Testing springs in Bryce

[Kathye]

I'm having great fun with this now I'm finally getting the hang of it better :)

I've been testing out the spring tool and rendering in Bryce. Took me quite a while to come up with a material for the waterfall that I felt was acceptable but I learned a heck of a lot more about the DTE while I was about it so nothing wasted there.

I've done two versions of this, one at 1024 and one at 4096. I think I do prefer the subtle difference visible in the 4096, enough to make it worth persisting even though they do test my poor computer's resources dearly both in GC and in Bryce.

There are some odd shadows in the front which I can only assume are coming from the sharp edges of the cut off terrain just off camera. It's a bit disappointing and I'm not sure the best way to deal with it really. Probably making it seamless and tiling off camera though last time I tried that it was very hard to get the seams to match well because the Bryce bounding box for terrains is not exactly at the edge of the terrain (as I understand it anyway).

Looking forward to trying more with isolines now, tempting as it is to develop this rough shot into a proper scene.


The image here is the 4096. If you want to compare with the 1024 it's

http://www.pbase.com/image/81713102

cheers
Kathy

[cajomi]

The shadows look allright to me. May be the water is a bit to troubled, so there are no reflections visible. But of course, the main problem are the lakes, they need a better map form GeoControl. I will improve that.
At all a for Bryce fantastic detailed landscape.

[vimutti]

This looks quite good to me. I haven't tried the rivers and lakes yet except to see that it is going to take some work to figure them out. I llike the height field or the slope map you have used for the valley. I'm wondering if you used an alpha map in Bryce to get the effect and if you did, does the alpha tend to smooth out your normal map where the actual alpha image is? I'm having that problem in Cinema.
Best of luck,
vim

[Kathye]

Thanks.

And yes, my water does still look too troubled. Might need to rework the material a bit further there I think.

The valley and the waterfall both use slope dependent procedural materials rather than alpha maps though I have used alpha mapping in the past to get snow lines on my mountain tops. I never figured out a way to do slope dependent materials in C4D though that doesn't mean it isn't possible, just I didn't discover it yet ;) Bryce also doesn't use normal maps so this is still an area that is a bit of a blank to me I'm afraid. I keep seeing it referred to and shall have to come up to date a bit there.

[cajomi]

In Bryce you need no alpha maps, because Bryce can load the full qualtiy terrain in 16 bit as PGM.

[Kathye]

Ah sorry, I maybe misunderstand the question then. I used the flowmap as an alpha channel for placing materials which sounds like it's a different topic.