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Stupid Terrain Tricks

Did you know that it's possible to mask off areas inside the terrain editor so that you can work on one area, while leaving the other area unaffected ? You can pull it off with the clipping brackets, and this step by step tutorial will show you how it's done. This tutorial was done with the updated version Bryce 4 on a PC. Your mileage may vary. =D

Fast and Dirty Version

You may not know it, but the terrain editor has essentially two terrain editor fields in it. They are sitting there under the pictures tab. Say what? Download the scene file and follow along. Here's the Secret Stever way of doing it.

Create the terrain of choice. If you're on a PC, hit control C to copy to clipboard. (I know, maybe it ain't supposed to do this, but it does. I didn't know better, so I tried it.) Now tab to the picture panel. In the first window, paste it. You've just pasted the first terrain into the TE as a photo. Cool, huh? But wait- it gets better.

Go back into the Elevation window again, hit NEW, then draw with your mouse or tablet to your hearts content. Now hit control C to copy, then tab back to the Picture area, paste that baby into the second window. Drag the blend slider to your heart's content.

Now dig this- the hand drawn stuff will follow the contour of the original terrain. You can now paint a road, add ribs to something, add a logo, whatever.  I've used this technique to do all sorts of cool stuff- and it doesn't need an external paint program to do it.  Now, to take it a step further- once you've blended those two together, it will show as blended in the Elevation window. Copy that one, paste it into the first window, paint some more stuff, control C and past the new stuff into the second window. You can build layer upon layer this way.

Detailed Step by Step Version

This page is heavy with graphics, but it's necessary.. sorry about that!

I've made the scene file I used for this tutorial available for download to those that want it. Bryce 4 only, Zipped. 

771 kb

Here's a sample image above, which I'll walk you through in order to show you how you can combine different terrain effects to selected areas. 

Start Bryce and create a terrain. Any terrain will do. Select the E button in the wireframe window to EDIT the terrain, and you'll enter the Terrain Editor area, as shown below. To make it more apparent what's happening as we work, go ahead and click the little triangle just below the word GRID and select REAL TIME LINKING, which will update the changes in real time. Now, go ahead and hit the button on the upper left hand side marked NEW. This will make the terrain totally black, meaning there's no height information. For the sake of this tutorial, click on the right hand row of small curved dots along the left side of the screen to pop open the panel as shown below. Now let's create a BLOB by selecting the BLOB MAKER button along the left hand side, and make one somewhat similar to the one you see below. Try to make it small enough that there's a bit of dark area surrounding it as shown below. 

Cool! Now here's where the clipping mask comes into play. On the right hand side, as illustrated by the green arrow, there's a slider bar area. Click at the top of that area, and start dragging the TOP of it down until it looks similar to what you see above. Below the arrow, you'll see a bracket in that slider column. That's showing the amount of clipping. For this example, just drag it down as far as it will go. Here's what you're doing- anything that's yellow is being masked, and anything not yellow will be affected by what you do to the terrain. Don't worry if the entire blob isn't selected- this will still work well enough to show you how this all works. 

Ok, now select a fractal type with the little triangle next to FRACTAL, and once you find one you want to use, select it, then hit the blue ball next to the word FRACTAL to apply it. If you don't like what you see, hit the UNDO button and try it again until you get something you like.

Note in the image above that the blob doesn't show up in the grayscale preview in the lower left hand corner, since it's masked. Here's what it looks like if you selected the MUD CRACKS fractal type. The mud surrounds the blob, but leaves the blob untouched! It's magic! "Thank you, thank you, I'll be appearing here all weekend. And don't forget to tip your waitress." =)

To remove the masking, click in the CLIPPING BRACKET SLIDER area (the one that had the green arrow pointing to it a little earlier) and drag it back up towards the top as shown in this sequence below.

The last image above shows what it looks like when the masking is removed. (I've shown this in steps here so you can see the clipping bracket has moved, and what it looks like as you do it.) The masked part was untouched by the fractal terrain you applied a little earlier! If your terrain needs some smoothing or other corrective touchup work, go ahead and do it now. When everything looks cool, click the checkmark in the lower right hand corner and take a look at your strange new terrain! 

Now the really cool thing is that you can combine TWO different terrain types in ONE terrain! Tab back to the PICTURES tab, and click on the first square, and the terrain you just created should pop up. Cool? Cool! Now click on the second square, and don't freak out to see the first terrain in there! Now, go back to the ELEVATION tab and hit NEW, which will clear that terrain, and create another funky looking pattern. Or, as I've done below, draw something, like a secret message!

Now if you go back to the PICTURES again and click on the SECOND box, you'll see the first one in the first box, and this new second one in the second box! Now you can use the BLEND button and drag it left and right and see the results of the two terrains in the last box. Below is the final render of the settings above.

Here's the steps we just went through put together as an animation so you can see how the clipping bracket moves, and what happens as it does. Remember- anything that shows as yellow isn't affected.

Now, if you wanted to go really crazy, you can take this idea a step further. Once you generate your main terrain, you can load an image into the second box in the PICTURES tab and blend them together, which will sort of average out the gray heightfield information and make the stars in this imported image pretty much conform to the terrain in the second panel. You can pull off some very cool effects this way

I hope this tutorial inspires you to head off into a new direction and create some really cool new terrains! One of the most rewarding and enjoyable thing about Bryce is experimenting and trying out ideas. C'mon, you don't have to settle for stock terrains any more!

Happy Rendering!

Steve
Hilltop Design

These tutorials and accompanying materials  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. 

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. [common/sitewide_copyright_notice.htm]

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