FROM THE COMMUNITY COLLECTION

Rashad's question

Made with Bryce

Created by Popgriffon

This image is to answer Rashad's questions about Bryce & sea. Hope Rashad forgives me late reply, and you all find this post useful.. This is basic sea scene that I made some time ago, and use with different settings and actors. In this image no postwork or ships were used. On the right there's base wake - it's the place where ship is supposed to be placed. Method: 1. I don't use procedural terrains, I baked a high-res terrain - Mordor generator, exported as image from Bryce, then in 2D editor (GIMP) I converted grayscale heightmap into tileable seamless pattern. Reimported back to Bryce's terrain editor (picture option in DTE). Resulting terrain is then multireplicated. Replication vector is slightly smaller than terrain dimensions - In this image I've used 20*20 multireplicated terrains. Closest seam starts some inch above low-left corner of the image, and continues diagonally to horizon at right. There's no way you can see the seams, but you can see its repetitiveness - it's main drawback. 2. Wake is just another layer in GIMP, it is blended before export with the main heightmap, and used with closest terrain only. Rotating the wake layer in GIMP must be done to turn wake in Bryce - that's most difficult part. 3. 400 terrains can make pretty big sea, but sometimes it's not enough. I took to GIMP the base heightmap, scaled it 10 times smaller, made it repetitive pattern. Resulting heightmap is the same size as base one, but has 10*10 pattern. In Bryce terrain like this must be 10 times bigger - it fit seamlessly to 10 base terrains, This one can be multireplicated as well... 4. Sometimes I use also "fourth stage" terrains - two or three, low resolution, but really gigantic to fill this remaining pixel. It doesnt have to be special pattern, just any noise will do. It's too far to show any seams, but it must be flattened noisy terrain - plane or infinite plane reflects light different way. All these terrains look somehow like Sierpinski fractal, High precision is required (numerical values keyboard input instead mouse actions for every scaling, positioning etc...) Resulting scene is big and Bryce slows down handling it, yet it doesn't crash.