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Comments
Dave - I wanted to try this upper/lower limit instancing but always got side tracked. To know that the upper bracket doesn't work on solid terrains is very good to know. Thanks a lot for sharing, saves a lot of frustration and bad words "mutterations".
Horo - I now understand what you mean, especially when I copied the original terrain's Matrix and pasted it to the altered terrain. In some cases, the terrains were too flat and I had to go back to GeoControl and added Height Correction to compensate but the results were positive.
Slepalex - Many thanks for your help on the Matrix; I had no idea Bryce could do that. I learned something new :-)
Dave Savage - I very much appreciate your discovery and input. I played with the idea of adding vegetation to my next project using Instance Lab and your research will help with it.
You guys rock!
A work in progress with 3 original Bryce terrains that were modified in GeoControl; the same Matrix proportionate to each other sure does make the landscape more realistic. By adding Height Correction in GC, it removes the need to have to dampen the terrains. I'll add a few more mountains and still working on the Sky and Distant Light. Time for bed.
Here is one of my first attempts at using multiple terrains; there are 3 in this composition. Also used the Bryce TE for the Erosion and exerimenting with the Erosion brush here. Still working on mastering texturing, but finding lighting means alot when it comes to the textures in Bryce.
Rasberri - You did a really good job on combining the different terrains. Lighting and texturing are also my nemesis :-)
I've been doing terrain test trials between the different Bryce generated terrains and GeoControl Filters. The challenges that I'm facing are lack of consistencies of the same type of Bryce generated terrains (Modor for example) and using the same GC Filters. My next step in this research would be to import a Bryce generated terrain of the same type, and carefully paint the effect on the terrain. I only have one Paint Undo, so this could be pain stakingly slow.
The other huddle is to find GeoControl's Zero Edges parameters in order to have all of the terrain sides untouched by the filters. I tend to prefer terrain tiles set up before importing them to GC, and have consistency throughout including having sharp edges.
Work on, Eugenius...super experiments - what it's all about.
Jay
Eugenius, I did not understand what you mean.
But if you mean the repetition of actions in TE and GeoControl, then remove the check marks "Random" on the Fractal tab. If you want to to arrange a few terrains as tiles, then alternately mark "Tile north, south, east, west".
If you want to repeat the successful combination of filters in GeoControl, then save the settings as a GTS file to disk and you can always load them for any terrain.
Also, if you are going to deselect the 'Random' options so that Bryce will create the exact same fractal everytime, you can deselect all three at once, by pressing the 'Shift' key while deselecting one of them and all three will deselect at the same time. It saves having to do each one individually.
Oh! I didn't know that either.
Heres a tutorial for tiling terrains. It was done with Bryce 4 but still works.
Terrain Tiler.
Heres another link for Bryce tutorials covering a lot of stuff.
Bryce 5 this time but still relevant.
"This Bryce 5.0 course consists of two sets of six lessons each (12 total.) Each lesson has four or more pages.
One set is geared for Beginners, who have no prior knowledge of Bryce at all; one for Intermediate students, who had some knowledge of the software, or who had already completed the first course."
Bryce 5 Tutorials
Just click Tutorials.
There's also a few free 3d models on there.
Now that I've read my last post, I can see what I'm confusing everyone. Bryce generated terrains aren't what I was referring to when it came to inconsistencies, it was once I imported them into GeoControl and apply the same filters onto the terrains that I would find inconsistencies. So when I would import Bryce generated tiled terrains into GC, certain Bryce terrain heights seem to trigger certain GC filters more than others, resulting in the overall landscape looking weird and not in a good way. So I'm experimenting while adjusting their parameters, especially the Height Correction Filter.
Jam - Thanks.
Eugenius - Nice snow terrain. I'm not sure what Height Correction does in GC/WC but it appears that it stretches the height data to the full black-white range and this optimises the height resolution. Bryce creates a mesh form the height map and this mesh can be scaled however you want, it can also be warped without changing the height map.
Zero edges in GC/WC can be helpful, e.g. for islands. The tiling option, however, is not worth a lot. It just makes the four edges meet and what you get is repeated tiling, like tiles on a wall. Bryce does it better because it generates a new terrain and only matches the edges that meet (e.g. when tiling east the east edge of the first and the west edge of the second one meet. That's why you have to go in a certain sequence, e.g. E-E-E-S-W-W-W-S-E-E-E-S-W-W-W for a 4 x 4 tiled terrain. If you de-select the random options (holding down the Shift key as Dave mentions) Bryce creates the adjacent terrain with the same seed.
By the way, creating the terrain first as 512 (is faster then a 4096 one) until you get what you're looking for, then deselecting the random options, you can change the resolution and re-generate the same terrain. Just changing the resolution without re-generating the terrain does not lead to a much improved result. And the Shift key trick enables all three random options, too.
There is also a means to save a terrain in the TE. Select the Pictures tab and you find your generated terrain in the left most slot. Click on Copy below and below the centre slot click on Paste, then on Apply. Go back to the Elevation tab. Modify your terrain and if you messed it up, just go to the Picture tab, Copy the centre slot and Paste it to the left one, Apply. When you go back to the Elevation tab, you have the original terrain back and try to get a better result. Ths also works if you leave the TE and look at the terrain in the GUI. Just go back to the TE and you can use the Copy/Paste sequence in the Pictures tab.
Rasberri - nice oasis scene. Indeed, lighting means a lot, not only for textures but also for shadows. There is no visual art without light.
Some very nice examples, ideas and links, Thanks to everyone for sharing
Although I am using Bryce for a long time now, I still refer to Robin Woods tutorials; they are awesome.
Rasberri: nice work. On some of the rocks, the textures look like unfocused photos. Are these procedural textures or JPG?
Eugenius: good examples. Nice to see different textures in comparison.
I made some new works too. First an excavation, made with a normal Bryce terrain and a terrain made in WM and alt-posterised in Bryce used to dig out some part. Then two normal terrains, coming from WM, a bit lowered and stretched and textured and rendered in Bryce. The last one is a heavily posterised and with subcontours. Copied twice and stacked with different textures.
Horo - Thanks for the great input. One of the Terrain Prests in GC Demo has a terrain which all four sides were completely flat; I thought it was the Zero Edges but apparently, I was mistaken :-) Tiling at 512 and then changing the resolution sure does speed up the process. I tend to forget the Picture Tab sometimes and it will come to good use in this experiment. In GC, I decided to start from scratch and as I went on, winded up removing a terrain generator and an erosion filter; the result has much better details and consistency. Thanks again for your help.
Hansmar - Excellent job! The first image looks like an American Indian labyrinth. I love the rock style and fog on the second one. The Dry Mountains look fantastic, given the low-resolution hurdle and awesome scifi city; reminds me of the Klingons' architecture.
mermaid010 - I have bookmarked Robin Woods' Bryce tutorials' page; thanks!
Slepalex, Dave Savage and StuartB - Thank you all for the amazing suggestions.
Hansmar - lovely renders my fav is the Dry Mountains
Hansmar - nice terrain work.
Eugenius - you're welcome. You can also make zero edges (sort of) with Isolines. Good examples.
I second the above..Good morning Folks. Thanks immensely for all of the tutorials.
Hansmar: The Rocks are all Bryce procedural textures, and yes, very unfocused.. I tried several ways. that is world space, object space, etc..random, it seemed that object space made some of them look more realistic. I didn't spend a lot of time with the texturing on this one as I was focusing on blending the terrains--perhaps this one is a good one to go back and experiment with texturing---as I am still in a Bryce texturing learning curve. I did check out one of the tutorial suggestions here and it has a decent tut on the deep texture editor. That is, I did not realize that A B C stood for Alpha, Color, Bitmap, etc. The sand is a seamless imported texture, however, I could not get it to tile correctly in Bryce as well as the orientation is off.
On another note I wanted to share a link with y'all for terrains.. . http://terrain.party/ So far I have not been able to download any maps from this - not sure why, but it's here if any of y'all can get it to work
Rasberri - I got Terrain Party to work a while back. To my experience, once I've decided on an area (usually somewhere in Canada), I would change the Map View (Blue Diamond) from Open Street Map to USGS Shaded Relief (it takes a few seconds for the viewer to display the terrain). Once displayed, I would change the Distance View from 18 km (default) to 8 km (for foreground terrains). I would then place the Blue Grid to an area I think would work (mountain range, lake, etc..) and click the download button (Cloud Button). The website sometime would take a few seconds and then download the height map. I would then move the grid and increase the Distance View to around 15-20 km (background terrains) and download it's height maps.
Here's a link to my Renderosity website which I go into a bit more detail: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/terrain-party-and-bryce-7-1-pro/2842055/?p
I hope this helps.
As I'm experimenting with GeoControl and Bryce, I'm finding that creating a step-by-step process and taking notes do have their benefits.
The first image shows the Bryce Modor tiled-terrains and then filtered GC terrains (applied a white color to display details).
The second image shows a terrain through different textures.
The third displays the GC filtered terrain (Upper Left), added Subplateaus (Upper Right), Texture changed to Object Space (Lower Left) and Texture changed to Object Cubic (Lower Right).
The last image is the same as the third with different lighting direction.
Not. A, B, C does not mean Alpha, Color, Bitmap, etc. A, B, C, D are just letters of the Latin alphabet. This is just the sequence number of the texture source as 1, 2, 3, 4. What is the difference between combinations of textures AB and ABC from just A, B and etc. you should read the tutorial. I do not give the reference, since I studied this question in the paper book of S. A. Kitchens and V. Gavenda.
.Sorry, maybe I phrased that wrong (not A,B,C). I was referring to the photo diagram below: The C A B channels below on the left . Thus, my understanding from the photo is that the channels stand for Color, Alpha, Bump
Color
Alpha Enable/Disable
Bump
And ... So we are talking about DTE? Well, and it was necessary to write. And after all, indeed, it is not clear.
Eugenius Maximus Yeah, mine as well.
Can make all the difference on a fantastic terrain. Love the Modor tiled terrains!
Thanks for the terrain party tip and rendo link!. Will have to try that. Thanks to all for the tutorial links and marvelous suggestions
Hansmar really nice terrains. love the texturing and the colors with the scifi city..built right into the mountain
Rasberri - You're welcome. Let me know if you have any questions; I do tend to confuse the hell out of people :-)
After a few frustrating hours of not being able to tile the filtered terrains or use them in a regular fashion, I decided to experiment with Bryce's TE Masking/Bracket on one terrain by bringing up the lower bracket until holes start coming through. With the default brush at minimal hardness, maximum soft edge, and the lowest height, I went around the terrain and removed straight edges and corners. I pushed together the terrains as I went along, one at a time. Some required to be rotated or their height slightly adjusted.
Once all the terrains were completed, I made them all white and went over the landscape to fix little spots here and there. The experiment still continues...
Eugenius Maximus this reminds me of the Lord of the Rings terrain for the dead marshes.. inspiration pic attached
Eugenius - tedious work. If you filter a terrain and want to tile it with others the seams don't match anymore as you found out. A better way would be to tile the terrains first and then filter the group. A Bryce terrain has a border on top (north) and right (east) of 0.16 Bryce Units (BU). If you tile terrains, this seam remains and is visible. To align tiles, the best way is to keep the default size (81.92 BU), copy the last one generated and move it in the appropriate direction: hold down the Shift key and hit the appropriate arrow key 8 times, then hold down the Alt key and hit the opposite arrow key twice, then hit Fractal in the TE for this terrain. Remember to keep a path. When finished tiling, group the terrains and resize it as needed.
- The arrow keys move the terrain in the four directions by 5.12 BU, which is 1/16th of the default size.
- Shift + Arrow moves the terrain by 10.24 BU, 1/8th of the default size.
- Alt + Arrow moves the terrain by 0.08 BU, 1/1024th of the default size.
Therefore: Shift arrow 8 times and Alt arrow twice opposite to compensate for the 0.16 BU wide seam.
If you intend to post-filter this terrain, the above won't work. You have to export all greyscale tiles and assemble them in a graphics application capable of 16-bit greyscale images. The TE-Filters program can do 4 tiles 1024 to a 2048 and 4 2048 to a 4096 terrain as well as 16 1024 tiles to a 4096 terrain automatically. But it can be done manually as well in e.g. Photoshop.
Rasberri - Thanks for the pic reference; I'm now looking at different options.
Horo - The tiling issue isn't placing them next to each other, it has to do more with the way they were affected in Geo Control and the terrain no longer having consistency. Though I like your approach of using Photoshop.