Digital Art Zone

I’d guess this has been asked before, but my searches didn’t turn up anything useful. I apologize for my weak search-fu if it’s a dead horse question, or if it belongs in a different forum altogether.

I got the Reality plugin for DS a little over a year ago and have never since looked back. From time to time I see some really awesome Bryce landscapes and think, “I want that for my DS people”. Fair enough, that’s part of what Bryce is for, and lots of people bridge their DS stuff into Bryce scenes for rendering. Because I use LuxRender/Reality though, I need to go the other way: port Bryce stuff into DS.

I know this should be possible to a degree by exporting from Bryce as an OBJ, but whenever I try that my landscape loses most of it’s detail, and something about the UV mapping appears to get screwed up. What leaves Bryce as a gloriously realistic water-carved canyon or snowy mountain arrives in DS looking like a something from a bad PSX-era game.

I admit I don’t know that much about Bryce’s inner workings, but it kinda looks like a lot of topographical detail in Bryce is maybe actually based on complex/advanced shader combos, and that Bryce isn’t properly baking that down into actual geometry or consolidated map images during export.

Part of the problem (maybe) is that I don’t know what a lot of the options in the export panel in Bryce mean. I’m hoping there’s some setting or combination of settings that will cause Bryce to bake detail accurately during export so I can render it in Lux/Reality.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to get accurate OBJs/texture maps out of Bryce?

mnpazan - 13 October 2012 07:35 PM

I’d guess this has been asked before, but my searches didn’t turn up anything useful. I apologize for my weak search-fu if it’s a dead horse question, or if it belongs in a different forum altogether.

I got the Reality plugin for DS a little over a year ago and have never since looked back. From time to time I see some really awesome Bryce landscapes and think, “I want that for my DS people”. Fair enough, that’s part of what Bryce is for, and lots of people bridge their DS stuff into Bryce scenes for rendering. Because I use LuxRender/Reality though, I need to go the other way: port Bryce stuff into DS.

I know this should be possible to a degree by exporting from Bryce as an OBJ, but whenever I try that my landscape loses most of it’s detail, and something about the UV mapping appears to get screwed up. What leaves Bryce as a gloriously realistic water-carved canyon or snowy mountain arrives in DS looking like a something from a bad PSX-era game.

I admit I don’t know that much about Bryce’s inner workings, but it kinda looks like a lot of topographical detail in Bryce is maybe actually based on complex/advanced shader combos, and that Bryce isn’t properly baking that down into actual geometry or consolidated map images during export.

Part of the problem (maybe) is that I don’t know what a lot of the options in the export panel in Bryce mean. I’m hoping there’s some setting or combination of settings that will cause Bryce to bake detail accurately during export so I can render it in Lux/Reality.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to get accurate OBJs/texture maps out of Bryce?

sorry not that I know of - you have to do it in Bryce

Without seeing screenshots or renders of the Terrains that you are trying to export it is difficult to give a definitive answer.

The topology of terrain does depend on how you have actually Drawn them in Bryce.

The texture however will not transfer with any great degree of accuracy, if they are native Bryce mats.

Bryce mats, DS shaders and indeed Poser mats do not happily transfer, because each program uses a different method of creating them.

SO you would need to provide renders of the terrain in question done in Bryce,one textured and one untextured, and a screen shot of the Texture editor screen showing how the texture is compiled.

Primarily the bridge works best by importing DS figures into a Bryce landscape, and rendering it in Bryce.

You definitely don’t want to use the Bryce bridge (File > Send to DAZ Studio) to send a terrain to DAZ Studio.  As you already found out, your terrain will loose most of it’s resolution.  I have no idea why they did that.

Instead, use File > Export Object, then choose some valid export format from the “Save as type” dropdown (I chose “Wavefront OBJ Files (*.obj) (Mesh Export)”).  I haven’t experimented with all the settings in the Export Terrain window, however I do know that once again the default value is bad, and you want to drag that slider across the bottom to the right to increase the number of polygons in your terrain until you are happy (but not so far that your system chokes on it.)  That will fix your detail level problem.

Thanks for the replies.

I’m currently using this freebee as a test scene for my experimental attempts: http://www.sharecg.com/v/56355/browse/5/3D-Model/Snowy-Mountains-Free-Bryce-Scene . I’m not experienced enough in Bryce yet to create anything I’d want to use myself, and until I have a better idea what is/isn’t possible export-wise, I don’t know if I want to invest the time. I have zero interest in rendering in Bryce, so if it can’t export, it’s unfortunately useless to me.

Unfortunately I can’t create my own renders or screengrabs ATM, as I’m in the middle of redownloading and reinstalling Bryce 7 (see below). Once that’s done though, I’ll get something up.

I tried using the bridge, and not only did it export in low quality, but it also rotated to textures 90 degrees relative to the UV maps so the textures no longer matched the geometry. Very odd. I’m guessing the people who made the bridge were only thinking of people using it as a posing aid for figures to be bridged into Bryce, and so made zero account for it producing anything usable for anything else. The texture/UV misalignment thing is still very weird though, as I can imagine many scenarios where the location of texture details would be important in posing.

I tried fiddling with the export function like what Sean Riesch described. I was thinking I might be able to export a mid poly mesh, then re-export a high poly mesh, then use blender to bake the latter into a bump or normal map for the former.

Turns out the size of the mesh I can export is limited by Bryce rather than my system specs though. It’s only a 32-bit program, so its memory allocation is capped a lot lower than what my system can actually provide. I could only get the slider maybe halfway over before getting an “out of memory” warning. When I exported at that detail level and opened the OBJ in another program… still pretty mushy, and I’ve worked with higher poly stuff than that in Blender and Sculptris before, so I know it’s not my system.

So I did a bad thing and ran a large address aware utility on the Bryce exe. Bryce didn’t take to that: it just crashes now when it hits the 32-bit memory ceiling instead of giving me an “out of memory” warning. Hence the reinstall.

Once I get it back up, I’ll post screenshots of the material editor. I’d love to find out how to tweak/create materials that are optimized for export. I noticed there were a lot of texture export options greyed out in the export panel (like specularity, for instance), so I’m guessing it should be possible to construct/reconstruct materials to make those options viable.