Yet another Bryce tip (sorry).

farss wrote on 9/15/2006, 4:12 PM
For some really funky text. Create white text on a black background. Easy enough to do in Vegas, suggest doing it in a HD project and save a frame as a jpg, you could use anything really, PS etc.

Now in Bryce, add a terrain, click the "E" widget. In the editor you can load a picture. Load the frame of text you created before. Bingo!

Text mountains with trees, snow, whatever. One can animate this too!

Back in your text editor add some glow (B&W) to add slopes to your text mountains. The Bryce terrain editor lets you finess it too.

Now my efforts look, well, pretty damn twee but hopefully I can kick start the creative brains amongst us to use the idea to good effect.

Bob.

Comments

apit34356 wrote on 9/15/2006, 8:02 PM
Thanks again Bob for the tip, keep them coming. Can you use bryce for scrolling text?
farss wrote on 9/15/2006, 8:43 PM
Haven't cracked that one yet.
How about text that sprouts wings and flies off the page?

Being able to map text to a surface is pretty neat also, and you can animate the camera, lights etc. The alpha channel can be used to punch holes in objects, no doubt some really interesting stuff could be done with this although the render times get very serious. Thankfully Bryce supports network rendering although I haven't tried it yet.
Truespace has a lot more power and way, way harder to get the brain around.

What I do like is this is an easy way to dabble in 3D, as I've said before, learning the nuts and bolts is one thing, understanding how to make things that look right is damn hard and then I look at some of the work on ArtZone and realise how sad my efforts are.

I tried a simple object animation a few nights ago and it just looked wrong. Then I grasped the issue. A big object far away looks different to the same object smaller up close, knew I should have stayed for those art classes.
fldave wrote on 9/15/2006, 10:43 PM
Older versions of Bryce (ie. v4 at least) was capable of a horrendous render time, depending on the complexity of the scene. Think 4 days for a single frame. V5 (supposedly) greatly improved render times through optimizations (and the move to Pentium 4 from P3!)

One other tidbit from a couple of years ago: a lot of 3D app users would build the objects in their favorite tool, but export for final render in Lightwave. Lightwave produced one of the finer/higher quality render outputs. I believe they used Lightwave for part of the movie Titanic .

I've spent so much time with Vegas the past few years, my 3D work is very rusty. I've always thought Bryce could be a very worthwhile add-on tool for my video work, glad to see I have a cheap upgrade from my Version 4. Now for the time to get used to it again!
vitalforce wrote on 9/16/2006, 1:56 PM
I believe Bryce 5 is available free on their site.