This thread is intended to be used to share your progress or possible final submissions with the members of the community as well as those running the contest. Please feel free to post your images for advice and tips, to get feedback, or to even just simply show off your hard work! Throughout the month myself and others will be popping in to give help and advice as you work to make your creative visions for the contest come to life.
We are concentrating on using Bryce this month, as it is the program in the DAZ 3D stable of programs most often used for creating terrains and landscapes. Many of you will have downloaded it when it was free, and now we will help you get to grips with using it.
Intent: To produce an environment that can be used as it is in Bryce or rendered out to use as a background image for use in Daz Studio or Poser.We will also talk about transferring it from Bryce to Daz Studio using the built in bridge.
We have people standing by to give you hints and tips varying from how to get your orignal terrain into the working panel to how to edit it to a lesser or greater degree, depending on what you wish to acheive.
Bryce is very simple to use to produce a simple terrain, but we will try and guide you through how to customise it and add other features so that you can produce a useful and useable background for your scene, and eventually maybe even a landscape that is complete in itself.
Most important thing to remember is that we want you to have fun and learn at the same time.
David Brinnen has made a tutorial video to help you in getting started
"We would like to thank David Brinnen and Horowho have graciously decided to sponsor this month’s contest" They will be awarding a special prize to the winners of this month’s contest. To view some of David Brinnen and Horo items please see their store fronts hereDavid Brinnen's Store & Horo's Store
Time permitting I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have. And if they are particularly good/challenging/interesting, and again - time permitting - I'll try and make a short video to highlight my answer. My approach is generally to focus on lighting and material solutions first and then worry about adding complexity afterwards, after those problems have been solved. The reason being, everything you add slows down the response of the software a little bit - and working towards a solution, getting the light and the materials right is a multi-stage process whereby you gradually creep up on the lighting and materials you want. So my recommendation is keep things simple to begin with and get more ambitious when you can make a simple scene one or two elements nice to look at. A well lit, and suitably textured scene that is poorly composed will usually be more pleasing to the eye than a very complex scene lit with basic lighting and inappropriate materials.
I've recently started learning Bryce and so far have only done a couple of renders, including the one below (mostly based on David Brinnen's tutorial, linked above). While it's not nearly as good as David's or Chohole's, I'm posting this image as evidence that you can, starting from scratch, achieve nice results very quickly. If you're completely new to Bryce, you may wish to watch this one (also by David Brinnen) first, to get a handle on the interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfGN-Yu8Hj0&feature=player_embedded
I love Bryce. Unfortunately, I'm not really a new user, by any stretch of imagination, so I won't be able to do a contest entry. Bummer. Can I still ask annoying questions, though? Because I do have one, and I haven't gotten around to searching for the answer yet. How do you make snow in Bryce? I've never really tried. Never had any interest until about three weeks ago, then suddenly started wanting to go make snow.
I'm Lurking for all the GREAT tips I'm so sure will be posted. I've been playing with Bryce for a bit now and really wish to get good enough to include it in my work flow, when I get a work flow back.
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but Carrara also has a terrain generator, atmospheric editor, plant creator, terrain shader functions and surface replicators. Any reason why you must restrict the contest to Bryce?
Evil Prodiucer. It is stated quite clearly in the header post that this is a Bryce specific contest. Sponsored by Bryce PAs as well as DAZ 3D, and led by me as a veteran Brycer.
If it proves to be popular and useful, then in the future we could possibly do a Carrara only one.
Edited to add, and of course Bryce was until very recently being offered at 100% discount, and even now is very low in price, as against the price of Carrara, so we are likely to have many more Bryce New Users than we are Carrara ones, and this is the New Users Forum.
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but Carrara also has a terrain generator, atmospheric editor, plant creator, terrain shader functions and surface replicators. Any reason why you must restrict the contest to Bryce?
This contest is to give those who have not used Bryce a chance to learn that application as so many had gotten it free but not many have necessarily tried it out
As Cho mentioned, in the future we may do a Carrara and even Hexagon specific contest as well.
All of us from time to time gets software we never get a chance to or have a reason to try so this contest is an effort at getting those who maybe have not checked out Bryce a chance to do so as well as a chance to pick the brains of those who have used it and loved it
Evil Prodiucer. It is stated quite clearly in the header post that this is a Bryce specific contest. Sponsored by Bryce PAs as well as DAZ 3D, and led by me as a veteran Brycer.
I did see that. Why do you think I asked the question?
Can I still ask annoying questions, though? Because I do have one, and I haven't gotten around to searching for the answer yet. How do you make snow in Bryce? I've never really tried. Never had any interest until about three weeks ago, then suddenly started wanting to go make snow.
Snow is really tricky in any application because it's just so damned white, reflective and without proper lighting, featureless.
So really it's about getting a balance of whiteness while keeping detail. I think made more tricky by the fact that Bryce doesn't do Sub Surface Scattering.
There are of course quite a lot of ready made shader mats with snow on them for snow topped mountains etc (see first example below) and if you are using Pro7 and have installed the extra content, you will have access to some of David's excellent pro materials which include several snows (including a groovy 'falling snow' which is a volumetric material that you can put in a slab or sphere to fill your scene with falling snow as in the second example below).
If you wanted to make you own material that allowed you to put snow on the top of objects within your scene, then that's done in the Deep Texture Editor (a scary place) and would involve using slope filters so that your snow only appeared on flat horizontal surfaces while the rest of the object had a regular material showing on it's vertical surfaces.
Chohole also came up with a good way to simulate snow on the branches of the trees in her render above, but I'll let her explain how she did that.
Sorry if this is a bit vague, but I'm hoping David can come along and point to one if his video tutorials.
[ Edited: 03 February 2013 01:07 AM by TheSavage64 ]
Throughout the month myself and others will be popping in to give help and advice as you work to make your creative visions for the contest come to life.
