Beginning Bryce 5 - Parte 1

–1–
Beginning Bryce 5
Beginning Bryce 5 - Lesson Three, Somewhere to Put It: Page One

In this lesson, we are going to be learning about the things on the Procedural section of the Create
palette; Terrains, Trees, Metaballs, Symmetrical Lattices, and Rocks. If you want to follow along, you will
need to download the Lesson3.sit or Lesson3.zip file, which contains the various files called for in the
lesson.
Shall we begin?
Please open Bryce to a new document if you haven't already done so.
The Terrain Editor, with all the parts labeled

You already know how to create terrains. Now we are going to explore editing and texturing them, so
they look like what you envision.
Begin by creating one. (The mountain on the Create palette.) When it's there, click the E on the Icon
Column. This will take you into the Terrain Editor.
The Terrain Editor has several parts. Some can be resized, and everything but the Accept and Cancel
buttons can be moved around, so you can set this area up in any configuration that is comfortable for you.
This is how I have mine set up.
The Timeline is for animations. We won't be using it in this course, so you can just ignore it for now.
The Terrain Canvas is the surface you will draw your terrains on. Because you will be actually drawing
there, I've found that it makes sense to have it as large as your screen will allow. In the upper right hand
corner of it, there is a flippy triangle. If you click it, you will see a pop-out menu that gives you several
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/BryceTuts/
–2–
Beginning Bryce 5
choices. The first one is "Set Preview Size." Several sizes are listed. Choose the one that is most
comfortable for you.
Remember the bump map from the last lesson? Well, terrains are like bump maps, but they actually
change the geometry of an object. The lighter each pixel on this map, the higher the elevation of that tiny
portion of the terrain. the darker the pixel, the lower the elevation.
When you paint on this canvas, you will literally be painting elevation, height and depth, onto the
square that defines your terrain.
Tool visibility toggle, in the top right corner of the Terrain Canvas
In order to help you do this, there is a section with Terrain Canvas Tools that is hidden in the default
view. In the upper right corner of the Terrain Canvas, there is a little icon that looks like a tiny computer
menu, next to a slightly larger one. This toggles between the minimum window, and the window with the
Tools. Click to see the tools, if they aren't already visible.
Those tools are so valuable that I just leave them on all the time. (They are shown enabled in the
graphic that opens this page.) We'll get back to them in a moment, after you know how to use the 3D
Preview, so you can see exactly what you can do with them.
The preview menu, top right of the Preview palette, under the flippy, showing a rendered preview behind it.
The 3D Preview allows you to see what your terrain will look like as you construct and edit it. Click the
flippy triangle in the corner of the Preview window to see the choices available.
First on the list are the choices for the size of this palette. It's not as important to me as the canvas, so
I would rather have the maximum Canvas size and make this one a bit smaller if necessary; but that's me.
Feel free to set them up the way that is most comfortable for you.
Next is View Mode. You can choose to see the thumbnail in either Flat Preview (the default), or as it
actually appears in your scene using the Rendered Preview. This can be very handy, but it also takes longer
to redraw. Once again, it's a trade off; and which you choose is up to you. Toggle between them now, to get
an idea of how they look.
Switch to Rendered Preview, if you aren't already there. Now, remember the keyboard controls you
used to look at the Preview in the Materials Lab? Well, they are all here, too, and they work exactly the
same way. Check them out.
Once again, if you put your mouse anywhere on the preview picture, you can move around it as if it
were at the center of a virtual trackball. If you hold down the spacebar, you can pan horizontally and
vertically. If you hold down the Control/Ctrl key, you can zoom in and out. If you hold down Option/Alt and
click, it will return to the default position.
–3–
Beginning Bryce 5
It won't show you anything else in your scene; but if you have resized your terrain in any direction, this
preview will accurately show you that. So it is very valuable to have.
The preview menu, with a flat preview, and Auto Rotate highlighted.
Okay. Now return to the Flat Preview for a moment.
The controls here, for some reason, don't work exactly the same way. But you can still see any part of
your terrain. The trackball is the same, and works without any modifier keys.
But the zoom is controlled by Option/Alt. Try it out.
Also, the Control/Ctrl key determines the height of the terrain in the preview. (This has no effect on the
height of the actual terrain in the picture.) Hold the key down, click and drag up and down to increase and
decrease the height.
There is also a pop-out menu choice that is not available in the Rendered Preview. That is Auto
Rotate. It's under the flippy triangle, naturally. Turn it on for a moment, to see how it works. This can let you
see your terrain from all sides as you work. (It can also make you a trifle dizzy.)
Looking at the menu again, the next choice is Realtime Linking. If it's checked, the preview (either
one) will change as you draw on the Canvas. (The Rendered Preview draws on a wireframe.) This can be
wonderful, as it lets you see what is happening as it happens. But it can also slow your machine. If you
don't have this choice enabled, the entire change will appear as soon as you stop working. Try it out now,
with both previews. (Just click and draw on the canvas. Unless you have changed something, you should
be drawing with the highest elevation. Undo as soon as you've seen what happens.)
Rip to Screen gives you a full size screen shot of whatever the preview shows. This is especially
valuable, I think, when you are using the rendered preview, because it lets you see what the terrain looks
like, in detail, before you commit to those changes. Just click anywhere on the screen to return to the Editor.
It's not as impressive in Flat Preview.
The Colored/Grayscale toggle, bottom left of the Terrain Canvas.

Okay. Back to the extras on the Terrain Canvas.
In the bottom right corner, you will see a tiny rainbow, and a yin/yang symbol. Those toggle between
colored previews and the default grayscale. Sometimes it's difficult to accurately visualize the elevation you
are working with in grayscale. For those times, there are color previews available. Click and hold on the
rainbow now. (If you don't see one, you need to enable the Terrain Canvas tools. The toggle for that is in the
upper right hand corner of the Terrain Canvas, as explained above.)
–4–
Beginning Bryce 5
The color variations menu, for the Terrain Canvas, showing stripes of color.
The lower elevations at the bottom, higher at the topA menu will fly out, with a number of color
variations. Select one (they are outlined in white when selected) and release the mouse button to color your
terrain. These colors do not affect the actual terrain, by the way. They are just to help you visualize what
you are doing.
If you think it really looks great, though, and you want to keep it for the image you are working on, you
can. Under the flippy triangle at the top of the Terrain Canvas is a choice called Keep Gradient. If you check
it, then the gradient is used as the Diffuse Color map on your actual terrain. Try it out, if you like. You can
always undo.
The yin/yang symbol will take you back to grayscale.
The Zoom Area button, to the left of the color toggle.

Moving to the left, the Zoom Area works with the Flat Preview. If you click on it to enable it, it will turn
white, and a marquee will appear somewhere on the canvas. That portion of the canvas will also zoom to fill
the entire preview window, where you can see the 3D representation of your terrain.
If you position your cursor over the boundary of the marquee, it will change to a hand. As usual, that
means you have a pan tool, and you can now drag the marquee to any area of the Canvas.
If you position your cursor over a corner, it will change to a four headed arrow, which allows you to
resize the marquee.
If you click on Crop, below the Zoom Area toggle, it will crop your terrain so that the portion within the
boundary of the zoom fills the whole canvas, and becomes your new terrain. If you click Fit, the whole
terrain will shrink into the area encompassed by the marquee. The rest will be set to the bottom elevation.
Go ahead and try it out. Remember, you only have one undo in here, though. You can, however,
always return your terrain to the way it was when you first entered the Editor. Just hold down the
Control/Ctrl key, and click on the New button on the Elevation tab of the Editing Tools palette.
If, on the other hand, you wind up with something that you really like, you might want to exit the editor
by clicking the checkmark, and then reenter it. That way you will be returning to that terrain when you hold
down Control/Ctrl and click New, not the raw one that Bryce first generated.
At the bottom left is the pop-up for Brush Behavior. We will get to that soon.
–5–
Beginning Bryce 5
The Clipping Tool, on the right side of the Terrain Canvas.

At the top right is the Clipping Tool. It shows the height scale, using whatever gradient you are using,
with a gray bracket to the right of it. Anything outside the bracket is not rendered in your image. In other
words, it's clipped. You can change either end of the bracket by clicking and dragging on it. Make sure the
Zoom tool is disabled, then go ahead and try. (It's more impressive to watch in the Rendered Preview.)
Clipped low areas show as dark red on the preview. Clipped high areas show as yellow. Move the bracket
ends to see them both.
A render of the terrain with the top removed, showing that's there's nothing inside it. (You can see the gray default
ground where the top is missing.)
If you look at the Rendered Preview, you can see the terrain is really just an empty shell. When the
top is clipped, there's nothing inside.
The flippy for the Terrain menu, on the top right of the Terrain Canvas.
You can make it into a solid, though. You do that by going to the Canvas pop-up, under the triangle in
the top right-hand corner, and choosing "Solid."
–6–
Beginning Bryce 5
Another render of the same terrain; this time, it's simply a mountain with a flat top.
Now look at the Preview. (Click on it to force a render, if you don't see any change right away.) See
the difference? The top is flat, as if you took the top off a real mountain. You will also want to render your
terrain as a solid if you are planning to use a transparent material on it, or if you are having problems using
Boolean functions with terrains.
You can move the entire bracket by grabbing the middle, and dragging it up or down.
When you have experimented enough to get familiar with it, please reset it to the entire range. We are
going to need it.
A circle with a cross hair inside it.

This is your brush!There are a couple of other things in that pop-up menu.
The first choice is Visible Brush. Drag your cursor over the Canvas. See the circle? That shows you
your brush size. (We will be getting to the brushes, and how to use them, soon.) If you uncheck Visible
Brush, that circle will disappear. I'm not really sure why you would want that, but if you do, there it is.
A monutain wiht the surface smoothedThe third choice down is Smooth.

When this is checked, Bryce renders your terrains with the same kind of smoothing we talked about in
the last lesson.
A mountain looking faceted, with all the polys showing.

If it's unchecked, you can see the sides of every polygon. Try unchecking it now, and taking a look.
–7–
Beginning Bryce 5
(Zoom in so you can really see it. If you don't see any change, click anywhere on the preview to force a
redraw.)
The last choice is Export. This allows you to export your terrain in a number of different formats, which
can be used by other software programs. This is wonderful, since it allows the terrain generating capabilities
of Bryce to be used in any program that imports one of those formats. You can also use this when you really
like the terrain you have made, but it's not what you need for this picture. Just export, and save it for
another one. Bryce can import those formats, too.
Moving right along.

The Paintbrush palette, with the grid at the bottom circledThe Paintbrush Palette is the little one
without a name. It controls the size, softness, flow, and elevation of the paintbrushes you use on the Terrain
Canvas. (In that order, from top to bottom.)
At the bottom of the palette is a grid. That controls the resolution of the terrain; from 16x16 pixels,
which is very coarse, all the way to 4096x4096 pixels, with several stops in between.
Smooth mountain, without much

Mountain showing some detail Highly detailed, realistic mountain
detail
32 - Coarse Terrain 128 - Normal Terrain (Default) 1024 - Massive Resolution Terrain
Of course, the higher the resolution of your terrain, the more realistic it will look. But also the more
time it will take to render, and the more memory it will take to store. Once again, it's a tradeoff. As a general
rule of thumb, you will want to use coarser terrains in the background of your picture, with finer ones as you
move into the foreground.
The default, 128x128 pixels, works fine for most terrains in the middle distance. Change the resolution
a few times now, to see what it does. Remember, you can undo! If you loose your terrain shape, Control/Ctrl
click on New in the Editing Tools Palette. (I know we haven't quite gotten there, but it's the only thing that
says "new" in here.)
I suggest that you look at some of the high resolution terrains in Rendered Preview, to get an idea of
the cost. Also, remember that right now there is only the default material on that terrain, which is cheap to
–8–
Beginning Bryce 5
render. When you are looking at a complex texture (and they do show up on this preview) it takes even
longer.
The Editing Tools palette, showing the Elevation tab, with the Master, General, and Special controls sections labeled.
Alright. Now that you know how the Grid Size works, we are going to look at the last Palette; the
Editing Tools. This is where the real fun is. (We'll get back to painting in a moment.)
There are three tabs on the Editing Tools palette. The first one is the Elevation, and changes the
elevation of the terrain according to several algorithms, fractal and otherwise.
It's divided into two sections, with four blue buttons on the top section, and 12 blue buttons, seven
green ones, and seven yellow ones on the bottom.
The top section are the Master Terrain controls. The Blue buttons are General controls, the green and
yellow ones are special elevation editors. (The colors are left over from earlier versions of Bryce, where you
had to toggle between the two sets.)
In general, all of these buttons can be used in two ways. You can click on a button, and the full force
of the effect is applied instantly. Or, you can click and drag right and left to gradually change your terrain.
Usually, dragging right applies a positive version of the effect, and dragging left applies a negative version.
(In some cases, dragging left doesn't do anything; but it's worth trying with all the buttons anyway.)
The New botton, in the Elevation Master Controls.

If you click the New button, it erases your canvas, taking everything down to the lowest elevation, so
you can start from the beginning. Dragging melts it all down, aiming for that base. Control/Ctrl - Click reverts
the canvas to whatever it was when you entered the Editor. (But you already knew that one.)
–9–
Beginning Bryce 5
The Invert button, next one to the right in the Master controls
Invert swaps the light pixels for dark ones, across the board, but it does it gradually if you drag the
mouse. The effect is to slowly turn your terrain inside out. Check it out! Or you can just click on the button,
to apply the full effect instantly.
The Undo button, next one along.

Undo, of course undoes whatever you did last, but only the very last thing. Clicking it again redoes
whatever you just undid.
The Erode button.

Erode is the fun one. Click and hold, and tiny little rivulets eat away at your terrain. Try it.
The Fractal button, top left in the General controls

Moving to the second portion of this tab, Fractal is used to generate a new terrain.
Click and hold on the Flippy Triangle, and you will see a whole list of possible Fractal algorithms.
Each one makes a different kind of landscape. (The choices at the bottom allow you to set up a series of
terrains that fit together like puzzle pieces to make whole landscapes; but that is material for the next
course.)
To use them, choose one and click the button to replace what you have with the new terrain, or click
and drag to blend it with your current terrain. Try it out. If you want to blend the Fractal with what you have,
and you are using a high resolution, it may take a few moments for the computer to generate the new
terrain. Wait for it to stop working before you start to drag, or switch to a lower resolution, blend, and then
return to the higher one.
The Eroded button, second down on the left.

Eroded adds large scale erosion, unlike the tiny rivulets of Erode. Click to apply the full force, or click
and drag to gradually erode the terrain. Dragging to the right erodes it up (actually adding material, but
doing so realistically.) Dragging to the left erodes it down.
– 10 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Picture button, third down on the left.

Picture allows you to use a picture you made in another program as a terrain. When you click on it, it
opens a dialog that lets you browse. We'll get to that later.
Switching Resolution to Create Terrains showing the effect of moving up, or moving down.
Mountain, showing blurry terrain features Mountain, with sharper, more detailed features
256 From 128 256 From 1024
The rest of them are pretty self-explanatory. Play around with them, and have fun. Remember, to
apply the full force, click on the button. To apply an effect gradually, click and drag either left or right.
A few tricks. When you use Eroded, you can quickly reach the limit, where you have flat topped
mountains. To avoid that, alternate Eroded with Raise/Lower and keep lowering the terrain so you can
Eroded it some more. (Which is odd grammar, but there you go.)
Erode (rivulets,) increase the resolution (the grid on the Paintbrush palette) erode, increase the
resolution, and erode some more to get fairly realistic terrains pretty quickly.
Starting with low resolutions and working up can save time. However, starting high and working down
to what you need can give you better results. In either case, don't be afraid to switch back and forth to get
what you want.
Have a ball. Remember, if it gets too muddled, Control/Crtl click the New button to put it back the way
it was when you entered the Editor.
The Filtering tab, on the Editing tools, showing two large thumbnails, with a linear curve on the left, and a terrain on
the right,and bunch of curve icons across the top.
– 11 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The second tab is Filtering. It allows you to change the cross sections of your elevations. You can
click one of the thumbnails across the top, or you can draw your own outline by dragging the mouse in the
window with the diagonal outline. Reset goes back to the regular 45° angle that is the default. Smooth
smooths out the jagged bits in your drawing. Click Apply to apply the filter, or click the flippy triangle under
the right corner of the drawing window to apply in different directions.
Try it out. This is how you can make Mesas, canyons, and other interesting things.
The Pictures tab, showing a terrain in the left thumbnail, a plus sign, thena blank white image in the middle, an equals
sign, and a very light terrain.
The third tab is Pictures. It allows you to control the pictures you import to modify, or replace, your
terrain. We'll be getting to that at the end of the lesson, when we do symmetrical lattices.
The Brush Palette, with Brush Size icon circled.

Now for the painting. This is not as much pure fun as editing with the elevation tools, but it gives you a
lot more control.
Look in the bottom left corner of the Terrain Canvas. There is a title there that says Brush Behavior.
The default is Elevation, so we will start there.
Look at the Paintbrush palette. The circle on the top is the size of the brush you are using. Dragging
to the right makes the brush larger, and dragging to the left makes it smaller. Make sure that Visible Brush is
enabled in the triangle at the top right corner of the Terrain Canvas, and drag that control.
You will see a circle in the middle of the canvas grow smaller and larger. That is the actual size of the
brush. As you can tell, you can paint tiny details, or you can cover most of the canvas in a single swath,
depending on the size you make your brush.
Try drawing with a couple of the sizes. Keep an eye on the Preview as you do, to see what it looks
like on the actual terrain. (Remember how to return to the terrain you started with? Control/Ctrl - Click on
New in the Edit palette. Do that when you have experimented enough with any one size.)
– 12 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Brush Palette, with the Brush Softness icon circled.

The next circle shows the softness of the brush; how much it blends as you paint. Drag right to make
the edges softer, left to make them harder. Experiment a bit with a fairly small brush and various
softness/hardness settings, to see how it behaves.
Return the canvas to its original state when you are finished trying it out.
The Brush Palette, with the paint Flow icon circled.

The next circle is the flow of the brush. The more little dots you can see, the more effect the brush
has. Few dots (slow flow) applies the effect only gradually, and you will have to go over the same area
several times to have the same effect as a high flow brush. But if you want a subtle effect, slow flow is the
way to go.
Click and drag right to increase the flow, left to decrease it. Try it. (Hint; the softer the brush, the more
effect flow has on it.)
The Brush Palette, with the Elevation slider circled.

The slider below that is what actually controls the elevation when you are painting with elevation, like
we are doing now. The higher you move the little red dot, the higher the elevation. The lower you place it,
the lower.
You can use high elevation to make walls, and low to cut channels. Or you can just retouch the
– 13 –
Beginning Bryce 5
mountain, and give it a double peak, before you use the elevation tools to manipulate it.
You can pick a specific elevation, from any area on your canvas, by holding down the spacebar. The
cursor will turn into an eyedropper, which samples the color of the pixels below it, and translates them into
elevation, for as long as you hold the spacebar down. Try it, watching the little red dot move up and down
as you run the dropper over the picture. Matching elevation becomes important when you want to add
things like roads, walls, or waterfalls or to your terrains.
The Brush Behavior menu.

Elevation is only one of the ways you can use the brush. (The controls work exactly the same for all of
them, of course.)
There are six different Brush Behaviors under the flippy triangle in the bottom left corner of the Terrain
Canvas Tools palette. (If you don't see it, click on the icon in the top right corner of the Terrain Canvas to
open the tools, as explained on Page 1.)
You can paint with any effect caused by the Elevation Tools. Change the Brush Behavior to Paint
Effect. Click the Elevation tab, if you aren't already there, and use one of the editing tools to do something
to your terrain (what doesn't really matter) Now immediately Undo.
Take the brush, and paint over an area. The effect appears where you paint! Neat, huh? So if you
want spikes, for instance, in just one area of the terrain, you can add them, undo, and paint them in just
where you want them. (Spikes, by the way, make great conifers on distant mountains.)
Unpaint Effect works in just the opposite fashion, for those times when you want the effect most
places, but not everywhere. Change to the Unpaint Effect Brush Behavior.
To check it out, add an effect, any effect, with the editing tools. Paint with the brush on your canvas,
and the effect vanishes just where you paint. Once again, you can get wonderful, realistic, and subtle
variations with this.
Erosion, the next Brush Behavior, allows you to paint those wonderful little erosion rivulets just where
you want them. For instance, you can use the lowest Elevation brush to paint a river in the middle of your
terrain. Then use the Erosion brush to erode just the banks of that river.
The last two Brush Behaviors are Minimum and Maximum.
Minimum will darken (lower) any elevations that are above the current level, but it won't touch things
that are below that level. So, you could lower the top of a mountain without touching the erosion that had
cut grooves into it. (Normal Elevation behavior would raise the grooves at the same time it lowered the
mountain. This is nice if you want a road, but if you just want to lower this bit, it's not so good.)
Maximum lightens (raises) any areas below the level you have set in the Elevation portion of the
Paintbrush palette, but leaves the levels above that untouched.
So, play with your terrain for a while, until you have something that you really like. When you do, click
the check mark to exit the editor and commit to your changes. I'll see you out there! (But don't take too long,
we still have quite a way to go in this lesson. You can come back here later.)
A Texture Palette, in the Materials Lab, with the Enter Texture Editor button circled.
– 14 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Now that you have the terrain just the way you want it, it's time to learn some more about the Material
Editor. So click on the M next to your terrain to enter it. (If your terrain has become unselected, you can
always use the Selection palette at the bottom of the screen to select it again. Don't forget to name it, too,
so you can recognize it easily.)
Choose a preset terrain material. I want to show you something.
As you can see, this material uses at least one of the Procedural Texture Components that we
mentioned briefly last lesson. You can see it there in the palette on the right, and you can see the dimples
filled in for the channels that are using it. (Probably Diffuse and Ambient Color, and Bump Height.)
At this point, you know how to increase or decrease the bump height to modify your material a bit. I'm
about to show you how to change the colors.
Now, this will involve a trip to the Deep Texture Editor, much of which is Advanced Material. But some
of it is easy to use, so we'll be doing more and more of that during this course.
Remember how you clicked on the pinkish button to access the Picture Editor? Well, you click on the
same one to get to the Texture Editor. Do it now. (It's the one on the right in the left hand corner of that little
Component Palette to the right.)
The Deep Texture Editor (DTE) showing the 3 component palettes, the Combination Palette, and a bunch of other
controls.
This is the Deep Texture Editor, where all the procedural textures in Bryce get their start.
A Component Palette, with the Color Swatches on the left side highlighted.
Notice the color swatches on those component palettes? You can change them, just the way you
change colors in the regular Material Editor. Try it now.
– 15 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Combination palette, bottom center in the DTE.

Depending on how the texture is set up, the colors can blend in different ways, so you will have to
look at the palette in the center bottom, labeled Combination, to see what you are really getting. (Don't
forget that it has color swatches, too.)
Sometimes changing the colors won't have any effect, because sometimes they aren't actually being
used. Sometimes the color will do something strange, depending on how it's blended. But you can still play
around, and get closer to what you envisioned, even if you can't seem to get the exact color you wanted.
Don't forget, you can hold down Option/Alt and get the advanced color picker here, too.
When you are ready, click the checkmark to exit and keep your changes. If you just want to cancel
out, click the X.
The Preset flippy, right top of the Thumbnail in the Materials Lab.
Now, I'm going to show you how to save the material you just made as a preset for yourself.
Click the Triangle next to the Preview in the Material Lab to open the Presets.
The Add button, at the bottom of the Preset Menu.

Set up the preview so it looks really good, because this is going to be the thumbnail for this preset. (I
highly recommend unchecking "Render with Neutral Ground" when saving terrain presets, so you can see
what they will do on a flat ground plane.)
At the bottom of the window there are a number of choices. Click on Add.
– 16 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Add Preset Dialog, recommending that you name it something good, and put the place where you got it, when
and why you made it, etc. in the Description field.
A dialog shows up that has the name this preset had before, and a text area for the description of it.
Name it whatever you want, and add a description, if you are so inclined, by typing directly into these text
boxes. It's a good idea to add your initials, at least, so that you know which ones you have tweaked, and
which ones you got other places, in case someone asks. You may also add which one you tweaked to
arrive here.
The Preset palette, with the new Preset highlighted.

Click the checkbox, and your preset appears at the end of the list, with the title and description just
like all the others. It's saved as of now. If the program crashes, you won't loose it.
Close the preset box.
The Library flippy, top right corner of each Texture Component palette.
I want to show you just one other thing, while we are here.
See the flippy triangle at the top right corner of the Component palette? (When you run your mouse
over it, the text above it will say, "Texture Library.") If you click on it, it will give you a list of all the various
built in textures. Which is nice, if you happen to know what the names mean.
Now, hold down the Shift key, and click on it again. This time, you get thumbnails. You can click on
any of them to add that texture component to your material. (You can also add the texture you just modified
to these presets, just the way you added it to the Material Presets, so you can use it again at any time.)
So, you can set up a texture with colors, like you did for the last lesson, and then use the bump from
one of these. Or you can just use one by itself, and set your own values for specularity, etc.
You can play with it to your heart's content. But do it later; for now, exit the Material Editor.
The Tree, on the Create palette.

You now have a beautiful terrain. It's time to put a tree on it. But not just any tree. We are going to
– 17 –
Beginning Bryce 5
explore the Tree Lab, so that you can make the trees look (more or less) the way you want them to. Save
your terrain, and open a new document.
Trees are the second thing on the Create bar, in the Procedurals section. The others are Terrains,
which we just did, Symmetrical Lattice, and Rocks.
Click on the little tree icon to create a tree. An outline will appear on your screen, already selected.
The Tree Lab, preview in the center, and controls all around it.
Click the E on the Icon Column to enter the tree lab. It looks like this. (Well, more or less. Once again,
I've used the Rendered Preview, just to show you.)
You will notice a preview in the middle of the lab. This one works just like the others. You can use the
flippy triangle below the preview to choose Wireframe or Rendered view, Normal or Close Up, and whether
to use a neutral sky, or the one currently being used in your document. Render with Neutral Ground will,
once again, give you a flat gray ground plane which renders quickly. If you uncheck that option, you will get
a grassy plane. (It won't be the one used in your scene, however, so in my opinion you may as well save
the render time.)
The same controls work to navigate in the preview, as well. Click anywhere in the preview and drag
your mouse to view it as if the tree were the center of a virtual trackball. Hold down Control/Ctrl, click and
drag to zoom in and out. Hold down the spacebar, click and drag to pan right and left, up and down. Hold
down Option/Alt and click to return to the default view.
The one difference is that, in Rendered Preview, the preview may not render until you click
somewhere on it. This is because these previews take time, and there is no point in using the memory
required to render until you need it.
The Shape portion of the Tree Lab, in the bottom center, showing the Preset flippy (circled), the Gravity Slider, and the
Randomness slider.
Bryce trees have four parts; the Shape, the Branches, the Trunk, and the Foliage.
The Shape is the overall silhouette of the tree, as seen in the distance. All tree species have
– 18 –
Beginning Bryce 5
characteristic shapes. For instance, an elm has a distinct umbrella shape, fir and spruce trees are shaped
like cones, and everyone can recognize a palm tree.
Bryce has an extensive list of preset shapes. You get them by clicking the triangle on the green bar at
the top of the Shape section, under the preview. It probably says Default right now. But look at all the
shapes you can have.
Now, because each shape requires the computer to generate a new tree, it will take a few moments to
see the change even in Wireframe Preview. Also, because there is more to a tree than just its shape, they
may not look like you expect them to. Branch distribution and foliage have a lot to do with how a tree looks,
too.
Effect of Gravity on Tree Shape - Note even leaves are effected
A tree, with branches and trunk reaching up into the sky A tree, with branches looking almost broken down
Gravity 87 Gravity 7
Below the Shape menu are two sliders that also affect the general shape of your tree. The first one is
gravity. When this is set to a high number, all the branches will droop, and all the leaves will point to the
ground. The lower it is, the less this effect influences the shape of a tree. At a low gravity, branches are
more upright, and leaves may point in any direction. (There is no antigravity; no setting to make the
branches and leaves all strain skyward.) Try it out.
Below that is the randomness setting. This keeps your trees from looking identical, even if you have
several in the scene with exactly the same settings. You can set this number by pulling the slider, or by
typing a number directly into the field.
In the bottom middle are memory dots. They work exactly the same way the memory dots throughout
Bryce work. Save a new group of settings by clicking in an empty (gray) one. Use saved settings by clicking
in a blue one. Clear a set so you can save a different set by Option/Alt clicking on a blue one. Be careful,
though. There is no undo if you clear something you wanted to save.
A Min/Max slider, with Min on the top left, and Max on the bottom right.
To the left are the settings for the trunk and branches. Several of the sliders here work a bit differently.
They're called Min/Max sliders, and they allow you to set minimum and maximum values. Bryce will then
pick a random value between those two when generating a tree.
Min/Max sliders have tiny green arrows above and below the slider. The arrow on the top sets the
minimum value for the attribute. The arrow below sets the maximum value. To use them, click and drag the
arrow itself. (Dragging on the scale in these sliders won't do anything.) You can also type the minimum
value into the text field on the left, and the maximum into the field on the right.
– 19 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The greater the spread between these numbers, the more random your tree will be. It will resemble a
tree with what is known as an "untidy growth habit." The smaller the spread, the more regular the shape of
your tree.
If you don't want the computer to pick a random number, you can set both Minimum and Maximum to
the same number, and the computer will simply use that one.
Effect of Distribution on Tree Shape - Note even leaves are affected
A tree with branches that fork almost at the tip, and

A tree, looking pretty normal
leaves all bunched at the tip of the branches
Distribution 6 Distribution 86
The first slider in this section is Distribution. It controls the way in which the branches are distributed
on the tree. The lower the number, the lower on each branch new branching begins, and the more evenly
the branches are spaced. The higher the number, the higher on each limb they begin. High numbers can
form clusters of branches at the ends of limbs.
Effect of Branches per Segment on Tree Shape - Note even leaves are affected
A tree with so many branches and leaves it looks like a

A sparse tree
"lollipop tree"
1 Branch per Segment 4 Branches per Segment
Still exploring the Tree Lab.
The second slider in the Branch/Trunk section is Branches per Segment. Each limb is divided into a
number of segments (determined by the slider below this one.) This slider lets you set minimum and
maximum values for the number of possible branches that spring from each segment. The greater the
spread, the more irregular the shape of your tree.
– 20 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Higher numbers, of course, generate more branches. Don't forget, though, that more branches means
more rendering time.
If you set the Branches per Segment number too high, it can lock up your computer. So be careful.
Ease up on a high number, to make sure you really need that many. (You are probably better off with more
segments, instead.)
Effect of Number of Segments on Tree Shape - Note even leaves are affected
A tree with two branches, four twigs, and eight leaves A tree with lots of branches and leaves
2 Segments 15 Segments
The next slider is Segments. A segment is the place where new child branches can begin on the
parent branch. The higher this number, the denser and wider your tree will become. Very low numbers can
result in almost no branching at all. Once again, though, if you use values that are too high you can bring
your computer to its knees.
A high number of segments is the best way to get fuller, denser trees, though. And fuller and denser
means older and larger.
Effect of Branch Start Angle on Tree Shape
A tree with branches and twigs

A tree with all the branches and twigs A tree with branches and twigs
coming out horizontally, or pointing
pointing nearly straight up spreading out
down (weeping)
Branch Start Angle 2 Branch Start Angle 90 Branch Start Angle 180
Below that is Branch Start Angle. This slider determines the angle that a branch has in relation to the
thickest part of the tree. The lower this number, the higher your limbs will reach. The higher, the more they
grow out, not up.
– 21 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Effect of Branch End Angle on Tree Shape
A tree with branches that start A tree that branches normally, but the
normally, but end int tiny non- A tree that looks fairly normal branches end in small flat clusters
branching clusters that don't go anywhere
Branch End Angle 2 Branch End Angle 90 Branch End Angle 180
The Branch End Angle, below it, determines the angle at the thinnest part of the tree. (The end of
each branch, as well as the top of the trunk.)
For this, as well, low settings cause the branches to grow upwards, and high ones cause them to
droop. The two, in combination, do a great deal to control the shape of your tree.
Effect of Trunk Thickness on Tree Shape
A tree with such massively thick trunk and branches that

A tree with whisper thin trunk and branches it's a solid lump, with some leaves sticking out here and
there
Trunk Thickness 2-10 Trunk Thickness 99-200
The next Min/Max slider controls trunk thickness. The maximum set here is the thickness of the trunk
at the base of the tree. The Min is the thickness of the tiniest twigs at the end of the branches. Generally
speaking, the thicker the trunk, the older the tree will appear to be. Of course, old trees have lots of
segments and branches as well, so they will take longer to render.
– 22 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Effect of Branch Thickness on Tree Shape
A tree with a normal trunk, and tiny

A with a normal trunk, and smallish A tree with a normal trunk, and heavy
branches coming out at nearly right
branches that quickly branch into branches that branch again about half
angles starting about 1/3 of the way
twigs and leaves way along
up
Branch Thickness 5-10 Branch Thickness 45-55 Branch Thickness 90-100
The Branch thickness is the percentage width for child branches, not an actual thickness. In other
words, if you have this set for 70, as the tree branches out each branch will be 70% of the width of the one
it branched from. This will be true for all the branches, from the first split in the trunk to the tiniest twig. If you
set a range, of course, the child branches will vary in width.
This has a great deal of influence over the shape of the tree, since thin branches tend to grow out of
the tree, while thicker ones tend to... well... branch. Look at the examples to see what I mean.
As with any other characteristics, a range means that the branches vary in thickness. The larger the
range, the more random and untidy your tree will appear.
The Texture area, showing the radio buttons for Uniform color, Image, or Material, with the Edit Material button
highlighted.
At the bottom of this section is an area that allows you to choose material for your trunk and
branches. (You can't choose different materials for them. There can be only one, and it goes on both.) The
first choice is Uniform. That gives you a solid color, and you can choose it with the color swatch. This is the
best choice for distant trees, where the texture would be too small to discern anyway. It renders the fastest
of the three.
The second choice is Image. This allows you to use a picture for the tree bark and branches. If you
choose it, you can also edit the image. Clicking on that button will take you into the Picture Editor that you
are already familiar with. But in most cases, you will also need to visit the Material Lab to make the picture
work.
You do that by clicking the next button, Material, and clicking on the Edit button there. This is the best
choice for close up trees, I believe. Bryce 5 comes with a number of Trunk material presets, corresponding
to the varieties of trees in the Shape menu. And, don't forget, you can tweak them the way you learned to
tweak the material for your terrain.
In fact, if you are going to be making a large tree, you will have to tweak the texture, because
otherwise it won't fit the scale of the tree; the pattern will be too large. Why don't we explore that now?
– 23 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Click on Material, if it's not already green, to enable it. Then click on the Edit button to the right of it, to
enter the Materials Lab.
The Preview Shape button, on the Preview thumbnail in the Material Lab.
Go to the Presets, (the flippy triangle to the right of the preview) and choose Simple and Fast. Use the
scroll bar to the right to scroll through the presets until you find the black and white checkerboard. I know,
it's not good for trunks, but I want to show you something. Change the Preview to Box, using the flippy
triangle on the bottom right beneath the picture.
The Edit Texture button, on the Texture Component Palette.

Now, click the greenish button at the top left corner of the Component Palette.
The Edit Texture palette, with the Resize controls highlighted.

A new palette, called Edit Texture appears. (Drag it off the other palettes to the right, so you can see
the whole Material Lab palette.) You can use this to change the size, rotation, or placement of your texture.
The tools should look familiar to you; they are nearly the same as the ones on the Edit palette.
The one we are concerned with here is Size. Notice that it is expressed as a percentage. This is a
frequency percentage. (All textures in Bryce are actually based on noise.) Now, listen carefully, because this
can be confusing.
0% is as large as it gets. The higher the percentage, the more frequently the pattern or noise is
repeated. So, the bigger the number, the tighter, or smaller, the texture. (Negative numbers don't make it
larger than zero; they increase the frequency again, making the texture tighter, but on the other side of the
axis.)
Click on the number, where it says X 24.2%. A text field will come up. Type in 50, hit tab, and type in
50 again until you have changed the size on all three axis. Then hit return. Notice that the little squares on
the checkerboard are all much smaller.
– 24 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Type in a smaller number, say 5, to see the squares get larger.
The Edit Texture palette, with the Component Picker buttons highlighted.
Now choose a trunk type, say Tulip. (Third from the left in the top row.) Notice that it has two
components. You will have to change the size in both of them to keep the same texture.
Look carefully at the Edit Texture palette, and you will see that there is a row of letters down the right
hand side. Those letters correspond to the Components. The one you are working on will be highlighted in
either blue or amber. So, to edit the first one, double the numbers that you see there. Then, click on B to
change to the B component, and double those values, too.
Close the Material lab. You have reduced the size of the bark texture, so it will look more natural on a
larger tree. Easy, wasn't it?
A Few Leaf Shapes
An unrealistic beech leaf An unrealistic oak leaf An unrealistic maple leaf

Beech Leaf White Oak Leaf Silver Maple Leaf
The last parameter for your tree is foliage. The first thing you can choose is the Shape of your leaves.
There are a number of presets, corresponding once again to the Shape presets. These will actually give
your trees the shapes of the leaves the real tree species has, so you can make recognizable trees. You will
find the presets under the Triangle, of course.
At the bottom of the list is "User Leaf." Remember that, because we are going to be coming back to it.
The Effect of Leaf Size on Tree Shape
A tree with a few tiny leaves, looking very sparse The same tree, with huge leaves, looking very lush
Leaf Scale 0 Leaf Scale 20
– 25 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The second slider controls the scale of the leaves. This is important, because it controls the apparent
size, and therefore age, of your tree. The larger the tree, the smaller each leaf will be in comparison. Since
we are used to thinking of leaves as being more or less standard in size, you give important clues about
tree size, and therefore tree age, this way.
The scale is the size of the leaf as a percentage of the tree size. So a leaf with a size of 50 would be
half as large as the tree itself! Since that would be ridiculous, the slider only goes up to 20.
The Effect of Leaf Number on Tree Shape
A bare tree, with no leaves at all A tree with what appears to be long, segmented leaves
Leaf Number 0 Leaf Number 20
The next slider controls the Number of Leaves on each branch. Dragging right increases it, of course,
while dragging left decreases it. Once again, a lot of leaves take a long time to render, so be careful.
However, the number of leaves also says something about the age and health of the tree. As a general rule,
of course, the smaller the leaves the more you will need to fill out the tree.
Using low numbers can evoke a scene in late fall or winter, since you can have trees with no leaves
on them at all.
Using higher numbers will make your trees appear to have longer branches, since unless you are
using the "Bunched" leaf distribution below, Bryce will add enough twig length to allow the number you have
specified to fit.
Leaf Distribution
Two long twigs with 13

The same, but with the The same, but with the
leaves, each opposite The same, but with all the
The same, but with the leaf leaves spiraling up the twig, leaves flat, and arranged like
another with one on the tip, leaves in a bunch, and no
position staggered so they no longer look fish scales (with lots of room
like a segmented leaf (think twig length at all
segmented at all between them)up the twig
Ash or Sumac)
Stacked Staggered Spiral Bunched Coniferous
– 26 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The next section allows you to determine the Distribution of the leaves on your tree. Just click to
choose the one you want.
Stacked arranges them in pairs on either side of the branch. Staggered arranges them alternately on
either side of the branch. Spiral puts them in a spiral up the length of the branch. Bunched sticks them all in
a bunch at the end, and Coniferous places them along the middle lying down, like the needles on a cedar
tree.
You can play with all of these for a while, if you want, but don't take too long. (Easy to do, since the
Tree Lab recalculates the tree each time you change a parameter, which can take a while.)
Render of a tree with Japanese fans as leaves!

The texture for the leaves, exactly like that for the trunk and branches, gives you three choices.
Uniform, once again, places a single color on all the leaves, and is good for distant trees or quick renders to
test leaf placement.
Image uses a picture as a texture, and Material allows you to use a material that you choose or make
in the Material Lab.
You can also, and this is the fun one, make your own leaf shapes. Remember "User Leaf" in the Leaf
Shape section? Go back there now, and choose it.
Now, go to the Material Lab. (Click Material, (which puts a green dot next to it showing you are using
it,) and then click the Edit button next to it, exactly the way we did with the Trunk / Branch Texture.)
Remember how we used a picture for the tennis ball in the pull toy? Well, we are going to do it again. This
time, there is already a picture in the Component Palette. It's the default User Leaf. Click on the pinkish
button to enter the Picture Editor, just as we have done before.
Click on the first empty square to the left of the pictures that are there, just like we did with the tennis
ball. That will open a dialog that will allow you to browse your disk, and find a picture. Load the FanColor.jpg
that you should have downloaded with this lesson.
It will appear in the large thumbnail on the left. Click on Load above the middle thumbnail, and load
the FanTrans.jpg as the Alpha channel of the texture.
Notice that now you have an image of the fan on a checkered background in the thumbnail on the
right, showing the transparency of this image. Transparency is driven by the Alpha channel. The darker the
pixels there, the more transparent that part of the image. The lighter, the less transparent. Because the
Alpha here is black and white, the black areas are completely transparent, and the white are completely
opaque.
Hit the return key to close the editor, and hit it again to close the Material Lab. You are back in the tree
lab. Render your tree, and you will see that the leaves are now all Japanese fans! You can make a money
tree this way by scanning in a dollar bill, or a palm tree using your hand (sorry) or any other leaf shape you
can imagine. All you need is the picture, and a mask for it to put in the Alpha channel, which you can make
in any image editing program.
– 27 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Material Lab, showing all the components of the Fan texture.
In the picture above, I also used pictures in the Bump and Reflection channel. They are in the
download too, in case you want to do that. Call up a new component by clicking on the dimple in that
channel, and then change it to a Picture by clicking the P on the palette, just as we have done before.
Anything that is not a color (everything in the Value and Optics sections) needs to be in the Alpha
channel to work. Except for transparency and bump, which we have already covered, the brightness of the
pixels corresponds exactly to the value of the slider, if you pulled it out. In other words, a pixel that is 100%
white is like setting the value at 100%, one that is 30% white is like setting the slider at 30%, and so on. If
you are using an Alpha channel to drive a value, the sliders will no longer work. So when you are making
your own pictures for this, just set the value of the pixel where you want it to be; you can't fudge it when you
get here. (Although you can invert it, by clicking on the half white/half black circle above the Alpha Channel
thumbnail. Go ahead and try it out, if you want to.)
Settings used for this tree:
Distribution: 6
Branches/Segment: 1-3
Segments: 4-14
Branch Start Angle: 135
Branch End Angle: 30
Trunk Thickness: 2-4
Branch Thickness: 77-96
Shape: Sugar Maple
Gravity: 6
Randomness: 44
Leaf Shape: User Leaf
Leaf Scale: 3
Leaf Number: 6
Leaf Distribution: Staggered
Compressed on the Y axis. A large, old tree, with fans for leaves
I'd like to give you a couple of tips to help you make realistic trees. If you want to make a specimen of
an actual tree species, there is nothing like knowing what it really looks like. If you aren't lucky enough to
– 28 –
Beginning Bryce 5
have a yard full of trees, I strongly advise getting a field guide, Googling tree images, or checking a book
out of a library long enough to make your own tree library.
If you are having a hard time getting the tree to look the way you want, try another tree shape. Don't
be a slave to what is "supposed" to be the species. Experiment.
When you want a thicker, fuller tree don't add branches. Add segments. After all, branches can only
branch where there is a segment.
If you want more limbs, or a larger spread on your tree, and you can't seem to manage it, make a little
tree and stick it on the big one as a limb. This gives you more control. In the same vein, you can make trees
with totally transparent trunks and branches, and put them in the same space as other trees to make the
first tree look fuller.
Don't be afraid to resize your trees on the various axis. It works. The leaves and branches don't seem
to smush. Also, whatever you do, make sure that your tree is actually in the ground. Put the center post of
the wireframe on the land. Nothing screams "Bryce Tree" so much as a tree standing on its tiptoes, with the
center of its trunk dangling in the air, supported only by its roots.
And remember; camera angle gives very important cues to the size of things. If you want your trees to
look large, look up at them.
Alright. It's time to leave the Tree Lab for now. Have fun playing with the trees later.
Three metaballs, joined and straining towards each other.

The next thing that we are going to explore in this lesson is Metaballs. Save your trees, if you want to,
and open a new document.
Metaballs are spheres that attract each other. The closer they are, the stronger the attraction between
them. This attraction is shown by a band of material that flows seamlessly from one to the other. The closer
they come to each other, the thicker the band grows.
The Metaball icon, on the Create palette.

Lets take a look. Go to the Create palette, and click on the blue zigzag thing at the very beginning of
the Primitives section. You have a single metaball.
Now click again, to get another. Zoom in, and make sure the Nano-Preview shows a nice close up of
your metaballs. Now draw them apart, moving them only a bit at a time, and watch the result in the Nano-
Preview. Pretty strange, huh?
Metaballs are used to make organic shapes.
They can be squashed and stretched, like any other Bryce object, so that you can make different
shapes with them.
– 29 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Wireframe of two metaballs, showing the distance Rendered metaballs, showing how they join to form a
between them mushroom
Mushroom Wireframe Mushroom Render
Try this. Place one right above the other. (Line them up with the Align tool on the X and Z axis, select
only one, hold down Option/Alt and drag to constrain the movement on the Y axis.)
Hold down Option/Alt to stretch from the center, grab the control handle in the middle of the X axis
and pull it out to about twice its current width. Do the same with the control handle on the Z axis, to make a
squished sphere. Keep an eye on the wireframe shadows to make sure it's somewhat symmetrical.
Then, select the other one, and move it down just a little using Option/Alt drag. Keep an eye on the
Nano-Preview. Do you see it yet? You've made a mushroom!
A render, showing how the join to look like a wooden

A bunch of metaballs, in Wireframe
spoon
Metaball Spoon Wireframe Metaball Spoon Render
Now lets make a simple wooden spoon. Make the larger sphere even larger, and squish it into a basic
spoon shape. Make a curved handle by duplicating (Command/Ctrl-D,) shaping, rotating, and placing
spheres until you have the basic shape. If the spheres overlap so that the edge of one is roughly at the
center of the next, they will form a smoother line.
Hold down the Shift key, and click on the Metaball icon to create another metaball. Notice that it's
invisible in the Nano-Preview, although you can see it perfectly well in the wireframe view. This is a negative
metaball. Name it right away, because there is nothing obvious to distinguish it from the others in the
Selection Palette. (I always name them Negaballs.)
Position it over the bowl of the spoon, and keep an eye on the Nano-Preview. See the hollow in the
spoon? Use what you know about shaping objects to make the negative Metaball form just the shape you
want for that hollow.
When you are finished, group the set, name it, and give it a nice wood material. (You can find several
in the Simple & Fast Material Presets.)
– 30 –
Beginning Bryce 5
A Texture Component palette, from the Material Lab, with the Mapping Mode flippy circled.
While you are in the Material Lab, look at the bottom right of the Component Palette. You will see text
that says World Space. That's the mapping mode, remember? We used it to change the Tennis ball to
Spherical mapping. Click on the flippy triangle and change the Mapping to Object Space. That will cause
the texture to stay where it is on the spoon, even if you resize the spoon or move it around. (Don't forget
that you know how to resize and move the texture to make it land just where you want it to on the spoon.)
If you leave the Mapping mode as World Space, the spoon will move through the texture, which
invisibly permeates the Brycian World, and look different in different places.
Try it both ways, move the spoon and render, to see what I mean. (To get a good look, render the
spoon, cycle through the display modes to mixed render and wireframe, and move the spoon until it's no
longer overlapping the render at all. Then plop render just that portion of the screen. You will be able to see
the two spoons side by side.)
Save this, because there is going to be an optional homework challenge, and open a new document.
The Symmetrical Lattice button on the Create Palette.

We are going to look at Symmetrical Lattices, or SymLats, next.
Go to the Create palette, and click on the thing next to the Metaballs that looks like a top. That's a
Symmetrical Lattice. It's made by taking two identical terrains, clipping them, and sticking the bottoms
together.
Way back in the early years of Bryce, it was about the only way to have complex objects, and it still
works very well. Hit Command/Ctrl-E to enter the Terrain editor.
Editing Tools palette, with the Picture button highlighted.

SymLats are made with pictures, and the larger the grid the better the final effect. So click on the grid
on the Brush Palette, and choose 1024. Now click the Picture button on the Editing Tools Elevation palette,
and find the Snowflake1.jpg, which you should have downloaded with this lesson. Click to open it, in the
normal way.
The picture will appear on the Canvas, and the 3D Preview will show a very, very thick snowflake. Exit
– 31 –
Beginning Bryce 5
the Editor.
A detail of the rendered snowflake.

Scale the snowflake on the Y axis, so that it's only as thick as a snowflake should be, make it white
and render. Pretty neat, huh? A complex 3D shape as easily as that.
But wait, there's more. As you may have noticed, parts of the snowflake are floating in the air, and
that's not what we really need. Let's make an icy clear center for those white parts to be crystallized on.
Duplicate your snowflake by hitting Command/Ctrl-D, and take the new one back into the Editor.
The Pictures tab of the Editing Tools palette, showing the original Snowflake, and Snowflake two, with the Blend
button circled.
This time, Click the Pictures tab of the Editing Tools palette. You will see three thumbnails.
The one on the left should have the current terrain; in this case Snowflake one. The one in the middle
is probably empty, but may have a terrain in it. The one on the far right is a blending of the two.
Load Snowflake2.jpg into the middle one. Now, if you wanted to, you could blend the two snowflakes.
Drag right and left on the Blend button in the lower left corner to see how that would work.
But we don't want to blend this time, so drag all the way to the right. Click Apply, and you have a just
the ice that we want for the snowflake. Since we want to put a transparent texture on it, go to the flippy
triangle at the top right corner of the Canvas, and enable Solid. (This will make the Refraction value work
properly.)
Leave the Terrain editor, go into the Material lab, and give the snowflake a nice icy texture.
– 32 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Remember to turn down the Diffusion and Ambience values, and give it a fair amount of transparency and a
Refraction value of 130.5 (100 x the refraction value of ice, which is 1.305.)
A render of the finished snowflake.

Do a test render, and you will see that the two of them fit together perfectly. Pretty cool, huh? Group
and name them.
A few things to remember about SymLats. First, the higher the resolution, the smoother your finished
piece will be.
Second, in your graphics program, make the design on a square with a flat black background. It's best
if the square itself is the size that you intend to use for the resolution of your lattice. (If the design isn't
square, Bryce will distort it, since all terrains are square.)
Keep the shading smooth. The smoother it is, the better the finished piece will be.
Keep everything that you want to show up in the finished lattice at least a few shades lighter than the
flat black of the background. That black is the clipping plane. Anything as dark (low) as the plane will be
clipped.
If you want to use Booleans on SymLats, remember to make them solid. If you don't, you are likely to
find yourself with a shell, especially if you boolean two of them together.
If you want pieces to fit inside each other, like the two textures for this snowflake, duplicate the lattice
and change the picture. It's not hard to make them separately, align them, and then group them; but this
way is so elegant!
I make most of the designs I intend to use as SymLats in Illustrator, because it's easier for me to get
the shading perfectly smooth there. Then I bring them into Photoshop for final working. But you can make
the whole thing in Photoshop; just use the smooth tool a lot.
If you don't have any drawing programs at all, you can still make SymLats by drawing right on the
Canvas in the Terrain editor. But it's a lot harder that way.
Rock looking very weathered and smooth Rock looking much rougher
Anti-Aliased Rock Rock with no Anti-Aliasing
– 33 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Now, just to mention rocks, and finish up the Procedurals on the Create Palette. They work just as
you expect. You click, you get one. If you don't like it, you delete it and click again.
You can add a material, just like you can for anything else.
You can also, and this is why I brought them up, keep them from anti-aliasing when you render, so
you can retain that nice sharp grainy texture. To do it, open the Attributes (A in the Icon Column) hold down
both Control/Ctrl and the Shift key, and click on the checkmark to close the Attributes. Now, when you
render, that object will not be anti-aliased even though everything else will be. (It works for everything, by
the way, not just rocks.)
To enable anti-aliasing again, open the Attributes, hold the Shift key, and click on the checkmark to
close the dialog.
– 34 –
Beginning Bryce 5
This time, we are going to explore Brycian weather. It's finally time to dig into the Sky & Fog palette,
and the SkyLab.
Shall we begin?
Please open Bryce, if it's not open already.
The Family Swatch, on the Icon Bar.

First, so that you can see the effect of some of what we are about to do, I want you to multi-replicate a
terrain, just like you did with the blocks in the child's pull toy.
Create a terrain, or open one that you made and like. (If you open one, remember to Save As... so
you don't overwrite the other file.)
Go to the Menu Bar, choose Edit > Multi-Replicate, and make about 6 of them, all at 100% size. (The
other settings don't matter at the moment.)
Now, while they are all still selected, go to the little gray color swatch right under the A in the Icon
Column. We are going to put them all in the same family, so you can select them easily later, no matter
what else is in your scene. Click on that swatch. (Don't click and drag, or it will close the second you release
the mouse button. Just click.)
The Family Palette, with a custom family, Extra Mountains" selected.

A little Family color palette opens, with 25 swatches. Pick one (not yellow (Family 4,) beige (Family 9,)
magenta (Family 3,) burgundy (Family 21,) or bright blue (Family 17,) because those are default colors for
lights, cloud planes, water planes, rocks & trees, and the camera. But any of the others will do.) You will
notice that the text under the swatches changes to give the number of the family, and that text is
highlighted.
Type in "Extra Mountains," so you know what that family is. If there aren't any colors you like, or that
you will be able to see against your paper choice, you can edit the colors. Just click on the swatch at the
bottom, and the normal color picker opens. Option/Alt click if you want the advanced picker, and
Option/Control click on a Mac, or Alt/Ctrl click on a PC if you want the regular color picker for your system,
as always.
Hit return, and the palette closes.
Notice that the color swatch in the Icon Column is now whatever color you picked.
The Select Family button, in the Selection palette.
– 35 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Go to the Top view, so you can see what you are doing. Now spread those mountains out, really far.
Stagger them, but keep them in the line of sight from the camera.
Look at the Nano-Preview. (Make sure it's set to Camera view.) Some of those mountains are
probably too small to really see. And if you can't see them, you also won't be able to see the atmospheric
effects I want to show you.
We are going to select all the extra mountains at once, and enlarge them.
Look at the Selection palette, at the bottom of the screen. See the little color icon, with a reddish
stripe, a white stripe, and a turquoise stripe? That is the icon that allows you to select objects by family.
Click on it.
The Family Pop-Up Menu.

A pop-up menu appears, with the names of all the families currently in your picture, in their own
colors. Choose Extra Mountains, and all the mountains are selected.
You can group anything you want to be able to select easily in a family like this, just by using the
Family Color swatch on the Icon Column, and select them all just this quickly, even if they are in different
groups, or composed of different primitives.
Go to the Resize tool, and enlarge the mountains so you can see them easily in the Nano Preview.
If you need to, spread them out again. We aren't going for a lovely composition here, we are setting
the scene to be able to see atmospheric effects.
A rendered example of the Seven Terrain Scene.

Add a water plane, to enhance the effect. Use the pan tool (that's the Spacebar, remember,) to crop
the picture so that you can see plenty of sky. You are aiming for something like this, where you can see all
seven terrains.
The Seven Terrain scene, in Wireframe Top view.

This is what it looks like from the top, with the terrains below ground invisible to aid in clarity.
– 36 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Remember, the larger the mountains, the more realistic it will look, and the better the atmospheric
effects will work. By big, I really do mean big. The terrains above are between roughly 500 B and 600 B on
the X and Z axis. In contrast, a newly created terrain is around 82 B.
The Sky & Fog palette, with all the parts labeled.
Now, click on the palette title to get the Sky & Fog palette, just as you do to get the Create or Edit
palette.
You will see a number of thumbnails, a black circle, and a set of memory dots, just like the ones for
the camera. It all looks like this.
The Atmosphere Memory Dots.

We are going to start at the right, so I can show you the sun and cloud controls first. As you play with
the other controls, you will want to move these around a bit, too, to see the effect they have.
So, starting at the far right, those memory dots work exactly like the ones for the camera. When you
have a sky you like, you can click one of them, and it will remember those settings. Then, you can
experiment as much as you like, and you can always go back to the one you liked later. Option/Alt click on
one to empty it so it is ready to save another.
The one on the top is the default sky; this one. You can always come back here, if things go terribly
wrong.
The Sky Randomizer button.

Want to see how strange your skies can get? See the little row of dots? That is the Sky Randomizer.
When you click on it, strange and random things happen to the sky; things never seen in nature, at least on
this planet. Sometimes, very rarely, you will get an actual decent, usable sky this way. But not often. Go
ahead and click a few times, to see what I mean. Watch the Nano-Preview to see what you are getting.
(If by some miracle, you get a sky you actually like, by all means save it as a preset; you aren't likely
to ever come up with that combination again. You do it exactly the same way you save preset materials.
Click on the sky Presets triangle, next to the Sky & Fog Palette title, click Add, and name it.)
When you have seen enough, click the default memory dot to return to the normal, default, sky.
The Sun Position Dome, with the Sun in the lower right corner.
The black circle is the Sun Position Dome. It's really a hemisphere, with the top towards you. The light
– 37 –
Beginning Bryce 5
spot is the sun. Think of it as the sun reflecting on an upside down, round bottomed bowl. You can click and
drag on the light spot to set the position of the sun in the sky.
If you haven't changed the default, the position closest to you, at the bottom of the dome, will put the
sun directly behind the current camera. Moving it to the right will move it to the right, and to the left will
move it left. Pushing it to the top of the dome will put it on the horizon in front of you. You get the idea. (If it
doesn't work this way for you, go to the flippy triangle under the memory dots, and make sure Link Sun to
View is enabled. We'll talk more about that later.)
Try it. If you push it too far, it will go below the horizon, and the moon will come out.
The Brycian sun and moon are linked, and are on the opposite sides of the dome. You can never
have both the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time unless they are very low on opposite horizons.
(Well, you can't unless you use a picture object for the moon. We'll get to that later.)
The Sun Color swatch.

The color swatch to at the bottom of the sky dome sets the sun color. It works the same way all the
other color swatches in Bryce do. Go ahead, and try it out. The sunlight affects the colors of everything in
your scene.
The Sun/Moon Toggle Button.

Above that, you can see a little yellow sun. If you click on it, it will change to the moon. Give it a try.
The Cloud Frequency and Ampitude Display, showing that Amplitude makes the clouds fuzzier as you drag up,
Sharper as you drag down, and Frequency makes them Bigger to the left, Smaller to the right.
Next to that is a box with a jagged line in it. This sets the cloud frequency and amplitude. If you click
and drag on it, you will be able to see the difference in the clouds when you let go.
Dragging left and right changes the frequency, or the size of the clouds.
Dragging up and down changes the amplitude, or how distinct the individual cloud shapes are.
If you watch the Text Display area, you will be able to see the actual numbers you are getting. Play
with it for a moment or two, to get the hang of it.
The Cloud Cover Control Thumbnail.

Next to the left is the Cloud Cover. If you click and drag right and left over the thumbnail, you will see
that it is interactive. Also keep an eye on the Nano-Preview, which will update when you release the mouse
button, and the Text Display Area, which updates continuously. You will notice that as you drag left, you
– 38 –
Beginning Bryce 5
have fewer clouds. Dragging right increases the amount of cloud cover, until the sky is completely overcast.
(All these thumbnails are quite similar, I know. If you get lost, just look at the Text Display Area. It will
tell you where you are, and also tell you the numbers for the things you are doing.)
The Cloud Color Swatch, at the base of the Cloud Cover Thumbnail.
Directly below the thumbnail is a color swatch. This sets the color of the clouds, and works exactly like
all the other color swatches in Bryce, except that you can see the old color on the left as you change it. Go
ahead and play with it. As you notice, it doesn't have as much effect as you think it might, because it only
controls the color of the Cumulus clouds. If you are using the Bryce default sky, there are no Cumulus
clouds. We'll be enabling them soon, and then we will come back here.
The Cloud Height Control Thumbnail.

Moving left again, the next thumbnail is for Cloud Height. This not only controls how high the cloud
ceiling is, it also controls how high the haze is. Dragging to the right increases the height, and dragging to
the left decreases it. Try it out.
The Sky Dome color swatch, at the base of the Cloud Height Thumbnail.
The color swatch here controls the sky dome color. That color influences the color of everything in
your scene, even if you aren't using the sun at all. (Yes, you can turn the sun off in Bryce. We'll get to that
soon.) It's a great way to add atmosphere, giving that cold blue cast to snow scenes, and the warm golden
tint to summer afternoons.
Try it out.
The Haze Control Thumbnail.

The next control to the left is the Haze Control. Dragging to the right increases the amount of haze in
your scene, and dragging to the left decreases it. (See why you have all those mountains? They really let
you see the haze, don't they?) Haze isn't to be confused with fog, because it behaves quite differently. If
you want the haze band at the horizon to be thinner, lower the cloud height. The two are connected,
remember.
Play with this one for a moment, and keep an eye on your scene in the Nano Preview. Now play with
this one and Cloud Height at the same time. See how they interact?
– 39 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Haze Color swatch, at the base of the Haze Height Thumbnail.
The color swatch controls the haze color. A light haze color will brighten your scene. A dark haze color
will make it darker, naturally. This can be very effective in night scenes. But be careful. Too much dark haze
can block the night sky. Too much light haze can make the scene unnaturally bright.
The Fog Control Thumbnail.

The next thumbnail allows you to set the fog for your scene. You can set both density and height. The
top of Bryce fog is smooth and even; so use it with care. (There are other ways to get more ragged fog, and
we'll be looking at one later.) Dragging up increases the fog height, dragging down decreases it. At the
same time, dragging right increases the fog density, while dragging left decreases it. Remember to watch
the Text Display Area, as well as the Nano-Preview, to see just what you are doing.
The Fog Color swatch, at the base of the Fog Control Thumbnail.
The color swatch beneath this thumbnail controls the color of the fog, just as you would expect. You
can make literal pea-soup fog in Bryce, but it's not as attractive as you might think.
The Shadow Density Control Thumbnail.

The next thumbnail controls the shadow density. This allows you to make heavy, dark cast shadows,
or light ones. It only effects cast shadows, though. In other words, if you have a sphere in your scene, the
shadow on the unlit side of the sphere itself is controlled by the Ambient Value setting in the Materials Lab
for that sphere. The shadows the sphere casts on the table it's resting on are controlled here. You'll be able
to see it in this scene, though, because the ridges in your mountains cast shadows on the valleys.
Dragging to the right increases the density of the shadow. Dragging to the left decreases it. Take a
look.
The Ambient Color swatch, at the base of the Shadow Density thumbnail.
The swatch below this thumbnail controls the ambient color of your scene. It blends with the Ambient
Color you have set for each object in the Material Lab. If the object has no Ambience Value, this setting will
have no effect on it. The higher the Ambience Value, of course, the more the object will pick up this color.
– 40 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Sky Mode Control Thumbnail.

The last thumbnail sets the kind of sky you have. It's the Sky Mode control. If you click the flippy
triangle under it, you can see the four available modes. You can also get them by clicking on the thumbnail
to cycle through them, or by clicking and dragging to cycle through them more quickly.
The first mode is Soft Sky. It's the default, and uses slightly lighter colors and softer shades to
compose the parts of your sky that you don't set directly. (A lot of Brycian sky is calculated, based on a sky
model. This is why the colors change as you move the sun closer to the horizon.)
The next one is Darker Sky. It uses darker versions, and is how you get brooding skies or brilliant
sunsets.
The Sky Mode set to Custom Sky, showing the three color swatches.
After that comes Custom Sky. This one allows you to set your own values for several things,
overriding the calculations that Bryce would ordinarily use.
Let's examine this one for a moment. Use the menu to select Custom Sky.
There are three color swatches here. The one on the left sets the Sun Glow color. It controls the color
of the halo around the sun. Push the sun close to the horizon on the far side of the Sun Position Dome, so
you can see it in your picture.
Now, choose a color. Notice how the sky around the sun changes? This color will still interact with the
color of the sun, as you can easily see if you choose an odd sun color, like green, with a red Sun Glow. But
the tint is still there. Turn off Custom Sky to see the difference.
The middle swatch controls the actual color of the sky. This one is really nice to have. Make sure that
Custom Sky is enabled again, and pull the sun directly overhead (the center of the Sun Position Dome.)
Now, change the color for this swatch. Pretty neat, huh? It's easier to see if there aren't many clouds, so if
there are, you may want to clear the sky a bit.
The haze color also affects the color of the sky, of course. If you want a green alien sky, but still want
haze, you may want to set them both to shades of the same green. Do this by picking up the color of the
Sky Color swatch with the eyedropper from the Haze color swatch, and then holding down Option/Alt to get
the advanced color picker so you can reduce the saturation, and increase the lightness, of the haze. (Or
you may want to make it darker, depending on the atmosphere of your planet.)
The swatch on the right is for the Horizon color. This color adds a subtle tint to the sky near the
horizon, and acts more strongly on things that are actually below the horizon, or ground level. If you have a
valley in your scene that is below ground level, and you have haze, this color will be visible there. (If you
have no haze, you won't be able to see it.) It also tints Stratus clouds near the horizon.
The last Sky Mode choice is Atmosphere Off. It turns all the other things off, and is mostly used when
you need to render quickly for position, when you want things rendered against a solid background for post
processing in a different program, or when you are composing an indoor scene, and don't need
atmosphere. The color swatch here determines the color that is rendered in place of atmosphere. It will form
the backdrop of the scene.
– 41 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Sky Lab button.

Now, you may have noticed that some of these controls were a bit difficult to manage. Because of
that, you can also set all of these things interactively and/or numerically using the Sky Lab.
Click on the little icon of a cloud with a rainbow next to the Sun Position Dome. The Sky Lab will open.
This is where you can really get to work on your Bryce sky. This is where you get stars, rainbows, comets,
and all kinds of other wonderful effects.
The Sky Lab, with the Sun & Moon Tab active.
There are three tabs, which will take you to the three different parts of the sky lab; Sun & Moon, Cloud
Cover, and Atmosphere. When you first open it, it might look something like this. Well, okay, not exactly like
that, because I've already set the preview to Render in Scene.
That preview works the same way the others do. When it first opens, it will show the scene from
whichever perspective camera (Camera or Director's View) you last used. But you can move it around, as
usual, by clicking and dragging to view it as if it were the center of a virtual trackball, holding down
Control/Ctrl, clicking and dragging to zoom in or out, and holding down the spacebar, clicking and dragging
to pan around the image. On the Macintosh, you can also hold down the Command key, click and drag to
use the camera as if it were on a tripod. Option/clicking brings you back to the default camera view; but be
careful. That's the default, not the one you are using, and you may wind up inside a mountain! If you need
to, you can always cancel out and open the Sky Lab again to return to the view you started with.
Preview from the Sky Lab, with the the flippy at the bottom right circled.
I suggest that you use the Render in Scene. It will allow you to get a good idea of what the controls
– 42 –
Beginning Bryce 5
do, without a lot of running back and forth in and out of the lab, and rendering. You will find it under the
Flippy Triangle below the lower right corner of the Preview.
Preview from the Sky Lab, with the flippy on the top right circled.
To the right of the preview is a flippy triangle that brings up the Sky presets, which you are already
familiar with.
The Sun Controls area of the Sky Lab.

Below the preview are the Sun Controls. Here you see the same Sun Position Dome that you have
used before. It works exactly the same way, although now you can see the numerical values for the altitude
and azimuth you are using; and you can set them by clicking on the numbers and typing a value in.
(Altitude, of course, is degrees above the horizon. Azimuth is degrees around the circle formed by the base
of the dome, with 0° at 12 o'clock, 90° at three, 180° at six, and so on.)
The Sun/Moon toggle, Sun Color, and sky memory dots are all here, and all work exactly the same
way as well.
But now you see a couple of extra buttons. The first one is Link Sun to View. When it's checked, the
dome works the way you have learned. When it's not checked, the position of the sun is independent of the
position of the camera you are using. So the far side may, or may not, be the horizon in front of you.
When the sun is not linked to the view, the dome acts like a compass. The right side puts the sun in
the east, the top in the north, and so on. Where the camera is, of course, depends on how you have moved
it. To get your bearings, you can look at the scene from the Top view. There, too, the compass directions are
set the way you would expect, with the North at the top.
When you get to the point where you are animating, you will want to make sure that the sun is not
linked to the view, if you want to have realistic animations.
You can also disable the sunlight from here, which can give you some interesting effects, and which
you will want if you are lighting a scene entirely with other lights. Try it out.
The Preview and Sun Controls are independent of the tabs, so they are always available.
– 43 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Fog and Haze controls, from the Atmosphere tab of the Sky Lab.
We are going to start with the Atmosphere tab, so that you can see the stars when we get there. Click
on the title of the tab now, to open it.
As you can see, there are controls here for fog and haze again. But this time, there are more of them,
and you can set them more accurately. For instance, you can set Haze Base Height, which you cannot do
from the Sky & Fog palette. Click the button next to the title to enable or disable the atmospheric effect
altogether. The buttons on these are all amber when the control is enabled, and the thumbnails are in color.
Anything gray is disabled.
Click on the number next to each slider to type in whatever value you want to use. The color swatches
work just as they always do.
There are three new controls, though.
The Rainbow controls, on the Atmosphere tab of the Sky Lab.

The first is the Rainbow. Click to enable it. Now, just as in the real world, you can only see a Brycian
rainbow if the sun is behind you. In Bryce, it has to be pretty low on the horizon, too. Make sure Link Sun to
View is enabled, turn the rainbow opacity up so you can see it easily, and drag the sun to the horizon at the
bottom. See it? You can adjust the opacity, just as you would expect. The Secondary Bow is always much
fainter than the primary bow.
A narrow rainbow A wide rainbow

Rainbow Radius 15 Rainbow Radius 89
– 44 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The radius adjusts the thickness, not the apparent size of the bow, like this. (The opacity setting was
79 in both cases.)
The Blend with Sun controls, on the Atmosphere tab of the Sky Lab.
Blend With Sun allows you to blend the color of the haze or fog with the color of the sun. This is most
noticeable when the sun is low on the horizon. You can click the buttons below the sliders to enable
blending of either one, and not the other. But the controls to determine the amount of color and luminance
that are blended work for both at once. (In other words, you can't blend 50% of the fog color, and 80% of
the haze color.)
The same sky, but it looks murky near the horizon, as if

A cloudy sky, with blue haze fading into distant mountains
there was heavy smog
Blend with Sun Disabled Blend with Sun Enabled
It's easiest to see if the sun is behind you, and there is a lot of haze. So disable the rainbow, crank up
the density and thickness of the haze, and give it a try. Try coloring the sun or haze, or both, as well. (The
effect is subtler if they are both at the default white, but it can still easily be seen, as these examples show.
Haze density and thickness were both set to 70%.)
The Volumetric World controls, on the Atmosphere tab of the Sky Lab.
Volumetric World is for super-realistic effects. It will give all your lights volume, make shadows in your
fog, and do other amazing things. But it takes for-freaking-ever to render. Go ahead and try it if you want,
but even the preview will take a while. This is the kind of rendering that can go on for days and days, even
on a very fast machine. Decreasing the quality speeds it up, but I recommend that you only use it if you
really need it, and have plenty of time.
(I would show you an example; but I'm afraid that I don't have that kind of time.) Be aware that this will
also make your world much brighter; so you will probably have to compensate for it.)
The Color Perspective controls, enabled (you can tell by the yellow dot).
– 45 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Color perspective mimics the atmospheric color shift that occurs in the real world because the
atmosphere scatters blue light more efficiently than green or red. (Red, blue, and green are the primary
components of light.) This controls the rate at which that scattering occurs, and I strongly recommend that
you don't play with it if you want to keep a degree of realism in your scenes. (However, you can always
reset the sky if you don't like the result, so if you feel like it, go ahead. But the results can be unpredictable.)
The Stratus and Cumulus controls, on the Cloud Cover tab of the Sky Lab.
The next tab has the Cloud Cover controls.
As you can see, you can click to enable or disable both Stratus (high wispy) and Cumulus (lower,
thicker) clouds.
Each control also has a thumbnail. These show the actual procedural textures that Bryce is using to
generate the clouds. You can change the turbulence of your clouds by clicking on the gray buttons, to the
upper right of each thumbnail. The plus sign increases the turbulence, of course, and the minus sign
decreases it. Try it out.
In the Screen Shot, Cumulus is disabled. Click to enable it, and try it, too. The combination can be
very interesting.
These settings:
Colors and Setting from the Sky & Fog Palette

Give you this sky:
A rendered sky, with a royal blue and yellow sunset

Make sure the Cumulus is enabled, and click on Stratus to disable it. Now, leave the Sky lab, and go
back to the Sky & Fog palette. Try changing the colors of the clouds using the Cloud Color swatch now. (It's
the thumbnail on the far right, next to the Frequency/Amplitude Graph.) Quite a difference, huh?
The effect is easier to see if you have the haze and fog set to something other than white, by the way.
When you have played enough here, go back into the Sky Lab, and we'll take up where we left off.
– 46 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Stratus controls, from the Cloud Cover tab of the Sky Lab.
Looking at the two thumbnails in the Cloud Cover tab, once more. The blue buttons adjust the
complexity of your clouds, adding or deleting detail.
If you want to return to the settings that were here, you can click Reset. Clicking Edit will take you to
the Deep Texture Editor. You can do this if you want to; but explaining how it works is beyond the scope of
this class. (I'll give you just a hint, but please finish the work for this week first. You can get some
spectacular results by adding filters. Click "Filter" at the bottom of the Deep Texture Editor, and then "None"
on the palette that appears. Choose one from the popup, and see what happens.)
Changing the colors probably won't have a discernible effect, but you can do it if you want to try it out.
Sliders for Cloud Cover, Height, Frequency & Amplitude.

Cloud motion is for animation, so we won't go there right now.
The other sliders you are already familiar with. These controls simply allow you to set them precisely.
The Cast Shadows portion of the Cloud Cover tab, with the shadows disabled (no cyan dot).
At the bottom, you can choose to enable or disable shadows cast by clouds. Be careful with this one,
because if the cloud cover is too dense, it can cast your entire scene into shadow. If you want to see the
effect more clearly, you can switch to the Render Against Neutral preview, and View Ground Plane.
– 47 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Seven Mountain scene, with all the mountains evenly The same scene, with the mountains in light and shadow,
lit in spite of patchy cloud cover. looking far more natural.
Cloud Cast Shadows Disabled Cloud Cast Shadows Enabled
Used judiciously, this can give you some wonderfully realistic effects.
Link Clouds to View and Fixed Cloudplane circled, from the bottom left of the Cloud Cover tab, Sky Lab.
Link Clouds to View allows you to move your camera without changing the pattern of the clouds in the
sky. You might want this if you have a perfect cloud setup, but it's most often used in animation, to prevent
the clouds moving by quickly as the camera moves.
Fixed Cloud plane is for much the same thing; it prevents you from getting too close to the clouds as
you move higher in the sky.
Both give the illusion that the Bryce clouds are much higher, and farther away, than they actually are,
allowing your scenes to mimic the real world.
Spherical Clouds, from the bottom left of the Cloud Plane tab, Sky Lab. It's enabled (cyan dot).
Spherical clouds gives you the lovely, puffy clouds that we are used to seeing in the lower altitudes.
Disabling them gives you flat clouds, such as you might see in the high desert of the Western US. (This is
the only kind that the first version of Bryce, which is named for Bryce Canyon, had. I thought they just
weren't very realistic. Imagine my surprise when I visited Arizona the first time, and saw clouds just like that
in the sky.)
Seven Mountain scene, with puffy clouds Same scene, with smaller, slightly less puffy clouds
Spherical Clouds Enabled Spherical Clouds Disabled
– 48 –
Beginning Bryce 5
In these two examples, the settings are identical, except for enabling or disabling Spherical Clouds.
(Also notice that this is the same sky used in Cloud Shadows above, with the complexity and turbulence
tweaked using the blue and gray buttons.)
Celestial controls, on the Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab, Random star field is enabled.
Which brings us to the Sun & Moon palette.
First is the Celestial control. This allows you to put stars and comets in your scenes. Click to enable it.
You can choose to generate a random star field, or you can use the Custom field, which are the stars you
can see from Earth.
The position dome works just like the one for the Sun/Moon. If you are using the Custom field, the top
shows the stars from the Northern hemisphere, the bottom the ones from the South.
The Stars Controls, on the Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
You need to enable Stars to see them, of course. You can control the Intensity and Amount of visible
stars. (Increasing the Amount doesn't actually generate more stars, it just makes more of them visible, as if
the sky was clearer.)
In order to really see them, I recommend that you disable all the cloud and atmosphere effects.
(Stratus, Cumulus, Fog, and Haze.) Also disable Sun/Moon visible. And, naturally, you have to toggle to the
Moon in the Sun Control. You can't see stars during the day.
Seven Mountains at night, with lots and lots of very bright Same scene, with only a few, more realistic stars. This is
stars a sky on Earth.
Random Star Field Custom Star Field
The Random field is more easily seen in the preview, because it seems to contain more stars. You
might not be able to see the Custom stars in the preview at all; but if you do a quick test render, they are
there, and extremely realistic. (These two examples show the same settings. They are also not anti-aliased,
since that removed all hint of stars from the custom field at this render size.)
If, when you render, you don't like the random star field you've generated, you can generate another
by Option/Alt clicking the Random Field button. This will change the position of your comets, too, because
they are generated with the star field.
– 49 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Comets controls, from the Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
You can add comets to your scene, if you are using the Random field and Celestial is enabled. (I
couldn't find any in the Custom field; I'm betting I wasn't checking the proper orbit. Nah. They really aren't
available there.) The sliders control the intensity and number of comets visible.
Seven Mountain night scene. There's a comet with a tail Same scene, the comet has a tail going off to the upper
pointing straight up right
Comet - Sun Azimuth 0° Comet - Sun Azimuth 270°
The direction of the tail is controlled by the azimuth of the sun. It always points away from it. Add a
few comets, and move the moon around the Sun Position Dome, to get a feeling for this. (Remember, the
sun is on the opposite side of the Sun Dome from the moon. So moving the moon moves the sun, too.
Keep an eye on the numbers.)
You can place the comet where you want it in your sky by moving the Celestial dome, just the way
you can place the sun by moving the Sun Dome.
Moon Phase controls, from the Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
Enable Sun/Moon visible, if it's disabled, toggle to the moon, if you are looking at the sun, and place it
low on the horizon so you can see it if it's not already there. Turn the Disk Intensity all the way up.
Now, enable the Moon Phase. You can change the phase of the moon by clicking and dragging on the
circle as if it were a trackball. What you see is what you get. So you can put the crescent wherever you
want it, change the phase, and pretty much have a lot of control over the shape.
The first slider, Earthshine, will determine how much reflected light from the earth is landing on the
moon. The higher it is, the more you will be able to see the "dark" side of the moon. Try it out.
Softness determines how hard the shadow on the moon is. The higher the value, the softer the line of
demarcation.
– 50 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Same scene, even dimmer moon, but it has the markings

Purple night scene, with a dim, unmarked white moon
of Earth's moon
Moon Image Disabled Moon Image Enabled
Finally, you can click to put a map of our own moon on the surface of the Bryce moon. I find it
impossible to get a bright full moon this way, though. So if that is what you want, I suggest that you use a
picture object. We will be covering them before the course is over.
Sun/Moon Visibility Controls, Sun & Moon tab, Sky Lab.

We've been using this one, and making the Sun/Moon Visible. But now we're going to look at the
control. Move either the sun or the moon so that you can see it in the preview. Enabling or disabling this
control lets you see an actual disk for the sun or moon.
Same scene, but the sun is white, and the sky is a much
Purple sky, purple sun, brown mountains
lighter shade of purple, and even lighter closer to the sun
Sun Glow 6 Sun Glow 60
You can control the brightness of that disk with the Disk Intensity slider, of course. The glow around
the disk is controlled by (surprise) Glow Intensity. This glow is the one that interacts with all the other things,
so being able to control it can give you some wonderful effects. As you can see, though, if the glow is too
intense, you can't see the disk at all. Which, when you think about it, is pretty realistic. (By the way, these
were done with all the colors left at the default, which is not the way to make sunsets. But it makes it easier
to see the glow effect.)
The color of the disk is tinted by the Sun color; but it's only a tint. Higher intensity lightens the color, as
it brings it closer to white. Unless you are using a Custom Sky, the glow also takes on the Sun color. So, if
you want a blazing red sun, you will have to not only have the sun color red, but you will have to turn the
disk intensity down, and the glow intensity up. Try it out. If you want a red sun with a yellow glow, or
something like that, use the Custom Sky in the Sky & Fog palette, and set the Sun Glow to yellow. As long
– 51 –
Beginning Bryce 5
as the glow is high, it will still have the sun color directly over the sun disk. You will probably have to play
with the size and intensity to get just what you want.
Sun/Moon Size Controls, Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
The next controls allow you to change the size of the visible Sun or Moon.
Disk Size is pretty self explanatory.
Pink Sunset, with a tiny sun on the horizon Same scene, with a huge sun on the horizon
Horizon Illusion 4; Disk Size 10 Horizon Illusion 94; Disk Size 10
Horizon Illusion is the illusion that the sun or moon is actually larger when it's near the horizon. The
higher this number, the stronger the illusion. Try it out by setting it fairly high, and pushing the sun slowly
over the horizon. (Remember that the preview will only redraw when you release the mouse button.) Using
both together you can get enormous suns and moons, that take up most of the sky.
(See what I mean about changing the colors for the various things? This is exactly the same scene as
above. Only the colors and Horizon Illusion were changed.)
Halo Rings controls, Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
Halo rings are the rings around the sun and moon caused by ice particles in the upper atmosphere.
While you still have the sun on the horizon, check this out.
Purple and brown sunset scene, with a large sun almost below the horizon, and a faint ring around the sun.
– 52 –
Beginning Bryce 5
They take on the color of the Sun Glow, and become brighter as the glow is brighter. (Remember, the
Sun Glow will be the same color as the sun, unless you have set it to be a different color using a Custom
Sky.) These rings, like the rainbow, have their own size which can't be changed. The Radius control
changes the width of the band, not the radius of the circle formed by it.
You can also enable or disable a faint secondary ring.
The Sun/Moon Shadow controls, Sun & Moon tab of the Sky Lab.
Sun/Moon Shadows, of course, controls the density of the shadows cast, just like before. You can turn
them off altogether by disabling them. So if you have been playing in here, and suddenly nothing is casting
a shadow, take a look at this control or the thumbnail on the Sky & Fog palette. If the thumbnail is gray, they
have been disabled. You can enable them by clicking on it, or coming in here and turning them on.
Sharp shadows at the base of a tree Blurry shadows at the base of the same tree
Default Shadows Soft Shadows
Soft shadows creates soft shadows, such as you might see on an overcast day. It's a lovely effect but
very, very render intensive.
The Ambient and Sky Dome swatches control those colors, of course, just like the palette.
The Sun asterisk, shining over some mountains in Wireframe view.

Let's leave the sky lab, and go back to your scene.
Now, you may have noticed that it's quite hard to get the sun exactly where you want it on the horizon.
There is a way around that, and it's been around for years, but it just got into the documentation for the first
time with Bryce 5. This is a Good Thing, of course, because features this great should be documented.
Go to the wireframe, using the perspective view that you would like to use to render your scene. Call
up the Sky & Fog palette. Now, hold down Control/Option on a Mac, or Ctrl/Alt on a PC, and double click
the Sun Position Dome.
Without letting go of the keys, click anywhere in your picture. A big yellow eight pointed asterisk will
appear where you click. That is your sun. Look at the Nano-Preview. As long as you hold those keys down,
you can click anywhere you want, and the sun will go there. If you let go, just hold them down again, and
– 53 –
Beginning Bryce 5
click some more.

If you want to position the moon, instead, add the Shift key to the combination. (Or you could toggle
between the sun and moon, but that takes longer.)
A sunset, with a yellow sky and a huge red-orange sun with a ring around it, floating on the horizon amid purple
clouds, with a red haze, and burgundy mountains. Much nicer than any other sunset on this page!
Using that method, and the trick I taught you about the sun disk intensity and the glow from a custom
sky, you can easily get sunsets like this one. (I always use Custom Sky for sunrises and sunsets. It allows
you to set the sky color, which means that you can avoid the odd purple colors in the sunsets above. See
the difference?)
Leo, the Picture Object button, on the Create Palette.

Now you know enough about the Sky & Fog palette to find your way around there, and you can use
the Sky Lab, and place the sun exactly where you want it in your picture.
Don't forget that you can also use infinite cloud planes, to add another level of clouds (and realism) to
your work.
So; I promised to show you how to use a Picture Object for the moon, so let's do that now.
Open the Create Palette, and click on Leo to make a Picture Object. You will find yourself in the
Picture Editor. (You go there before the actual creation, because the proportions of the object are decided
based on the image you use.)
The Pictures dialog, showing the moon in the first and second thumbnails, and the semi-transparent moon in the third.
Click on the square after Leo to add a new picture to the library, just as you did in Lessons 2 and 3.
Browse your disk, and find the Moon.jpg picture that you should have downloaded with this lesson.
It will load into the first thumbnail. Click on Copy under that thumbnail, and then click Paste under the
thumbnail in the middle. (It will ask if you want to delete, because it assumes that there is something in that
middle thumbnail Alpha channel that you might want to keep. There isn't, so say yes.) We are going to use
the same picture as a transparency map. The black areas will become completely transparent, and the gray
areas will become semitransparent so that the color we are using for the sky will show through. This is just
what we want.
lick the checkmark to close the dialog.
– 54 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The flippy, to the top left of the Components palette, in the Material Lab.
You will find yourself back in your scene, with the picture object now visible. But, as you can see in the
Nano-Preview, it's not a white glowing moon at all. It's a sort of dark smudge in the middle of your scene.
We need to finish working on it in the material lab, and then we need to put it in the correct position in the
sky.
So, click the M to enter the material lab.
If you look, you will realize that there is quite a bit of Diffusion Value, and very little Ambience Value.
This is the opposite of what we need. We don't want any lights in the scene to affect the moon at all,
because it's supposed to be too far away for anything but sunlight to reach, and we are faking the sunlight.
We do want it to glow. So, turn the Diffusion Value all the way off, and slide the Ambience Value to 100%.
Presto, a glowing moon.
While we are here, I want to show you a couple of other things.
There is a flippy triangle next to the row where the Component Palettes appear. Click on it.
The Shading Mode menu, with Cast Shadows highlighted.

These are the Shading Modes. Notice that in the first section, Blend Transparency is enabled. This is
what makes the transparency mask work. Whenever you want to have parts of your object completely
transparent, not like glass but like there was nothing there, you will need to enable this.
In the second section, there are more choices. The three that we are concerned with here are Cast
Shadows, Receive Shadows and Self Shadows.
Cast Shadows lets objects cast shadows on other things in the Bryce universe. We don't want the flat
moon to cast its shadow on anything, so click to disable that.
Receive Shadows allows other objects to cast shadows onto this one. We don't want that, either.
Disable it.
Self Shadows lets things cast shadows onto themselves, such as the ridges in your mountains casting
shadows into the valleys, or a figure's outstretched arm casting a shadow onto her body. The moon can't
really do that, because it's two dimensional. But we may as well tell Bryce not to look for them, to shave
every nanosecond off the rendering time that we can shave. So disable that, too.
OK. The Moon looks like a moon. A flat, low one, but a moon. Close the Material Lab.
– 55 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Reposition tool on the Edit palette.

Rotate the moon until it looks roughly square to the camera. (We will fine tune this in a few moments.)
Then position it where you want in your scene by holding down the constraining keys (x and z,) and moving
it in a zigzag along the X and Z axis until it's back behind your terrains, raising it on the Y axis when
needed.
Or you can look at it from one of the Orthogonal views, and just drag it; but it's very hard to drag a 2D
object lying in the same plane as the view. If you want to go that route I suggest that you tilt it a bit first, so
you can grab it. (If you drop it, remember that it's easily selected from the square 2D Face object on the
Selection Palette.)
Or you can go to the Top view, and use the Reposition tool on the Edit menu. Just grab the axis you
want to move it on, and drag. Your object will move in the view. Pull it until it's as far as you need in one
direction, then change to the other axis, and pull it into position.
A wireframe, in the Nano Preview, showing the position of the Moon Picture Object in the scene.
Change the Nano-Preview to Camera, Wireframe so you can see where it is, and pull it up on the Y
axis the same way.
Then use the Rotate tool to rotate it so it faces the camera, if necessary, and the Resize tool to make
it whatever size you want.
The Moon Picture Object highlighted, in a Top Wireframe view of the scene.
You want the moon behind the other things in your scene so that the aerial perspective will work
correctly. But you cannot move it behind the clouds; so we will be using cloud planes instead of the
generated clouds for this picture.
Once you have it behind everything else, you will probably find that you need to enlarge it a good bit.
Go ahead and do that now.
Edit Current Camera menu item, from the flippy second from the top, in the Control Palette.
– 56 –
Beginning Bryce 5
In order for it to look like a real, round moon it needs to be exactly square to the camera. We are
going to do that numerically. Click on the second flippy triangle, next to the Camera Cross controls, and
choose Edit Current Camera from the list.
The Camera & 2D Projection Dialog box, with the Rotate controls highlighted.
A dialog box appears, titled Camera & 2D Projection. This has the Attributes of your camera, just like
the attributes of an object, although some of the choices are different.
The ones we are interested in right now are the Rotate settings. They tell us the exact angle of the
camera. Write them down somewhere. (I keep a small white board next to my computer for writing things
like this on. This cuts down on the amount of scrap paper that I use, and also makes sure I'm looking at the
current set of notes.)
Cancel out of the dialog by clicking on the X.
Now open the Object Attributes of the moon by clicking the A in the Icon Column. Type the same
values into the Rotate settings there. Close the dialog.
A night scene on Earth, with a white Moon hanging low in a purple sky.
There it is! Your moon is set exactly square to your camera.
You can use this trick whenever you use a 2D picture object, to make sure that it's lined up perfectly
with the camera. If you change the rotation settings of your camera, you will have to change the ones for
the object, too. So it's faster not to add a 2D picture object until the rest of the scene, including camera
angle, has been set. But there you go.
Add some cloud planes, if you want to, set up a night sky, and you can have a picture with a bright
moon. Or you can have the moon visible in the sky during the day, or have two moons. This is the one I did.
– 57 –
Beginning Bryce 5
In this example, by the way, I used a volume material on a huge squished cube for the mist on the lake.
Once again, explaining that is beyond the scope of this course; but the materials are there if you want to
experiment.
Volume materials are very render time intensive, though.
A faster way to get ground fog, low lying clouds, and so on is to wrap a cloud texture around a sphere.
The same scene we've been using, in Wireframe Top view, with many large spheres - as big as the mountains - all
over it.
To see how that works, remove the moon from your scene, and return to the default sky. (Don't forget,
you can use "Save As..." to save a copy of your moon scene, if you want, so that you don't loose it.)
Create a sphere, and give it one of the Cloud preset textures. Bright and Bumpy works well. Just
make sure, when you are looking at the Material Lab main palette, that the settings are what you are used
to, and the round icon in the upper left corner says, "Surface." If it says, "Volume" click on it, to use the
preset as a surface texture.
Do a test render, just to see what you have.
Now, enlarge the sphere, and nestle it down between two mountains, or anywhere else you want to
see some mist. Squish it on the Y axis if your mist is too high for your scene.
Duplicate it with Command/Ctrl D, and put that sphere somewhere else in the scene where you want
mist.
Continue, until you have all you want.
As you are doing this, keep a couple of things in mind. First, remember that the texture itself actually
permeates the Bryce world. Dragging a sphere won't move the mist you see in it to another place; it will
move the sphere to another patch of mist.
If you want mist stuck in the spheres, you need to change the mapping mode to Object in the
materials lab, just like we did for the Metaball spoon.
Also, don't forget that you know how to resize and move textures. If the mist patches are too small,
just go into the Material lab, click the greenish button at the top left corner of the Component palette, and
enlarge the texture. (Remember, the smaller the number, the larger the texture.)
It that patch of mist would be perfect if it were moved just a hair on the X axis, move it.
Look at the preview set to Actual Selection to see what you are really getting.
You can also change the brightness of the mist by changing the Ambience Value. Don't forget that the
color of the Ambient Light, set in the SkyLab or on the Shadows thumbnail of the Sky & Fog palette,
controls the ambient color of everything in your scene. Or you can tint everything in your scene at once by
changing the Sky Dome color.
– 58 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The rendered scene, with the spot marked where the sphere edge is sharply rendered against a mountain.
Also, don't forget that you can select all the spheres at once, using the Selection palette at the bottom
of the window, if you want to reset the size of the texture on all of them at the same time.
Sometimes, when you are using this technique, you will be able to see the actual shape of the sphere.
When this happens, first try resizing the sphere. That frequently solves the problem. (Resize it both up and
down; either one may work.)
If that doesn't clear it up, try moving it slightly, or moving the other spheres around it. The spheres do
interact, and sometimes that is where problems come from.
If all else fails, you can set it to Object Mapping mode, and move the patch of mist so that it's not
against the edge of the sphere.
Be careful, because these problems can be pretty subtle, as well as glaringly obvious. And they can
take forms you wouldn't expect. For example, in the middle of this picture of morning mist rising off the lake,
there is a section of missing mist on the right.
Close up Combined scene, with the wireframe over the render, and the bad sphere showing Red. You can see how it's
removing the mist behind it. (It's an OpenGL thing, really.)
Looking at the Combined Display, render and wireframe at the same time, you can see the sphere
that is doing it. (I've selected it, in case you might miss it.)
Same scene, looking all misty and nice, with no hard sphere sides.
Shrinking the sphere took care of the problem.
– 59 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The VCR controls, on the Selection palette, labeled so you can see that the outside buttons toggle instances of types,
the inside ones toggle types.
Now, I can hear you saying, "But Robin! There are dozens of spheres! How do I know which one to
select from the list?"
Simple. See the controls to the far right of the Selection menu? They are called the VCR controls,
remember? Well, the buttons with the large arrows to the right and left cycle through all the types of things
from the Creation palette in your scene. Those with the small arrows cycle through all instances of a type.
Select a sphere. Now, click on the button with the small arrow. Bryce selects your spheres, one after
the other. Just stop when you get to the one that has an edge that fits the problem.
You can also step through all the objects in your scene, whatever their type, by using the tab key. Just
start hitting Tab, and keep going until you select the thing you want.
You can use the Shift key to add objects to your selection, but only objects in sequence. In other
words, you can select something, and hold down Shift while going to the next, and they will both be
selected. But you can't skip the next thing, and select the one after that. You can select all four, or any one.
Things to remember about adding clouds wrapped around spheres. Keep 'em big. Watch for the way
they interact. When in doubt, resize them.
Render of Seven Mountains, on a misty, overcast day.

What if you want rain in Bryce? There are several ways to do it.
The easiest is to use a picture on an infinite plane, so that's the one I'm going to show you first.
Start by setting your picture up with a cloudy sky; one where it's obvious that it might be raining.
Lower the cloud plane, reduce the frequency and amplitude of the clouds so they are big and heavy,
increase the haze; whatever makes it look right to you. Don't forget, if you are using water, it should have a
bump that shows it's being hit by raindrops. You may also want to change to Soft Shadows on the Sun &
Moon tab of the SkyLab, since you usually don't have hard shadows when it's raining. But this will increase
your render time, so bear that in mind.
The Edit Texture dialog, from the Material Lab, with the Resize tool circled and all axes showing at 250%.
– 60 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Now, for a gentle, all over rain, we are going to start by putting a picture of slanted lines (raindrops) on
an infinite plane. I've provided one, SeamlessRain.jpg, with this lesson.
So, use the Create palette to make an infinite plane. (It doesn't matter which kind; I used a Cloud
plane.) When you have it, take it into the Material Lab. Right now, it has a texture on it. We are going to
replace it with a picture. So, in the lower left of the Component Palette, click on the P to change to a Picture.
Leo will appear in the thumbnails, as always, unless you have other pictures in your library (in which case
it's random, and Leo may not even be there.)
Click on the pinkish dot to edit the picture, and load the one called SeamlessRain.jpg, just as we have
done before. Copy and paste the same picture into the Alpha channel. (The thumbnail in the middle.) Exit
the Picture Editor, and return to the Material Editor.
Alright, first we want to make sure that the material between the raindrops is invisible. So click in the
dimple next to Transparency, so that the alpha map will be used. Now, go up to the Material Options flippy
triangle next to the Component palette, and switch to Blend Transparency, just as we have done before.
Finally, we need to make sure the picture will be applied to the plane the correct way to make it look
the most like rain. So, switch the Mapping Mode to Parametric Scaled. This will place the picture on the
plane, and allow us to tile the image. To do that, we need to change its size, so click on the greenish Editor
dot. You know how to scale things already. I did some experimenting with this particular picture, placing it
right in front of the camera, and I think that it looks best at around 250%. (You can take my word for it, or
you can do your own experimenting.) Change the scale by clicking and dragging in the center of the Resize
cube, and then close the Editor.
Set the Diffusion and Ambience values fairly low (I used 23.7%) set the specularity high, and leave
the other values at zero. I added 10% transparency, which makes the "solid" part a bit transparent, and then
set the refraction value to 133.3 (100 X the Refraction Index of water, which is 1.333)
You know how to do all these things; we've done them all before.
Close the Material Lab.
Top Wireframe view, showing three cones of raindrop texture near the camera, and 3 planes at increasing distance
away from it.
Now, switch to one of the side Orthogonal views, and rotate that plane so that it is more or less
vertical, and right in front of the camera. (We want some perspective in this, so we won't line it up exactly
with the camera.) Switch to Top view, duplicate it using Command/Ctrl-D, and position the new one farther
back. Tweak the rotation in all three axis just a bit, and repeat the whole process. Make as many planes as
you think you need. Just be sure to keep them all lined up in front of the camera. This will give you several
layers of "rain." Render to see how it looks.
To make heavier clusters of drops, you can make nested cones using this same texture, one inside
the other. (Use Cylindrical Mapping Mode, and resize if necessary.)
– 61 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The render again, but this time you can see rain falling.
There you are! A steady, gentle rain.
Stormier skies are only slightly harder. They use several of the things we have learned this lesson.
To make one, start with the same basic sky that you used for the last one. (Clear the planes and
things, though. We won't use them this time. If you liked the last picture, Save As.. to start a new one
without overwriting the old one.)
The Picture dialog, with a squall showing in color on the left, the black and white alpha in the center, and a squll
against a checkerboard on the right.
Create a picture object, exactly the same way we did for the Moon, and load RainSquallColor.jpg as
the image, and RainSquallTrans.jpg into the Alpha Channel. Make sure that Blend Transparency is checked
in the Shading Mode menu.
Line them up square to the camera, the same way we lined up the moon. (Check the rotation settings
in Edit Camera, and then change the settings in Attributes to match.)
Four Squall planes, in Top Wireframe view, among a bunch of cloud objects, and quite a distance from the camera.
They are huge; bigger than the mountains.
Line it up square to the camera, the same way we lined up the moon. (Check the rotation settings in
Edit Camera, and then change the settings in Attributes to match.)
Duplicate, change the sizes of some of them, and place several in a staggered row. Group them. Now
make a few spherical cloud objects, just like you did for mist a little while ago. But this time, put them higher
in the sky, and make sure that they are nice and dark. (Turn down the Ambience and Diffusion values,
change the colors, or both.)
– 62 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Place them over and around the Squall Group, so that it looks like the rain is coming from those
clouds. (I enhanced the outline around the picture group in this view, because it was impossible to see in
the .jpg otherwise.)
You may need to tweak the haze, or the other parameters, so that you can see those squalls clearly.
The Picture dialog, with colored lightning on the left, white on black in the center, and color on checkerboard on the
right.
As a final touch, you can add lightning! Create another Picture Object, but this time load
LightningColor.jpg for the image, and LightningTrans.jpg into the Alpha channel. Square it up as normal,
and put it where you want.
The Coordinates menu, under the flippy next to the Rotate tool on the Edit palette.
Alright; are you ready for the best hint yet? If you want to rotate the lightning, so it's not at the same
angle I drew it, you can; and without losing the angle to the camera, either.
Under all the Transformation tools on the Edit palette (Resize, Rotate, and Reposition) there is a flippy
triangle. If you click on it, you can choose whether to transform your object using World Space, Object
Space, or Camera Space.
So far, all the transformations we've done have been using World Space. If you think of Bryce as a
map, with the North at the top in the Top Orthogonal view, Y has been up and down, X has been east and
west, and Z has been north and south.
But it doesn't have to be that way. If you use Object Space, then the coordinates change, so that Y
becomes the axis that was up for the object when it was created, no matter where it is now. X becomes that
object's own side to side, and Z becomes its front to back.
You can also use Camera Space, and that's the one we are going to use now. In Camera Space, no
matter where the camera is, or what angle it's been rotated to, Y is up and down as you look through the
camera. X is side to side, with no zigzagging, and Z is straight toward you, or away from you.
So, in order to rotate the lightning with respect to the camera, just change to Camera Space. (It
doesn't matter which tool you use for that; if you are in Camera Space for one object, or one tool, you are in
Camera Space everywhere.)
Now, if you hold down the Command/Ctrl key, and grab the control handle in the front face of the
bounding box, you can rotate the lightning around the axis you are looking down. So you can rotate it to
your heart's content, and it will still be square to the camera.
Is that neat, or what? And it works with either camera. Which means, of course, that if you want to
rotate an object just so, all you have to do is line it up in Directors view so that the rotation is square to the
camera, switch to Camera Space, and rotate. Simple as anything.
– 63 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Seven Mountains scene, with dark skies, heavy rain, and lighting striking one of the mountains.
Set your scene up the way you want it, and render. Now, that's a storm! Of course, if you were doing
this for a real picture, not just for practice, you would probably want to use several different squall pictures,
instead of just copying the same one over and over. Small details like that can add a lot to your finished
picture. You would want to add a light, too, since this bolt is in the foreground, to cast the objects around it
into stark relief, like real lightning does.
Just one final hint about atmosphere in Bryce. What you see is dependent on the altitude of your
camera. Some effects, like fog, actually work better under ground. Don't hesitate to select your whole
scene, including the camera, and drag it up or down. Remember that the ground plane you use (if any) is
wherever you say it is. You aren't limited to what Bryce thinks is the ground at all. Try it out, to see what I
mean.
This time, we are going to be looking at Bryce Light.
Lighting is one of the most important things in any scene. A beautifully composed scene, with lovely
terrains, striking materials, and perfect models will still look dull and boring without good lighting.
Lighting adds snap, depth, and life to your scenes.
So, lets take a look at how lights are created, manipulated, and used in Bryce.
You are already familiar with sunlight. But that is only one of the many lights that are available. We are
going to look at the rest.
Begin by starting Bryce, and opening a new document, if you haven't already done so.
A Combined render and Wireframe, of a white sphere in a flat gray world.

Create a sphere, and place it a little way above the default ground plane. Both of them should be
using the default gray material at this point. Now, go into the SkyLab, and disable the sunlight. We won't be
using it just now. (It's at the bottom of the Sun controls on the right hand side of the palette, in case you've
forgotten.)
– 64 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Also turn off the atmosphere, from the Sky & Fog palette. (The triangle under the Sky Modes
thumbnail on the far left has the command.) Give your scene a dark gray sky color. (Place your mouse on
the color swatch under Sky Modes, and slide the eyedropper to pick up the dark color from the ground
plane in the Nano-Preview, to get one that matches.)
Alright. You should now have a pretty dim scene. In fact, it should just be dark gray all over. This kind
of setup is perfect for exploring lights, and we are going to be using it again next week. So open the Sky
presets (Triangle next to the title of the Sky & Fog palette,) and Add this as a preset, just the way you have
done with other palettes before. Call it Dark Scene, or something like that.
The first thing we are going to look at is Ambient Light glow. So, select your sphere, and go to the
Material Lab. Turn the Ambience value up to 100. Exit the lab, and take a look at the Nano-Preview now.
Your sphere is glowing white, like a light bulb. That's what high Ambience values do. You can make it glow
different colors by using a color in the Ambient Color channel, or by changing the color of the Ambient light
in the scene using the Sky & Fog palette. (It's under the Shadow thumbnail, second from the left.)
Same circle, but you can see a horizon line, and the land
Blue circle, on flat gray background
is dark navy blue, not gray
Ambient Color in Material Ambient Color in Sky & Fog Palette
Try it out both ways for just a second. Notice that the color of the Ambient Light in the Sky and Fog
palette tints the whole scene, including the ground plane. That's because there is an Ambience value of
19.6 on the ground plane, too. Anything with any Ambience value at all will be colored by the Ambient light
in the scene.
Set the Ambient Color back to white in both places. I want to show you something else.
The Render Options menu item, from the Render Options flippy, last one on the Control palette.
We are going to just peek into the rendering methods here. (We'll be covering all of this in more detail
next lesson.) Go to the bottom flippy triangle on the Control Palette, next to the Render buttons. There is a
choice there called "Render Options." Choose it.
– 65 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The Render Options dialog, with Premium and True Ambience highlighted and enabled.
A dialog box will open that is full of options for rendering. Right now, the only one we are going to look
at is True Ambience under Premium Effects. To enable it, go to the Quality Mode section at the top left, and
click on Premium (Effect AntiAliasing.) Now, this will increase render time quite a bit, but it's sometimes
worth it.
When you click on it, the section below it will become enabled (no longer dim.) Leave the other
choices alone, but click on True Ambience. Then click the checkmark to close the box and accept the
changes.
A white glowing sphere, casting a small pool of light on the ground below. The horizon is faint, but visible, and the sky
is darker than the ground.
You won't be able to see this one in the Nano-Preview; you will have to render. Please do so now.
(Remember, you can speed things up a lot by using the Plop Render.) You should get something like this.
This is a new feature in Bryce 5, and it's wonderful, because the glow is exactly the shape of the object that
is casting the light.
It also works even if the Ambience value isn't as high. So we don't have to fake Ambience as much as
we used to. It's not really radiosity yet, but it's getting closer.
Try changing the shape of the sphere, and rendering again, to see what I mean. But don't take too
long playing with this. You can do that later; for now there is still a lot of ground to cover.
Return the sphere to its original shape by going to the Edit palette, clicking on the flippy triangle under
the Resize tool, and choosing Unscale. Reset the Render Options to Regular. Change the Material of the
sphere back to an Ambience value of 19.6, and pull it a little farther away from the ground plane.
You should be back to solid gray.
– 66 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Wireframe view of a spotlight shining straight down on a sphere.

Now, go to the Create palette, and create a Spotlight. (It's the second yellow shape from the left; the
one that looks like a cone.) It will appear in the scene, facing straight down. Pull it up until it's a little way
above the sphere, and make sure that the two of them are aligned on the X and Z axis by selecting them
both and using the Align tool in the Edit palette.
The render. The top of the sphere is lit, and there's a circle of light below it, with the shadow of the sphere in the center
of it.
If you render now, you will have a sphere, lit from directly above, and casting a shadow directly below.
Something like this. Dramatic in its own way, but hardly worth exhibiting.
It's time to visit the Light Lab. Make sure that the light is selected, and click on the E at the bottom of
the Icon Column to edit your light.
The Light Lab.

The Light Lab opens. It looks like this. In the top center is a preview, which works much like the others
in Bryce. Dragging the mouse on the picture allows you to view the scene from any angle, holding
Control/Ctrl and dragging up and down lets you zoom in and out, the Spacebar lets you pan, and Option/Alt
– 67 –
Beginning Bryce 5
returns to the default. Choose Render in Scene, if you haven't already done so. You should be able to see
both of your objects easily. If you can't, maneuver until you can.
The Intensity slider, top left corner in the Light Lab.

The control at the top left allows you to change the intensity of your light. You can either drag the
slider, or type the number you want into the text box by clicking on it. Try it out, and see how it affects the
scene.
A sphere in broad daylight, with a black anti-light on the top, and a black pool of anti-light below it, with the anti
shadow of the sphere showing bright in the middle. It looks like someone dropped black paint on the sphere from
above.
Notice that you can have negative numbers. (The slider turns blue when you are using anti-light.)
This is used to add shadows to an area that's too well lit. But be careful, because it adds bright anti-
shadows where a positive light would add dark shadows. (We'll be talking more about that in a moment.)
Pretty strange looking, huh? (That's edge softness on the pretty intense antilight, by the way; making one
picture serve for two.)
The Edge Softness controls, second from the top on the left side of the Light Lab.
The next control down allows you to soften the edges of the light. Try it out. You can choose between
0, which gives you a hard edged spot, and 100, which softens the edges quite a bit.
The Cast Shadows controls, bottom left in the Light Lab.

Next is a control that enables Cast Shadows. Turn it off, and there isn't a shadow to be seen under
– 68 –
Beginning Bryce 5
your sphere. (That's how to fix the anti-shadows under negative lights. Just turn 'em off.)
The sphere again, in daylight, casting a pink shadow. It looks fake and very weird.
There are two additional controls that allow you to do things with shadows besides simply enable or
disable them. The first one is Shadow Ambience. This doesn't decrease the darkness of the shadows.
Instead, it adds whatever percentage you specify of whatever color is in the color swatch next to the control
to your shadows. Be careful using this one, because if the color is too light, or the percentage is too high,
you can actually wind up with a very fake-looking patch of unexplained light color where you would expect a
shadow.
In the example here, the Shadow Ambience color was a light purple, as shown in the swatch in the
lower left corner of the picture, and the percentage of Shadow Ambience was 57%. Now, this might be what
you want. But it's not what I expected when I saw these controls, so I just thought you should be warned.
You can also make the shadows Soft or Hard for each light. It does add to rendering time, but it's
really nice to have. Move the slider to the left for hard shadows, move it to the right to soften the edges of
the shadows cast by this light. (Remember, though, that soft shadows add to render time.)
The Render Options controls, bottom center of the Light Lab.

Moving on to the center panel, we have the Render Options.
– 69 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The thumbnail from the center of the Light Lab. A small light cone, hanging above a sphere.
The same scene, but the The same scene, but the edges of the
The top of the sphere is illuminated,
cone extends to the ground, where it cone are dimmer than the center, and
and there's a pool of light with the
meets the edges of the light pool as a the sphere is casting a cone of
sphere shadow under it.
sharp line shadow that reaches to the ground
Visible Object Light Infinite Visible Object Light; Surface Infinite Visible Object Light; Volume
The first choice is Visible Object. If you click it, you will be able to see your light. But it's not very
realistic looking. In fact, it's a shape made of light, that's all. Click it anyway, though. See what I mean?
Now, directly below that, click Infinite Light. That's better, isn't it? Make sure that Surface is still
checked under Visible Object, and try out the sliders on the left now.
Notice that while they all still work the same way on the light and shadow that are seen on the sphere
and the ground, none of them have any effect on the cone of light.
Now, change to Visible Object > Volume. Notice the shadow cast by the sphere now extends to a
shadow in the light cone itself. Neat, huh? That's how you can get the really realistic light effects where light
comes streaming in a window, and things like that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Try the sliders on the left now. This time, notice that they affect both the light and the cone.
Remember that. Also, notice how much longer it takes to render the preview. Remember that, too.
Whenever you use volumetric materials in Bryce, it increases the rendering time. It's frequently worth it, but
it's the price you pay.
At the bottom of this panel is a bank of memory dots. They work exactly like all the others throughout
Bryce, and you already know all about them. After all, you've been using them for over a month now, right?
The Color controls, top right corner of the Light Lab.

Leave Visible Object > Volume enabled, and take a look at the controls on the right hand side.
The first is Color, and there are two ways you can apply it. Uniform is pretty straightforward; you
choose a color from the swatch, which works exactly like all the other color swatches in Bryce, and your
light becomes that color.
Gradient is a little more complex. It actually applies a gradient, which you control, to the light; so that
the color near the source is different from the color farther away from it. It's hard to see with the white to
– 70 –
Beginning Bryce 5
black gradient that is the default, so let's change that.
The Gradient Editor the current gradient is white to black, with the white color swatch highlighted. The Location text
field shows is 0%.
Click on Gradient, then on the Edit button, to open the Gradient Editor. It looks like this. Click on the
color swatch, which once again works just like all the others in Bryce, and choose a nice yellow for the
beginning of the gradient. (If you don't see a color swatch, make sure that Adjust: Color is enabled at the
top of the dialog.)
The Gradient Editor, with a yellow to magenta gradient. The color shown is magenta, in the 100% location.
Now, click on the Black circle at the end. Notice that the little arrow is under it, now, and the color
swatch is black. That shows that you are now editing that Color Node. Make it bright purple.
The color between them is sort of strange, isn't it? Lets change that.
Gradient Editor, the gradient goes from yellow, to red, to magenta. The color swatch is red, with a 50% location.
Click on the plus button at the right end of the Gradient, to add another color. Another circle appears,
in the middle of the gradient. Make that one bright red.
You can add as many colors to the gradient as you like. If you want to delete one, you can either
– 71 –
Beginning Bryce 5
select it, so the black arrow appears below it, and click the minus button, or you can simply Option/Alt click
on it.
If you want to change the position of a Color Node, just click on it, and drag it wherever you want, or
input the position numerically in the Location text field in the top right corner. You can drag color nodes right
over each other, to rearrange the colors in your gradient. Give it a whirl.
Gradient Editor; the same gradient, but the midpoint between the yellow and red has been moved to 30%, and the red
slider has been moved far to the right.
You can also change the midpoint of the transition from one color to another. Click on one of the white
diamonds above the gradient. It will turn black, to show it's selected. Now, either drag on it to move the
transition point, or type the number you want into the Location text field. Try it out.
The Thumbnail again.

This time, with the volumetric light showing the gradient, which starts with yellow at the top of the
cone, goes through red, and ends with magenta where it meets the floor. The light on the sphere is yellow
at the top, fading to red. The light on the floor is magenta.When you are ready, click the checkmark to close
the dialog, and see the preview of your gradient. You should have something like this.
The Range and Offset controls, below the gradient swatch.

If you look below the Gradient Preview, you will see two text fields labeled Range and Offset. Those
control how the gradient fits on the light.
– 72 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The same scene; the gradient is mostly magenta with just Again, but the gradient looks as it did when we first saw
a bit of red and yellow at the top the preview
Range = 20 Range = 85
The Range controls where the gradient ends. The higher the range number, the farther the distance
from the first color of the gradient to the last. Anything outside the range simply uses the last color of the
gradient. Try typing a few numbers in to see. (Just click on the text, and you will get a text box that you can
type numbers into.)
This number is a real value in Bryce Units, by the way; so you can use the size of things in your scene
to determine this number.
Same scene; the gradient starts with just a bit of the Again, but this time it starts with just a bit of red at the
yellow showing and fades quickly to red, then to top. The cast light, on both the sphere and the floor, is
magenta. There is no yellow on the sphere magenta.
Offset = 20 Offset = 70
The Offset controls where in the gradient the light starts. At zero, which is the default, it begins with
the first color of the gradient. The higher you set this number, the farther into the gradient the light color is at
the beginning of the light. If you set it to 100, it just uses the end color of the gradient for the whole light. Try
it out. You can type in a number, or you can use the little double headed arrow button to the right of the
gradient preview. (Why would that be useful, you might ask? Animation. But we aren't getting into that in this
course. That's the next one.)
– 73 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Gradient Editor, but this time, the Transparency portion is enabled (red dot) and the color swatch is an Opacity value.
In this instance, it's set to 20, at location 100%.
Light gradients in Bryce are opaque by default, but you can change that, too.
Click to edit the gradient again, but this time, click on the Adjust: Transparency button. A percentage
appears where the color swatch was. Other than that, the controls work exactly the same way.
Try it out!
Same preview, with the same gradient, starting at yellow, but fading out almost completely before it hits the ground.
Opacity gradients cause realistic dissipation of the light, if used this way. Of course, you can also
make the light transparent in the middle, if you are so inclined, which isn't as realistic.
The Gradient portion of the Light Lab, with the Import button highlighted.
In addition, you can import any gradient that you have saved from Photoshop. To do that, click the
Import button. A normal browser window will open, that will allow you to locate the Photoshop gradient file
you want to use. Simply click to open it, and it's imported. I've included one in this weeks download, if you
want to try it. It's called Candlelight.grd.
Now, I've been showing you all of this with the Light Visible, and set to Volume, to make it easier to
see. But all of these controls still work, even if the light beam itself isn't visible at all. Try that, too.
Use Gel controls, middle right of the Light Lab. The Image button, on the left, is highlighted.
– 74 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Now we are going to take a look at the next section, which will allow you to use a gel on your light.
This is exactly the same idea as using a gel in the theater. It allows you to add colors or shapes to your
light, therefore letting you have pretty impressive effects fairly cheaply.
To enable it, just click on the button next to Use Gel. You now have your choice of either using an
image as a gel map, or a procedural texture. First, click on Image. The familiar Picture Editor opens. Load
the SeamlessCaustics.jpg image that was provided with this lesson, and exit the editor.
Same scene, but this time the blue and white pattern
Light Lab thumbnail, with the light showing a blue and
looks like it's painted on a cone that encloses the sphere,
white streaks all through it, and the familiar volume light
which, of course, does not cast a shadow inside the cone
shadow and light effects
of light (although there is a cast shadow on the ground.)
Volume Visible Light with Gel Surface Visible Light with Gel
If you don't already have Visible Object enabled, do so now. Use an infinite volume light, and white
uniform color. Notice that the colors of the gel are added to the light, and that you can see them in the
visible light as well. Change to a surface light. Notice the difference, and the similarities. (By the way, you
can use this particular gel on a light to create underwater scenes. I don't have time to show you that now;
it's for the next course. But you can experiment on your own if you want to.)
Use Gel controls, middle right of the Light Lab. The Procedural button, on the right side, is highlighted.
The other button, Procedural, will take you into the Material Editor. Try it now. You know all about how
to use that. Try some of the materials made for lights in the Volume section of the Presets. You can
increase the transparency by turning down the Base Density. You already know how to change the size by
using the greenish edit button on the Component Palette, and increasing the frequency to make the texture
finer, or decreasing it to make the cloud clumps larger. Have a great time, but don't get seduced by the Fun
Side of the Bryce. There is still a lot I want to show you.
The Falloff controls, bottom right in the Light Lab.

The final part of the Light Lab is Falloff. As you know, the light from a real world lamp doesn't go on
forever. It fades as it gets farther from the source. How long it takes to do that is its Falloff rate. In Bryce,
you can control that.
– 75 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Preview, with a very bright white light that is as bright on the floor as it is at the source.
If you set the Falloff to None, obviously, there won't be any falloff. You will have a laser; except that it
might still spread out (we'll be getting to that soon.) Try it out by clicking the button, and see what it does to
your preview.
Preview, with a white Volume Light looking what we now think of as normal.
Linear Falloff is the default. It makes the light fade at a constant rate, with a fairly large range.
However, you cannot directly control that range. This is usually used for things like street lamps and
searchlights in outdoor scenes. It's what we've been using all along, (unless you changed it at some point.)
Thumbnail, with the light fading so quickly that the top of the ball looks dim, and there's almost no light on the ground,
or in the bottom of the cone.
Squared Falloff uses a geometric progression to cause the light to fall off very quickly. It's usually
used for things like candles and light bulbs indoors, where you want some of the scene to be in shadow.
– 76 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Take a look at it.
The light looks quite bright at the top,

The cone of reaches the sphere, and and the top of the sphere is very
Barely visible light, it's just a speck at
lights the top brightly, but then fades brightly lit. It remains quite bright until
the top, and doesn't reach the sphere,
rapidly just below it, and never almost at ground level, where it fades
let alone the ground
reaches the ground abruptly; and the pool of light there is
smaller than with the Linear falloff
Ranged Falloff 10 Ranged Falloff 50 Ranged Falloff 85
Ranged Falloff just makes the light stop at the end of the range specified. It's great when you want a
light to go just so far, and no farther; but it's not very realistic looking. To test it, type numbers into the text
box, starting with 10, and increasing by increments of 10. See what I mean?
The Preview again, looking almost normal. The top of the sphere is more brightly lit than with a Linear falloff, but the
rest looks about as we would expect.
If you need to use a ranged light, I suggest that you put a gradient on it. That way, you can have the
best of both worlds. A light that fades after a distance that you can specify. In this example, the range for the
light was 85 (the same as the figure at the far right above) but this time, I applied an opacity gradient that
took it from 100% to 10% opacity. See the difference?
So, now that you know your way around the Light Lab, we are going to take a look at the kinds of
lights that are available. Turn off Visible Light, enable Use Gel and click on the Image button. This time, load
the one called ImageMapTester.jpg. It will allow us to clearly see the distortion caused by the various lights.
Make sure that the Intensity is bright enough to easily see the spot of light on the ground, and that you
are using Uniform color, Linear Falloff, and have Cast Shadows enabled.
Click on the check mark to exit the Light Lab and keep these settings.
– 77 –
Beginning Bryce 5
The sphere and light in world; the gel gives you colored blocks and numbers, so you can see the polar distortion. (The
blocks look like concentric rings, with the lines between them radiating out like spokes on a wheel.
Now, using the Director's view, move so that you are a bit above the light, and far enough away to see
the pool it leaves on the ground easily. Go ahead and render.
See how the grid is distorted, so that it all pulls in towards the center? That is going to happen to
every gel that you apply to a spotlight, so be aware of it.
The Convert Palette expanded, in the Edit palette.

Now, make sure that your light is selected, and go to the Edit Palette. See the little double headed
arrow above the palette? That's the Convert button. It allows you to change anything that you made from
the Create Palette into any other thing that you can create there.
Right now, we are going to change the Spotlight to a Radial light. Just click on the arrow, and drag out
to the little round yellow ball. Let go, and there you are. Slick, huh? (Make sure your sphere isn't selected,
or it will change that to a light. Anything created to any other created thing, remember?)
The pattern is the same, but the squares are much deeper, and the thing is far, far larger.
Now render. Notice how, with exactly the same settings, the light illuminates much more. And there is
no sharply defined edge. It just fades away. This is the Bryce equivalent of a light bulb without a shade or a
base. It's just a ball of light. But the polar distortion is still there.
The sphere, with the grid shown tiny, but with polar distortion, on the sphere, and not light spill on the ground at all.
– 78 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Now, try the next one on the list, the Round Parallel Light. First, notice that the edge of the light
doesn't go beyond the sphere. This is because it doesn't spread out at all. The spotlight makes a light beam
that is shaped like a cone. This one is really more like the laser we spoke of earlier. The beams of light are
all parallel, and there is no Half Angle (spread of the light.)
But, once again, notice the polar distortion of the grid. It's all drawn up in the center.
Same scene, but the light on the ball shows squares, and the light on the ground is a large square, with perfect
squares on it. There is no distortion.
Change it to a Square Spotlight. Notice that it now spreads again, just like the round spotlight. But
there is no distortion of the gel image. If you need to use a gel without distortion, put it on a square light. If
you need to have a round edge on the light, incorporate that into the gel.
There is no distortion, but the light doesn't spill onto the ground at all.
Finally, switch to a Square Parallel light. No spread, and no distortion. This is the kind of light you
would use to imitate sunlight, which is so far away that the beams appear parallel, while keeping a gel
intact.
Combined Render of the familiar

scene.. You can see that the Same scene, but with a very narrow
Same scene, but with a very wide
wireframe of the light is the same as cone. It barely reaches beyond the
cone.
the angle of the cone, with looks shadow of the sphere.
normal.
Default Half Angle Half Angle Changed by Decreasing Half Angle Changed by Increasing
– 79 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Length on Y axis Length on Y axis

There are just a couple more basic things to show you, and then we can start actually using the lights!
Switch back to one of the spotlights, it doesn't matter which, and enter the Light Lab. Remove this gel,
and switch to a Visible light. Use Surface for now, because it renders so much more quickly. Close the Lab.
We are going to change the Half Angle of the light; the amount it spreads out from the source. That is
controlled by the ratio of the height of the light to it's width. In other words, the shorter it is on the Y axis
compared to its size on the X and Z axis, the more it will spread. Think of the shape of the light as its
lampshade. A short, wide lampshade will give a much larger pool of light than a long, narrow one. It's just
like that.
Visually, the angle formed by the sides of the wireframe is exactly the angle formed by the light
beams. Mentally extend those lines, and you will be able to see just where the light is going.
Without changing the angle of the camera, grab the Y control handle of your light, and squish it up
along the Y axis. Keep an eye on the Nano-Preview, and make several stops, so you can see the effect.
The shorter you make it, the greater the half angle of the light.
Now pull it the other way. Notice that the longer it is, the smaller the circle of light on the ground. The
narrower the light, the smaller the half angle.
Wireframe view of a spotlight. The long line that comes from the center of the light is highlighted.
Now you can control every aspect of every light in your scene. (Well, you will be able to with this
knowledge and a bit more practice.) But how do you aim these puppies? Simple.
There are two ways. One is to aim them manually. If you look at them from the side, either in an
Orthogonal view, or with one of the perspective cameras, you will notice that there is a red line sticking out
of the end. (There isn't one for Radial Lights, but then, you don't have to aim them.)
That is the actual direction of the light. Keep your eye on it, and use the same tools you have been
using all along to rotate it, resize it, align it, and perform all the other transformations on it that you've been
doing with everything else.
Icon Column, with the Tracking icon highlighted.

The second method is more elegant, and will allow you to keep your light on a specific target, even if
you move the target. It's called Tracking, and it's very simple to set up.
Select the light, if it's not already selected. Now, in the Icon Column, the one in the middle is the
Tracking icon. It shows a square, centered between some registration marks. (Keep your eye on the Text
Display area, to make sure you have your mouse over the right one.) Click it, and begin to drag.
– 80 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Wireframe view of the blue line leading from the center of the light to the sphere. The sphere is blue, in the wireframe,
while the lamp is red (because it's selected.)
A line will appear, going from the center of the light to your mouse. Pull that line to the sphere, and the
sphere will turn blue, to show that it's the tracking target. Release the mouse button.
Now select the sphere, and move it around. The light will follow. The sphere cannot escape it! You
can also select the light, and move it, and it will continue to aim itself at the sphere as you go. You can even
change the light to any other object, using the Convert Selection tool, and it will continue to track.
To stop tracking, just click on the icon again. It will turn the tracking off.
Isn't that easy? (You can use the same trick to make the camera point at things, by the way.)
Alright. Now to have some real fun.
A really dark scene, with a glowing candle that illuminates nothing, and a dim white windowframe. The rest is black.
Save this scene, and open the scene called Study.br5, which was in this lesson's downloads. This is
an interior scene, which we are going to use to explore a few things about lights, and a few techniques.
Press the render button, or hit Command/Ctrl - R to make a quick render.
As you can see, it's pretty dark right now. In fact, all the light that you see comes from the Ambience
value of the objects. Notice that the window frame is obviously there, in a ghostly kind of way, even though
it's not illuminated by anything. (So is the candle, but that's intentional.)
If you want to do a night scene, it's important to turn the ambience way down or off on all the objects
in the scene, or they will glow like this.
Let's start by getting rid of that glow, shall we? Hit the Esc/Esc key to toggle to Wireframe mode.
Select the window frame, take it into the material lab, and set the Ambience value to zero. Now render it.
That's better. Nothing glowing except the candle.
– 81 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Render of a scene; books, a mug, and some other stuff, on a table, all washed out by a light we can't see, somewhere
above the table.
Now, in order to make the candle actually shed light, we are going to put a radial light inside the
flame. But we don't want the flame to move, because the scene is already set up. So we will lock it first.
Select the Candle Flame, get the Attributes, and check "Locked," just the way you have before. Then
go to the Create palette, create a radial light, and name it Candle Light. (You create it by clicking the round
yellow ball, remember?)
If it shows up outside your scene, drag it inside the room, and place it above the table. Take a look at
the Nano-Preview. Wow, that's bright!
Wireframe of the scene. The light is a red sphere, that is being resized.
Go to the Resize tool on the Edit palette, or grab it by one of the corner control handles, and shrink it
down until it looks like it's the right size to make a nice halo around the candle flame. Keep an eye on the
Nano-Preview while you do this. See any difference? There isn't any.
Unlike the other lights, radial lights are not at all affected by the size of their wireframes. This is
because they are all really single point source lights. The size and shape of the wireframe makes them easy
to grab, and influences the Visible light, if that's enabled, but that's all.
We are going to have to change that wattage in the Light Lab. So click on the E in the Icon Column to
enter it now.
Same scene, same light, but now it's not too bright at all. It barely reaches the walls, in fact.
– 82 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Make sure that the preview is showing Render in Scene. The intensity should be the default of 25.
Edge Softness is dimmed, because Radial Lights don't use it. The shadows look good. So why is the thing
so bright?
The answer is Falloff. Remember, I said that Linear Falloff was pretty long? That's what you are
seeing. Click the button to change to Squared falloff. Big difference.
Same scene, but now the light is warm, like candle light.
It's still a bit white for candle light, though. Use the Color to make it a bit warmer. (You know how. Just
click on the color swatch.) Don't overdo it; this isn't a bug light. Make it about the color that you want to see
on the white pages. Also notice that you can control the brightness of the light here, too. If you choose a
darker color, the illumination of the whole scene becomes darker.
When it looks about right for candle light, exit the editor.
Same scene, but the light has moved to the candle, where it's being almost completely hidden by the flame mesh. The
scene is quite dark, except for a small pool of light around the base of the candlestick.
Now to place it inside the candle flame. Select them both, and use the align tool to align them on all
three axis (blue button in the middle.) Since the flame is locked, only the light will move. (Of course, since
it's locked, you can't select it directly. You can either use the Named Meshes under the flippy triangle in the
Selection palette, or you can use the Shift key with Control/Ctrl to select them both.)
Did it look to you like it just got dimmer? That's because the candle flame object is blocking the light.
In order to make something that looks like a candle flame or a lit bulb, (anything glowing, and casting more
than a little light,) the object you are putting the light inside must have a high Ambience value, and either a
Transparency value of 100%, or a shading mode that doesn't cast shadows. It doesn't matter which one. In
this case, because we want to keep the color of the candle flame, and transparency washes out color, we'll
leave it with the transparency map it has, and eliminate the shadow casting.
– 83 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Same scene, but now it looks like it's being lit by the candle.
Unselect the light, so just the candle flame is selected. (You can hold your cursor over both of them,
and hold down Shift/Control on a Mac or Shift/Ctrl on a PC, to get a menu of the objects under the mouse.
Then just release the button when you are over Radial Light to unselect it. The flame will remain selected.)
Go into the Material Lab, to the Shading Mode triangle next to the Component Palettes, and disable all
three shadows. (Cast Shadow, Receive Shadow, and Self Shadow.) Exit the lab, and you will have light on
the table again. Go ahead and do a quick render. (Don't forget that you can turn off anti-aliasing in the
Document Setup to save time.)
Notice the quality of the light, and the darkness and direction of the shadows. This is what you get
with one radial light and no fill light. If you want to experiment later, try rendering with soft shadows, or
putting a gradient on the light.
Same scene. The wall is almost completely dark, the things on the table are quite brightly lit, but it still looks like it's
the candle doing the lighting.
Now, lets say that we want more of the things on the table to be illuminated, but we want the wall to
be in total shadow. How can we do that?
The answer, of course, is Ranged light. Remember how it ended abruptly with the spotlight? Well, it's
something like that with Radial lights, too. It has soft edges, but within them the light is closer to its total
value for longer. Outside of the limits you set, there is no light. Let's take a look.
Take the light into the Light lab by clicking on the E, and change the Falloff to Ranged, making the
Range about 10, because this is a pretty small scene. (It's probably easier to just type it in.) Set the preview
for Render in Scene, and watch it, as you change the Amount of ranged light to 15, 20, and 25. See how it
works? Don't forget, that number is actual Bryce units.
You can render this, if you want to. Try it with the range set to around 20 B.
– 84 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Same scene, back to lighting the wall. This time, there's a soft nimbus around the candle flame.
When you are finished, return to the Light Lab, and set the Falloff back to Squared. Now, set the
Render Options to Visible Object > Surface, and exit the Lab.
Render the picture. Notice that the edges of the light globe around the flame are soft? Surface visible
object gives you soft edges with a radial light, unlike the hard edges you get with a spotlight.
Same scene; the nimbus is quite a bit larger, and more distinct.
Make sure the light is still selected, go back into the Light Lab, and change that to Visible Object >
Volume. Use the RaySpray to render just the light from the Render Mode screen. (You can find the controls
for both of these on the Display Palette to the right of the workspace.) Notice that the edges of the light are
now much harder, and that you can see the shadow from the candle extending into the light.
Combined render, showing that the nimbus is the same size as the wireframe for the light object.
Toggle the Display Mode to combined Render and Wireframe. Notice that the edges of the wireframe
for the light define the edges of the Visible Object sphere. You have control over the size and shape of the
Visible Object.
– 85 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Make the Wireframe larger, using any method you like, and re-render that portion of the picture. This
time, use the Plop Render, so you catch some of the table and the objects on it, as well. As you can see,
neither the brightness nor the range of the light have changed. The only thing the wireframe of a Radial
Light controls is the size of the Visible Object. You can play with this for a few moments, if you want to. Try
changing the proportions of the Wireframe, or its angle, as well. (Just be sure to keep the center point within
the candle flame, and don't let it get into the Candle Wax, or it will get very dark in your picture.)
Render of just the candle flame. It's very distinct, with Same render, but the candle flame is blurry at the edges,
sharp edges. espeically the tip (which is thinner in the model.)
Shading Mode; Blend Transparency Shading Mode; Fuzzy
When you are finished, there is just one more thing I want to show you about using candles in Bryce
pictures. Notice how hard and sharp the edges of the flame are? Well, they don't have to be that way.
Select the Candle Flame itself, and take it into the Materials Lab. Go to the Shading Mode flippy triangle,
next to the Component Palettes, and choose fuzzy, from the top portion of the list, as the Blending Mode.
Then click in the dimple right next to the word Transparency in the Optics portion at the bottom of the
Palette to switch back to straight value, so that the map from the texture won't be used to determine the
transparency of the flame.
Now, render just the candle flame again. See the difference? You can control how blurry it looks by
changing the transparency in the Material Lab. The higher it is, the more the edges blend.
In this shading mode, Bryce determines the blending of objects based on their thickness. Usually, that
means the edges are fuzzy. But if an object is thinner in the middle, that will blend too. (If you can't really
see any difference, zoom in on the flame, and try again. Then click the first Camera Dot to return to the
position the camera was in. Or just use the Director's View, and the RaySpray to render in the wireframe.)
The Values section of the Material Lab, with Ambience and Bump Height both set to zero.
Enough of this studying by candle light. Let's get a real task lamp in here. Use the Save As feature to
save this scene with another name, delete the Radial Light, and make the candle flame completely
transparent. (Transparency value 100%, Shading Mode Blend Transparency.) We are blowing that baby
out.
You will need to change the Candle Wax material, too, so it won't glow. Take it into the Material Editor,
and click in the "no map" dimple right next to Ambience, so it won't use the map any more. Then, click in the
dimple in the A column next to Bump Height, to keep the map assigned to the candle. Leave the Bump
Height at zero, and it won't have any effect. But if a component isn't assigned to anything, it will vanish as
soon as you close the Material Lab by clicking the check mark. Since you may want to light the candle
again, we'll just keep it handy.
If you look at the Nano-Preview now, your scene should be completely black.
– 86 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Sections button of the Object Presets dialog.

Go to the Create Palette, and click on the flippy triangle next to the title to bring up the presets.
At the bottom left of the Preset Objects window that appears, it says Installed. That means that you
are looking at the presets that came with the program. As you know, you can add other presets to the list.
(We did that with the materials, remember, and they all work exactly the same way.)
Well, there is another whole section available, called User, where you can store the presets you make
or import, so you can get them easily. Click on the flippy triangle next to Installed and choose User from the
list.
The Import button, at the bottom of the Object Presets dialog.

At the moment, there is only one category, called User, and you are looking at it. You can add more
categories; it tells you how in the Users Manual for Bryce. For now, we are just going with this one.
You probably have a whole bunch of black squares. We are about to import an object. Click on Import
in the bottom menu bar to open the browser for your platform. In the downloads for this lesson, there should
be something named Lamp.obp. Open it.
The Task Lamp, in the Object Presets dialog.

Your computer will think for a moment, and then a thumbnail of an adjustable task lamp will appear in
the first black box. Click on it, then click the check mark to close the window and accept the changes.
You have just created the lamp in your picture. Furthermore, it will be there, in the Preset Objects,
until you delete it. Anytime you want to use it, it will be readily available. You can save your own objects the
same way you save your materials or preset skies. And you can export them to share with friends, and
import them as easily as that. Handy, huh?
The Camera controls, on the Control palette. The Field of View button, to the right just below the crosses, is circled.
– 87 –
Beginning Bryce 5
You probably can't see the lamp in your picture, because newly created things tend to show up in the
center of the Bryce World. But you will be able to see the Icon Column. Click on the A. We are going to
numerically input a new position for the lamp, since I happen to know just where it should go.
In the Position row, type in 37.3, 21.29, -58.36. (You can use the Tab key to move to the next field.)
Press Enter, and the lamp will move to the table, just where it should be.
Drag the Field of View button, to the right under the Camera Crosses, so that you can see the top of
the lamp, and use the hand tool (press and hold the spacebar) to pan the picture so it's roughly centered.
You can't just back the camera up this time, because if you try you will send it through the back wall. If you
rendered then you'd just see the unlit wall. Not very interesting.
Render of the table with the books and mug and things, but this time with a task lamp illuminating everything on the
table. The wall is nearly black, though.
However, if you've done this right, and you render, you will see the table top and the stuff on it again,
but with a whole different kind of light.
We have already covered the things that you can do with spotlights, when we explored the Light Lab.
You can try some of them out here, with real objects to illuminate, if you want to. Don't forget, if you want
the light to spread out more, just make sure you are using Resize by Object Mode, and change the size on
the Y axis of the light to make it shorter. Render, and you will find that you are lighting more of the things on
the table.
But the shadow side of everything, and the rest of the room, is very, very dark. Black, even. The only
thing outside the light that you can see at all is the lamp itself, which has an Ambience value assigned to its
material. (If you want to eliminate that, by the way, just select color Family 18 in the Select by Family menu,
and turn it down. All of that part is on a map, so the various bits will remain the colors they should. The
lights are separate, so they won't pick up the maps as a gel.)
These inky black shadows aren't terribly realistic, and may not be the look you want for a piece. You
can change it with fill lights.
Wireframe view of the table, with the mug highlighted in red, and the new radial light, also red, centered on it.
Fill lights in Bryce, just as in real world photography, are used to shed a little light into the shadow
areas. In Bryce, they are normally radial lights, although you can use any kind of light at all.
– 88 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Create a new radial light, and name it Fill Light. It will probably be outside the room, and may be
outside the picture. Here's a trick to bring things you've created into the area that you are working in. Lock
something in that area; anything will do. This time, let's lock the coffee mug.
Go ahead and do that. You know how. Then, while the mug is still selected, hold down the Shift key,
and select the Fill Light from the Selection Palette. (Click on the yellow ball there to see all the radial lights
in your scene. You are in the habit of naming everything, aren't you? (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) Just select
the thing you want from the list.)
Use the align tool to align them on all three axis (click the blue button in the middle,) and it will drag
the new object right into the heart of your scene. Unlock the object, unless you want to use it as an anchor
some more.
Alright, the light is inside the mug now, and isn't illuminating anything. (Remember that the size of the
wireframe doesn't make any difference to the light cast for radial lights.) Select the light, make the
wireframe smaller, (so it's easier to handle,) hold down Option/Alt to constrain movement to the Y axis, and
pull it up so it helps to light the scene.
Render of the scene. The wall is brightly lit, and the things on the table are washed out.
Wow! That's more than just fill light. Take it into the Light Lab, and tone that puppy down. This time,
since we want the light to reach a fair way into the nooks and crannies, leave the Falloff set to Linear, but
change the Intensity Amount to 10 or so, and leave the Lab.
Wireframe Top view of the light, showing it next to the blue triangular Camera object.
We need the light to illuminate the back of the objects that are in shadow; the side of the coffee mug
facing us, the window wall, and so on. In order to do that, we will have to move it. Right now, remember, it's
over the cup.
Change to the Top orthogonal view, and position the light so it's above and a little to the left of the
camera. It should also be just a touch lower than the camera. Check one of the side views to make sure it
is.
– 89 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Render of the scene, with the shadows and caustics on the windowsill highlighted.
Now, render the scene. That's better, but notice that the pencils in the inkwell are casting a distracting
shadow on the window frame. (If you are very lucky, you'll even have caustic bright spots, like the ones you
see here.) We can eliminate that very easily, by doing something that I've wished many a time I could do
with fill lights in the real world. We can turn off shadow casting for the fill.
Another render. The shadows on the windowsill are gone.

Make sure the fill light is still selected, take it into the Light Lab, and disable Cast Shadows. Render
again. The distracting shadows are gone.
You can add as many fill lights as you want to a scene, to get the illumination you desire. Just
remember, each one adds to the render time.
It can also get too bright, and things can be washed out. Take the page of notes under the pencil, for
instance. The rest of the table seems about right, but the white paper is too bright, and looks blank. And
after all that work to put Useful Information on it for you, too!
Final render of the scene; nothing is washed out. Looking good!

Let's fix it the simple way. Select the page (Ranged Light Notes) and take it into the Material Lab.
Now, decrease the Diffusion Value from 100 to 50 or so. Render the page. That's better! Anytime that a few
things in the scene are over lit, you can decrease the Diffusion Value for just those things, and balance
them out.
– 90 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Alright. You can play with this later. For now, save this scene, and then Save As. We are going to look
at the room in daylight.
Scene with the table, a window with a stained glass transom, and green ground and blue sky outside the window.
There is a spill of light on the floor.
Select the lamp, and delete it. Select the Notes, and change the Diffusion back to 100%.
Click the second Camera Memory Dot to move the camera to the position I saved for this part of the
lesson.
Now, go into the SkyLab, and enable the sunlight. Click on the moon icon by the Sky Dome, to toggle
it to the sun for a day scene. Go back to Camera View, and render the scene.
You should have light shining in through the window. (If you don't, you will need to reset the sun. Go
to the SkyLab, to the Sun Controls, and make sure Link to View is enabled. Then, set the Azimuth to 41.8
and the Altitude to 49.5. That should do it.)
But the room is still quite dark, which just isn't right.
Same scene. The room is now well lit. The sun is still distinct, on the floor.
The answer, of course, is fill lights again. Drag the one you already have up closer to the ceiling, and
move it nearer to the window. Duplicate it, and put the duplicate over the table. You can also change the
intensity of the light coming from each one, and decide if you want shadows or not. I used one light at
position 58.96, 33.17, -51.96 set at 15% with no shadows, and one at 27.43, 42.07, -53.91 at 7% with
shadows for this render.
Combined render close up, showing the wireframe of the spot light lying face up in the light spill.
Now, if you look under the table, there is quite a spill of sunlight there. In the real world, that light
– 91 –
Beginning Bryce 5
would reflect a fair amount up onto the underside of the table. In Bryce, you can fake that by putting a
spotlight with a very large half angle right in the light spill. You use a spotlight, instead of a radial, so it won't
interfere with the light spill itself. On the other hand, if you want bloom from the light, a radial is the thing to
use.
Duplicate one of the fill lights, and change it into a spotlight using the Convert Selection To... pop out
palette under the double headed arrow at the far right of the Edit palette. Rotate it 180° on the X axis, so it
points straight up.
Change Display Modes to combined Render and Wireframe mode. Land the new spotlight by clicking
the down arrow in the Icon Column. (If it lands on the table, hold down option/alt to constrain the movement
to the Y axis, drag it under the table, and land it again.) Then, using the X and Z keys to constrain the
movement, maneuver it into the middle of the light spill under the table. Grab the top control handle, and
squish it down on the Y axis so that it's nearly flat.
Render of whole scene, with light on the inside legs of the table, where they would catch the bounce from the spill in
the real world.
Now, render the underside of the table. As you can see there is light there. Adjust the intensity until it
looks about right. Convert it to a radial light to see the difference, and choose the one you think looks best.
It's subtle, I know; but little subtle things like this can make all the difference.
Render, looking more like the room is being lit by sunlight bouncing off the floor and walls.
You can also adjust the amount of diffuse and ambient light that objects have, to do things like lighten
the floor under the table (increase the Ambience value for the floor) or sharpen the distinction between the
two walls (decrease the Diffusion value for one, and increase the Ambience value for the other.) Don't forget
you can change the color of the light, too, to change the feeling of the whole scene.
For this render, I did all of the above. I gave the top two fill lights a warm tone, the floor an ambience
value of 22 (decreasing the diffusion value to 72.8 so it wouldn't start to glow,) decreased the diffusion value
of the front wall to 95 and increased the ambience value of the left wall to 11. I made the front wall darker
because the light is behind it. More reflected light would end up on the side walls, so that's where I put it.
– 92 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Combine render close up, showing the wireframes of the

Render, showing the dark spots where the table legs hit
tiny anti-spotlights, pointing at the floor from inside the
the floor.
table legs.
Anti-Light Placement Anti-Light in Action
Now, this would be perfect, if there was only some way to put a tiny shadow right where the table leg
meets the floor. Well, there is. All you need is a little Anti-Light. Create a tiny spotlight, leave it aiming
downwards, and place it inside the table leg, just a little bit above the floor. In the Light Lab, give it an
Intensity of minus two or three, an Edge Softness of 100%, and disable Shadow Casting. Use the RaySpray
or a plop render to render just the foot of that table leg. There is your tiny shadow.
Wireframe view of the scene, with the red rectangular Picture Object outside the window.
Which leaves only one glaring error in this scene. (Well, except for the complete lack of a Center of
Interest, but I'm leaving that up to you.) The view outside the window is horrible. So much for any illusion of
reality.
Remember the trick with the moon and the lightning bolt? We are going to use the same thing to add
a view, without adding a lot of polygons and rendering time. It's all stuff that you have done before.
Go to the Create palette, and click on Leo to make a Picture Object. In the Picture Editor, click on an
empty square, and then browse your drive until you find the render of one of your outdoor scenes. (Bryce
saves renders with every scene, even if they are blank. On the Mac, they will be Scene Name.pct. On the
IBM, they are Scene Name.bmp) Pick something sunny. If you were really setting up a picture, you would
want a scene with the sun and the camera in the same positions they have here; but for now anything will
do.
Take it into the Material Lab, disable the Component in the Transparency channel, set the
Transparency and Diffusion values to zero, and the Ambience value to 100. Go to Shading Mode (top
triangle, remember) set the mode to Normal and disable all shadows (cast, receive and self.) All of this
causes this panel to be fully lit, no matter where the sun is, or what other objects are around it.
Now, remember how we made the picture objects square to the camera by copying the information
from the Camera into the Attributes box in the last lesson? We need to do that again. This time, select the
blue wireframe perspective object, open the Attributes for it, and copy down the rotation values. Select the
Outdoors picture object, and type those values into the rotation row there.
Move the Outdoors, so that it is behind the window, and overlaps it on all sides, including the top
semicircle.
– 93 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Render, showing the misty scene outside and the bright green reflections in the partially open window.
Render now, and the view outside the window is vastly improved. But if you look carefully, you will
notice that there is still a bit of a problem. In the left window, which is partially open, you can see the
reflection of the green and blue from the flat ground and sky. Sort of ruins the illusion, doesn't it?
Rendered scene, with only the colors that should be there in the window reflection.
We've got a nice room, and we've fixed the extraordinarily fake view outside the window. But the open
window is still catching the reflection of that view.
Fortunately, there are a couple of easy ways to fix it. If the reflection is distorted, like this one, you can
just duplicate the Picture Object, and line it up with the open window, just exactly like you lined the other
one up with the camera, so the window is catching that reflection. The colors will be right, and the illusion of
a world outside will be restored. Try it.
Just hit Command/Ctrl-D to duplicate the Outdoors, then go to the Top orthogonal view. Select the
Left Window Group and check the angle of rotation in its Attributes box. Select Outdoors 1, open the
Attributes, and type that information in. Then, use the Reposition tool to place it just past the corner of the
room, so the reflection will be caught in the window.
Render now, and the bad reflections will be gone.
The Render Options menu, last flippy on the Control Palette, with 360 Panoramic Projection highlighted.
If the reflection is too clear, though, or isn't limited to a single plane, you can't use this method.
– 94 –
Beginning Bryce 5
I'm going to tell you another one; and you can practice it later. (You have the skills now to do it.)
Set up the outdoors scene, with landscape all around. Then, under the Render Options flippy triangle,
to the right of the Render Controls, choose 360° Panoramic Projection from the list. Save the Image with a
name you will recognize.
Combined render of the scene, showing the Sky Sphere totally surrounding the scene.
Return to your indoor scene, and make a sphere. In the Materials Lab, use the same options that you
used for the 2D Picture Object, but with the 360° Panoramic Projection you just made as the map.
Make the sphere large enough to encompass your scene, put the middle of it at the same level as
your camera, and you can have reflections everywhere!
I've included a map in this week's downloads if you want to try it after the lesson. I suggest that you
use a sphere that is 116.48 Bryce units in diameter, placed at 36.08, 32.67, -66.61 and rotated 180° on the
X axis, 43° on the Y, and 180° on the Z. This gave me the best view while still keeping the sun at more or
less the correct angle.
It's also important in either case to have enough resolution on the Outdoor scene that it doesn't look
too blurry, unless you want it to be out of focus. Also, if you want to really heighten the illusion of a
photograph taken inside, you can wash out the outside picture by taking it into an image editor, like
Photoshop, and changing the levels. That's what happens with film, so it will look more realistic to your
viewers, who have been raised on photographs.
Okay. This is all well and good, but what if you want to actually see the light streaming through the
window? You could do it by choosing Volumetric World in the SkyLab, but that would take for freaking ever
to render.
Wireframe Side view, with the Parallel Light outside the window, angled to follow the sunlight.
An easier method is to use a parallel light right outside the window. Let's try that one.
Disable the sun in the SkyLab, and Create a Square Parallel Light from the Create Palette. You want
to use a Parallel light, because the sun's rays are so far away that they appear parallel on this planet.
Position it so that it is outside the window, and angled in. You can resize it so that it's the same
proportions as the window (remember to use Resize by Object Space when you do.) Now take it into the
Light Lab, give it an intensity of 15 or so, enable Visible Object > Volume, Infinite Light, and change the
Falloff to None. Exit the Light Lab.
– 95 –
Beginning Bryce 5
You will probably want to turn down the fill lights you have been using, so the effect will be more
pronounced, and you may want to add another fill light to give the illusion of reflection from the light spill,
depending on where the light spill falls. (Remember to keep an eye on the Nano-Preview while rotating your
light to determine that. Also, if you have resized it, remember to Rotate in Object Space, or you will skew it;
and we aren't covering skewed objects until the next lesson.)
Same scene, but with a darker room, and sunlight streaming through the window, picking up the colors of the stained
glass. Very pretty.
When you are finished, you should have something like this.
Try experimenting with Ranged Falloff lights for these streaming light effects. You can get some pretty
nice results. You might also want to try putting a gradient on the light, particularly if you are using one with
ranged falloff.
Close up render of objects on the table, with the light from Gonorta's Venetian Blinds shining on them.
If your window isn't going to be visible in the scene, you don't have to go to the trouble (not to mention
the polygons) of modeling a whole room like this. Just use a gel on your light! It's simple.
Save this scene, if you like what you have here, and then Save As so we can make changes without
overwriting it.
Now, select the whole window wall, the ceiling, the back wall, the right wall; everything except the
"Wall, left" and delete 'em. (You will have to unlock some of them before you can delete them. So select
everything, then go to Attributes and unlock it all at once.)
Now, use the FOV (Field of View) button under the camera crosses, or the magnifying tool, to zoom in
on just the table and the objects on it. We are aiming for a tight closeup, with the back wall just visible in the
background (if that.) Feel free to move the wall, if you need to, to cover any gaps.
Now, select the parallel light, which should still be in your scene, and take it into the Light Lab. Disable
the visible light, to save on render time, and turn down the intensity a notch or so. Enable Use Gel, and click
on Image. Load the Blinds.jpg into an empty slot, and hit the enter key twice to leave the Picture Editor and
the Light Lab.
Now render. Look! Blinds! Really, really, BIG blinds! Let's fix that.
– 96 –
Beginning Bryce 5
Same scene, but the light now looks like it's coming through normal blinds, and streaming across the table.
Make sure the light is still selected, and click on the M, or press Command/Ctrl M to take it into the
Material Lab. You can see that Blinds.jpg is just being used as an image component. You already know how
to resize components. That's easy!
So, click on the green Editor button, and change the size to use the pattern more often. Click and
drag on the middle of the icon until all three axis read about 20% or so. Then hit Enter to leave the Material
Lab. (I turned up the fill light a hair, too.)
And there it is. A picture of early morning sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds onto the
study table. Hmm. Maybe we should reset the watch!

Beginning Bryce 5 - Parte 1

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beginning Bryce 5 - Parte 1

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

–1–

Beginning Bryce 5 - Lesson Three, Somewhere to Put It: Page One

The Terrain Editor, with all the parts labeled

The Colored/Grayscale toggle, bottom left of the Terrain Canvas.

The Zoom Area button, to the left of the color toggle.

The Clipping Tool, on the right side of the Terrain Canvas.

A circle with a cross hair inside it.

A monutain wiht the surface smoothedThe third choice down is Smooth.

A mountain looking faceted, with all the polys showing.

Moving right along.

Smooth mountain, without much

The New botton, in the Elevation Master Controls.

The Undo button, next one along.

The Erode button.

The Fractal button, top left in the General controls

The Eroded button, second down on the left.

The Picture button, third down on the left.

The Brush Palette, with Brush Size icon circled.

The Brush Palette, with the Brush Softness icon circled.

The Brush Palette, with the paint Flow icon circled.

The Brush Palette, with the Elevation slider circled.

The Brush Behavior menu.

The Combination palette, bottom center in the DTE.

The Add button, at the bottom of the Preset Menu.

The Preset palette, with the new Preset highlighted.

The Tree, on the Create palette.

A tree with branches that fork almost at the tip, and

A tree with so many branches and leaves it looks like a

A tree with branches and twigs

Effect of Branch End Angle on Tree Shape

A tree with such massively thick trunk and branches that

Effect of Branch Thickness on Tree Shape

A tree with a normal trunk, and tiny

The Edit Texture button, on the Texture Component Palette.

The Edit Texture palette, with the Resize controls highlighted.

Type in a smaller number, say 5, to see the squares get larger.

An unrealistic beech leaf An unrealistic oak leaf An unrealistic maple leaf

Two long twigs with 13

Stacked Staggered Spiral Bunched Coniferous

Render of a tree with Japanese fans as leaves!

Three metaballs, joined and straining towards each other.

The Metaball icon, on the Create palette.

A render, showing how the join to look like a wooden

The Symmetrical Lattice button on the Create Palette.

Editing Tools palette, with the Picture button highlighted.

A detail of the rendered snowflake.

A render of the finished snowflake.

The Family Swatch, on the Icon Bar.

The Family Palette, with a custom family, Extra Mountains" selected.

The Select Family button, in the Selection palette.

The Family Pop-Up Menu.

A rendered example of the Seven Terrain Scene.

The Seven Terrain scene, in Wireframe Top view.

The Atmosphere Memory Dots.

The Sky Randomizer button.

The Sun Color swatch.

The Sun/Moon Toggle Button.

The Cloud Cover Control Thumbnail.

The Cloud Height Control Thumbnail.

The Haze Control Thumbnail.

The Fog Control Thumbnail.

The Shadow Density Control Thumbnail.

The Sky Mode Control Thumbnail.