Digital Art Zone

davidb45 - 07 October 2012 10:08 PM

GussNemo,

“Are you referring to the blue bead to the right of the word Displacement?”  I can’t move the blue bead to Texture A, for example.

“Or the object to the left of the word that looks like a press down button?”  The slider on the left side will not move.

“Just to the left of the word is a small window displaying numbers.  Are you able to left click on that window and highlight it?” Yes, and I can enter a numeric value but it resets to 0.

Very frustrating.

Sounds like another one of those mystery errors that seems to hit one or two people but nobody else. I got one, not the same but essentially I can’t import .obj’s directly into Bryce although others can. I can import other formats but when I try .objs Bryce says “Unexpected error (failed creation)”. I can import .objs though if I import it into Studio and then send it to Bryce over the bridge. Anyway when I ask, people have never heard of the error and tell me they can import .objs into Bryce directly with no problem.

Now as far as displacement I’ve never tried that. I have however seen quite a few people way more experienced with Bryce report that it’s flaky and is prone to causing Bryce to crash. As a note I paused here, open a blank scene, created a single Bryce rock, went into materials, put a blob in channel A for displacement let it apply the default DTE setting that popped up which was waves2 I think? I was able to go to attributes and manually adjust that setting David showed but it seems to have a maximum of .1 because I could set .01 on up to .09 and it would hold but anything above .1 would revert back to .1 as soon as you close attributes. It would distort the rock in strange ways similar to what guss posted if I adjusted the slider next to displacement. I didn’t do more then the one rock and playing with it’s setting and rendering but I got no crashes.

@Mark:  That’s the first thing that went through my mind.  Adjust the color towards black, play a bit to get the two bottom quills separated, and it’d make a nice looking sea urchin.

@Horo:  I always find it interesting, and somewhat frustrating, that something nice looking can come from experimentation.  Problem comes in repeating those experiments to obtain consistent results.  I stored the texture, and saved the render, so using it again won’t be a problem.

@davidb:  Have you tried going to the Help tab and selected Contact Us?  Maybe they have a fix or suggestion on a fix?

GussNemo - 08 October 2012 10:56 AM

@davidb:  Have you tried going to the Help tab and selected Contact Us?  Maybe they have a fix or suggestion on a fix?

I think he will find there is more help to be found here in the forum, really, than he will get from Customer Service for Bryce specific problems.

Steps which worked on my system

Windows 7 Pro
64 bit OS
Intel i7 CPU
6 Gb memory
HD 5850 GPU

1 from launch.  Create a Bryce primitive cube
2 set displacement value (see 1st image)
3 put a blob in Channel A (again 1st image)
4 exchange the texture component in A for basic grid (2nd image)
5 render (3rd image)

Note that in while the geometry is self occluding, self shadowing of the new geometry is not working correctly.  Also the mapping modes are not adhered to according to.

The source files saved without crashing, it 78kb in size and if you want to have a copy of it for testing, send me an email and I will post it back to you.

Note that any successfully saved source files with displacement materials within them, in order to get the displacement working again it is necessary to enter and leave the material lab for each displacement material to restore the link with the texture channel output (in a similar way as is necessary for extracting (colour) normal information from the bump channel).  Bug tracker fans https://bugs.daz3d.com/view.php?id=39540 if you can get in this deep.

chohole - 08 October 2012 11:18 AM

GussNemo - 08 October 2012 10:56 AM

@davidb:  Have you tried going to the Help tab and selected Contact Us?  Maybe they have a fix or suggestion on a fix?

I think he will find there is more help to be found here in the forum, really, than he will get from Customer Service for Bryce specific problems.

So far, no one has offered an explanation why davidb isn’t able to adjust the Displacement settings.  He said the blue marble can’t be moved.  The slider can’t be moved.  And if the value is changed it goes back to zero.

I’ve shown it does work on my computer, Mark said it works on his system, and David said how he gets it to work on his system.  But no one has said why Displacement on davidb’s system isn’t responding.  I would think if there’s a glitch in the software, everyone would experience the glitch.  That’s how it usually works.  And if for some reason Displacement has been disabled on davidb’s system, then there has to be a way of re-enabling it.

Does anyone know of a setting that would disable anything in the Material Lab?  Would choosing a certain mode disable anything?  Or any other setting?  That’s why I suggested going to the Help desk, chohole.

Definitely running Pro and not PLE?

I was just going to ask the same Question David.  Has davidb got any other controls greyed out, like the light icons on the top bar etc, which only come with pro.

Does the PLE version have the same version number as the Pro version? If not then it can’t be the PLE version based on the first post.

LordHardDriven - 10 October 2012 11:20 AM

Does the PLE version have the same version number as the Pro version? If not then it can’t be the PLE version based on the first post.

So far as I know, the version numbers are the same.  The PLE differs in the personal serial code that the user is provided with and also, the text on the splash screen on launch.

That is accurate.  THe download that was the PLE from download.com was issued with a serial number which only ran some features. However changing the serial number to the pro version, once you have “purchased” the pro version does unlock the features which were disabled in the PLE version.

Furthermore if you actually “purchase” Bryce 7 Pro through the store http://www.daz3d.com/shop/software/bryce/bryce-7-pro  and take it through the checkout you will have it in your itemised order history, with the serial number appearing in your available serial numbers on your account dashboard.

THere is no reason to actually redownload it, just take it through the checkout system to get the serial.

AFAIK the PLE edition was updated to the latest version number.