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Snowy Footprints Tutorial

After getting a lot of email asking how I created the footprints in the snow on the above Christmas card in Bryce, I've put this little tutorial together to show how it can be done. It's actually easier than it looks! These instructions were done in the Windows version of Bryce 2, and although this screen shot may be different than Bryce 3D, it can still be done.

Fire up Bryce, then create a terrain by clicking the mountain in the EDIT area. Now click the E next to the terrain to EDIT it. The terrain editor will pop up as shown below. The first thing you need to do is click into the GRID SIZE (figure1) and make the terrain size larger- 512 will work fine. Now click NEW (figure 2) to start out with a clean slate. Click on MOUNDS (figure 3) which will make weird bumps all over the place. You'll see that they are really too large, so we need to make them more gentle and smaller. You can now click SMOOTHING (figure 4) and keep clicking it until it's nice and smooth. You can also hit EQUALIZE and DAMPEN as well to achieve a different result. To add some more texture to the snow, you can hit the NOISE button (figure 5) which will add a slight grain to the terrain. This is just something that will take some time tweaking in order to get it to look the way you want it to.

Ok, once you get the terrain looking good, we need to make some footprints in the snow. Select the darkest color that you can by dragging the dot in the triangle (LEVEL, just above figure 1) then make the brush size the smallest one you can with a FUZZY hardness, with a light FLOW. Now start peppering the terrain wherever you want footprints to appear. In the picture below, you'll see two very dark squiggles- these are the paths in the snow where the kids rolled the snow into the huge snowballs used to create a snowman. Just ignore them...

Remember- this will take some time to get everything to look just right, so just tinker with the different settings and you'll get the hang of it. One thing worth mentioning- when I first started messing with this, I was trying to get the footprints to look elongated instead of just round holes punched in the snow as you see here by adding one circle, then another one above it to make it more oval. What a waste of time and energy! Here's a secret- make the footprints perfectly parallel with the sides- in other words, go from the bottom to the top of the terrain in a straight line. Then, when you exit the edit screen, go to a top view of your terrain and then stretch the terrain it lengthwise, which will distort the entire terrain, which will also make the footprints more oval! Duh!

You can use this effect to simulate footprints marching across desert sands, footprints along the shore of a lake or the ocean too. Cool or what? I hope you've found this short tutorial helpful- now go render yourself some footprints in the snow!

Steve

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