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Bryce Recycling

I don't know if I was one of the first people who has played with this idea, but it's pretty cool, so I thought I'd share this with you. The idea here is pretty simple- what you're going to do is create an image using Bryce to generate an interesting height map, render it, then import it right back into Bryce. You'll end up using the first image as a picture which will generate a Bryce terrain. It sounds simple, and it is- and here's how to get some good results right off the bat. Try it as I've outlined below, but feel free to experiment to see what other effects you can pull off.

The way I came up with this was one night as I was messing with images to create materials, I accidentally imported an image that was rendered in Bryce, and noticed that it was very smooth and the gradients were excellent. A lot of times, you end up with nasty spikes that are hard to get rid of, and this technique allows you to create some great looking terrains from a pure Bryce source. It's just another avenue to gather more terrains to play with.

So far, I've found two ways of doing this, and both will work. One way is to use a ground plane with the material applied, and rendered from the top view, the other way is to cover a cube with your material and zoom in really tight on it. When you use the zoomed in cube version, the lighting can be kind of tricky to get right, so for now, try the ground plane version to see how it works. You can always go back and play with the cube idea later.

Start Bryce, then click on the default ground plane that's sitting on the bottom of the scene. Now, for this example, let's work with something that everyone has available- go into the materials and select the eroded gold material. This will be the base material we'll use for this example, although you can later choose a few other materials to play with. Click on it, which should make the ground plane covered with this material. Now, go into the material editor and we're going to make a few changes to this stock material. Grab the bump height slider and drag it all the way over to 255, making it as bumpy as possible.

Now, if you look at the preview, you'll notice that it's got some heavy height to it- that's the idea. Now, to get the desired effect, get it into an overhead view. You'll see that it looks pretty bad, right? Now go into the sky controls and start moving the sun around until you get a good contrast to the material, and putting it into the very middle will get you in the ballpark. And here's a hint to try- set the sun to NIGHT- this will sometimes give you the lighting you desire. You want to get an good amount of "bright" areas along with some dark shadows, since this is what will drive the height of your terrain in the next step. And here's a tip- to get a little more highlights in your image, go into the material editor and add a bit more specularity, which will give you more highlights.

Also, try clicking on the PLUS or MINUS sign to either zoom in or out to get things just the way you want them. You can also pan around using the hand icon to get the nicer looking part of your material into view. Once you're happy with the view, go ahead and render this scene, keeping the camera in the overhead view. I know, it seems to go against everything you know, but trust me- this works. When it's done rendering, save the scene, which will also save the image as a bitmap. To give you an idea as to what we're shooting for, below is a sample image.

Now- here's where the fun starts! Create a new scene, and add a terrain (mountain) to it. Click the terrain to select it, then hit E to EDIT. Select picture, and then bring the image in that you just rendered. Chances are, it'll need to be smoothed a little bit, so go ahead and hit the smooth button a few times until it's nice looking. Go back to the wireframe and take a look at the terrain- if it looks cool, we're off to the next step. At this point, you can either select a material from the presets and render it, or- to recycle things further, import your first image back in as a Leo picture and map it right back on top of the terrain. Or, you can just slap a material on the terrain and render away. The first image below is what it looks like when you render the terrain created with the first image looks like using a regular material, the next one is what it looks like with the original image mapped back on top of it.

Now- to get really conceptual, you can recycle this image again- just take the last rendered image and go through the terrain creation steps again- I've got one image that's had 5 generations of recycling done to it- just render the image and add an interesting material to it, render, and import it over and over as a terrain. You can really get some great looking terrains by using this method. The cool thing is that the more times you change the material import the image as a terrain, and tweak the lighting, you can really get to a depth that would be really hard to achieve any other way. Experiment with this idea and see what you can come up with. The thing that just intrigues me is that you can create and then see different textures in incredible, real 3D. As you start looking through your materials and wonder what they'd look like as a terrain, the mind starts to boggle...

Now, to take this idea one step further- add some Bryce primitives, like some stretched spheres laid side by side, halfway buried in the ground plane, apply a basic material to them, then render them from above. When you import this rendered image back into Bryce as a terrain, you've just created some sand dunes! By varying the lighting, you can add shadows, which will then be a nice, smooth gradient when you bring the images into a terrain. Start stretching your brain a bit- the possibilities are endless....

This is the image seen above recycled with a new material applied....

 

And here's the same image recycled again as the new terrain, with the same image mapped on top of it again. You get the idea.... now go play! These tutorials and accompanying materials and images are my work. It's cool to save them to your hard drive to learn from, but are not to be posted elsewhere without asking.

Oh, to save this file with all the images intact, if you use a recent version of Internet Explorer, go to FILE/SAVE AS, and under FILE TYPE, select Web Archive, single file which is .mht extension. This is a handy way to save a page with everything you see on it embedded into one document.