Shrub5.jpg'
Hit the tick to accept and then put a blob in the lower transparency row in channel B.
Repeat importing the picture using channel B and import 'Shrub5Trans.jpg'.
Then make sure the top transparency row's colour is set to white and the transparency row driven by your trans pic is set to '0' and you're good to go.
I also added some yellow/green specular to this render.
So, yes these shrubs can be made to work too.
Hope this helps... And I haven't copy checked this post so I hope I haven't got anything wrong.
Savage64, I am so glad you knew how to fix that square box problem...LOL I was looking at the render saying what is going on here???? I printed the screen on your instructions so I could remember them later...Did you find more than one plant in that 7z because mine even with the square leaves does not look like a palm fern...maybe she has more or something.....Wow we have more plants so this has been a neat adventure.
@cris333 - thanks for the link. I haven't a ShareCG account as yet - too busy with other things, but I might come back to this later.
@bullit35744 - "what is the I guess you would call it render capacity of polys in Bryce before I would kill the program?" - I can't say just like that. There is that darn 2 GB limit of Bryce. If your computer sports at least 4 GB, you can make it large Address Aware (http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556) and with that you can go to around 3.2 to 3.5 GB.
An important thing to keep in mind is that Bryce does all in memory - it even notes what you've done so you can undo it. There is no limit of the steps how much you can undo. It fills up the memory mercilessly. Once you have an elaborate scene in the works, save your work often (with a new name), quit Bryce, restart it and load your scene. This is the only way to clear the Undo-buffer and free memory.
Horo, Thanks for that link, I have 12gigs of ram so that should work out ok......see i was right you know all the tech stuff, what i am trying to figure out is using Zbrush models in Bryce, read above about Daz being able to import them ...so I am just guessing I should be able to use the bridge to get them into Bryce I would like to know if this would work before i spend the money on a better end result (or should I say fun for me to use expensive toy)
This looks like it could work found it used on renders on the cgsociety.org
I'm not very good at picture textures, Studio and ZBrush. In my understanding, GoZ is an application for Studio to create some sort of a bridge between Studio and ZBrush. I'm not sure but it may be that ZBrush creates UV maps from the models, Sculptris seems to do them. By the way, Wings3D can also create such maps.
Yes, she has quite a lot of freebie plants on ShareCG.
These were the ones I downloaded:
I like the look of bamboo too., I may have to get that one working later. :)
Another solution is to just use the XFrog packages made for Bryce and sold here at Daz. I know that's not as desireable as something you get for free but at least you shouldn't have to mess with making the transparencies right since they are in .obp format and ment for use in Bryce.
http://www.daz3d.com/xfrog-plant-sampler-1
http://www.daz3d.com/xfrog-plant-sampler-2
http://www.daz3d.com/xfrog-plant-sampler-3
I tried some of XFrog free plant samples a while ago. They offered "billboard", which I take to mean the flat image on the rectangle, and also ojb files. I liked the Opuntia, but close up it looks odd. I had success with the tomato plant, too, thought it looked very good. The billboards could be instanced, so creating several for background is possible without overloading the memory. The objs of course take more memory. So I used a few billboards in back ground, and an ojb in front but shadows have to be considered in positioning.
I'm sorry I do not have screen shots-that was on an old computer, with the XFrog samples. I don't know if they still have any. I'll check. Because on the rectangle the image is flat, I've used lights to bring out color. Try the billboards on spheres, shaping the spheres by squashing and stretching. Lots can be done, as long as the beads for Blend Transparency are set in the right channel. They have to be in the channel where the black and white silhouette is. Sometimes, as with hair, there are more than one. If it doesnt load you can go back with Material, through the image menu and find the file and import the material and masks that way. I do this with hair all the time.
Once you get the hang of the silhouette (mask? alpha? someone here will give the correct term),
you can have a lot of fun with editing tree leaves. I used Dover clip art and also some bows by Atenais. It is the same principle. If the color is poor, I put the image into my paint program and up the contrast and saturation. Then re-import as before.
The important thing is to have fun. I remember how frustrating that transparency was until I "grokked" the silhouette's purpose.
Yes, the billboard still exist here, with the other Xfrog products: http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=xfrog&x=0&y=0
Silhouette, mask, alpha? I think it's called an alpha mask. If you link billboards (2D-Faces) to the camera, they will always point to the camera, no matter how you move the camera.
Billboards are not that bad - though shadows are a bit difficult to get right. If you have a very elaborate scene, you can set up a part, render, delete the objects, then bring in the render as billboard and continue building the scene. If correctly done, nobody will see the difference.
@Horo
thank you for that tip about linking the rectangle to the camera.
attached is a rendered scene done with Alpha Masked Spheres. I used a Dover Clipart page, selecting one of the butterfiles and saved as a jpg in my personal materials folder. Also, I took a photo of some grass on my hill, saved as jpb in same folder. You can see I set this scene up very quickly, since I didnt trouble to completely conceal the join of the thin wall terrain that was to just break up the edge of the rectangle. I mapped the terrain with the grass image, and then used the same image on the rectangle. The illusion of a dip is from the angle of the photograph. Most of the lower part of the grass is the rectangle image. I've also Alpha-Masked grass photos that I took more on eye level so as to get stalks. I was in a hurry here. I had that same greying-out of the colors. I put beads into all the first channel Diffusion and Ambience to brighten. The butterflies are the Dover clipart mapped with the image just loaded in the first channel bead, and in the second channel I loaded the Alpha Mask that I made in the Menu window by clicking on the half-moon icon of black/white of the original butterfly image. Put the Blend transparency bead in that second channel.
I "cheated" by loading the exported Bryce render image into paintshop pro and adding a Screen layer to brighten constrast and colors. But I hope it gets the imagination going as to new and interesting things to do in Bryce.
Savage64
I read your post and ty for your time but i still cant get it to work.About exporting alpha chanel, i deleted other channels but i cant save alpha channel in photoshop as jpg, only in psd,raw or psb even if i create new document and use move/drag and drop tool.
The second image is a screenshot from mat lab using your instructions for this shrub , but as for first i used the default image :lol: because i cant save alpha channel as .jpg
If i cant save as jpg then some others cant do it too.Well i should keep playing in Bryce with just some landscapes but the problem is when/if i want to model obj and i will need to know how to apply different maps in bryce such as diffuse,normal,specular,..etc
I should read some tutorials except the bryce artist guide with 2000 pages pdf is not even organized as should be :-/ (terrain tips phrases are splitted in almost chapters lol)
EDIT: to bad with your signature :) you should write some tutorials specialy how to import different objects from Nubiax,maya,3ds max,etc etc etc , to many tutorials on Bryce forum/web won't hurt ,in fact it'll be better , more bryce users will join to the community :lol: I can help with creating pdfs if you/anyone need :lol: here is a pdf made by me http://www.sharecg.com/v/63140/view/3/PDF-Tutorial/Bryce-Tutorial-1---Basic-and-Complex-Booleans :lol:
To save the alpha channel in photoshop as a ,jpg:
Go to channels tab and click in the bottom one (the alpha channel silhouette).
Select all and copy.
Go to Layers tab.
Paste onto new layer.
Making sure your newly pasted layer is at the top, click 'Flatten image'.
In 'Image mode' check 'Make Greyscale'
Go back to channels tab and select alpha channel.
Click to delete the alpha channel.
Go to save and save as .jpg
Photoshop will only save .jpg's if there is no alpha channel existing in the document, so you have to make it into the image instead and delete it from the channels list.
Hope this helps. :-)
LordHardDriven, Thanks for letting me know about the xfrog plants on Daz I had no idea......Duh. Shows how little I shop I guess
TheSavage64, How did the bamboo plant turn out???? post a shot so we can see.
Cris333 Did you get your plant your plant to work???
No problem and don't feel bad about not knowing about those, they were release several years ago when Daz first aquired Bryce and with the way the site is now it's harder to find old releases for a particular program like Bryce, then it used to be.