Digital Art Zone

I recently downloaded Bryce 7.1 Pro.  I installed it a few days ago, and with the exception of the cursory glance I gave it after installation (because I didn’t have time for more than that), I’ve never set eyes on Bryce until last night (when I did have more time).

I read through most of part 1 of the Artist’s Guide, and got to the point where I had a sky preset, two mountains, a third one turned upside down to form a lake, and the flat plane. I didn’t get to part where you fill the lake, because I wanted to render what I had so far. The limitations of my computer would make it take about an hour to render, even with this simple scene. Not too bad, I figured, for someone who knows nothing about Bryce.

I know it will take practice, but I have questions. For instance, when using multiple elements in a scene, how do I know when I have to perform the Boolean operation, (like in wanting to make a hole for a lake) and make adjustments to the positive or negative? When opening a new document, how do I know how to set the basic size parameters for the project I want to make? The default settings (1514x855) seem to be a bit large. Should I just leave it there? Sorry if that seems like a stupid question. Also, is it absolutely necessary to connect multiple elements into a group?

I know if I read more into the AG, things may become more clear, but I wanted to see if I could get any advice here. Thank you in advance.

Ok, Booleans first:

Positive is the object you want to keep, negative is like a cookie cutter to remove mesh from the positive mesh.

Therefore the lake scene is the flat ground is positive as that is what you want to keep
The upside down mountain is negative as that will cut a hole into the ground leaving a negative impression.
Group the two meshes.
Add a water plane to fill the hole.

Keep in mind with Bryce the boolean objects are still independent objects, therefore you can still select the ground or the inverted mountain and adjust if necessary.
Right clicking on that group will bring up a menu of the group and each object.

As for document size, while learning, the default will do, but a time will come when you need to have an image that fits a certain size, a good example is the internet, when sharing images, you can decide on how big is too big or well too small. Some monitors are set to 800x600, others are 1024x768, etc. A web site may require the image to be less that 600x600 (this forum was a good example of that) Or you may want to share your images on a dvd standard resolution of a TV is 720x640 while blu-ray HD is 1440x1080 or 1280x720.
When you get to the point of rendering photo quality images then the resolution jumps way up for example a 3 megapixel image 1600x1200 or 10MP is 3888x2592.

So you see, the document size is totally up to you and where (or what media) you plan on showing the image.

Set the document size as it suits you best, you can set a sky, just how you would like to start most of your projects. Then save as “default.br7” into the folder where the Bryce exe is. Each time you start Bryce, you’ll get that setup.

Thank you both for your comments and advice. Like I said, I will need to work with it some more and practice, but honestly, I found DS4 easier to learn and work with (even though I still don’t know everything about that, either). I think until I get more of a feel for it, I may even turn off the anti-aliasing, since that’s just more time I have to wait on a render.

Another question that just came to mind - I notice when I’m rendering an image, I can stop and resume the render, and if I stop it, it all goes back to the wire-frames when I click on the roller-ball or the XYZ controls. This is normal? Why does it do that?

This might help some more, IanzThingz is doing the same as you here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/2133/

Megarig - 15 June 2012 01:58 AM

Thank you both for your comments and advice. Like I said, I will need to work with it some more and practice, but honestly, I found DS4 easier to learn and work with (even though I still don’t know everything about that, either). I think until I get more of a feel for it, I may even turn off the anti-aliasing, since that’s just more time I have to wait on a render.

Another question that just came to mind - I notice when I’m rendering an image, I can stop and resume the render, and if I stop it, it all goes back to the wire-frames when I click on the roller-ball or the XYZ controls. This is normal? Why does it do that?

This is normal behaviour. As soon as you click on something in the scene Bryce will assume that you ar going to change something.

Stop and resume render is very useful if you have a long render and want to save it and come back to it later to finish the render. Is also handy if you think the render is taking too long, because sometimes saving and closing a render will clear all cached items which have been removed form the actual saved file, so when you re open Bryce the render will go faster.

Szark - 15 June 2012 06:43 AM

This might help some more, IanzThingz is doing the same as you here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/2133/

Completed http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/2165/