Bryce 3D:
Amazing Results, In Motion

by Shawn Lankton

June 15, 1998

If you want to make photographic quality 3-D images but have no experience, or you are a savvy graphic artist and are looking for a fast and easy way to make realistic looking terrain for your scenes, you might want to take a look at MetaCreations' Bryce 3D.  This picture took only about ten minutes to design and render.  And you can do the same!

It has an easy to use GUI (graphical user interface) and an amazing engine.  Even if you don't have any experience, you can read the next section to get all the information you will need to use Bryce 3D.

All You Need To Know In One Little Paragraph
First you need to know the basic theory for 3-D design.  There are two dimensions in typical graphic design, height and width, but if you add a third dimension, depth, you open up an entire new world of possibilities.  This third dimension is how Bryce II allows you to create scenes much more easily than in 2-D graphics programs.   In Bryce, you design a scene in 3-D and then it takes the 3-D information and figures out how it would look in 2-D (with shading and all) so when you render it, It looks like a painting in two dimensions.

Really GUI Toolbars Are Easy To Use
The controls are the most complex as well as the most simple part of the program.   There are three toolbars, one for creating objects, one for editing objects, and one for editing the environment sky and fog.  There is also a camera control bar.  I will go over it first. 

	This is the camera and view bar.  It allows you to change the camera angle or your view of the scene.  The mountain with the objects around it changes your view from camera view, to top, then front, left, right, back, and underneath.  You can also click on the little ring in the upper right corner to cause the wireframe of the object to spin for your viewing pleasure.  You can also move the camera angle on any of the three axes by clicking and dragging on the flat arrows.  Or you could move all three at once with the trackball.  The trackball is often hard to control.  Below the trackball are render options, and the render button is in the center.  The options allow you to do such things as turn textures on and off while rendering, do a quick preview render, resume rendering, and clear a render.
	To the right of these words is the preview window.  It will automatically render a quick preview every time you make a change.  You can also save camera angles by clicking on the little buttons to the left of the window.  The top button is always the default camera angle.

Now I will talk about the creation tool bar which is used the most.

This is the creation tool bar.  The small objects you see can be created in the manipulation field by clicking on them in the tool bar.  the three planes you see on the left are infinite planes.  The blue one is water, the white one is clouds, and the final plane is a ground plane.  The only difference in these is their respective height along the Y axis when they are initially created.  Next is the mountain.  This tool allows you to create random mountains, and there is also a tool that allows you to edit virtually everything about the mountain to your exact liking!  Next is a random rock.  Then you see a symmetrical lattice, but its shape is like that of a mountain with a mirror image of itself underneath it rather than a smooth figure.  After the lattice are a multitude of various objects which all look exactly like their representatives on the tool bar.

Here all of the other objects are in the manipulation field.  After the objects to the right are lighting sources.  These are, from right to left, a radial light source, spotlight, square spotlight, and parallel light.  Lighting is always necessary to make a picture look just right, but can be omitted if you don't care!

Next is the edit tool bar.  This allows you to edit objects you have just created.

The tool on the far left is the material editor.  It pulls up a window that lets you create custom textures for your objects.  The next tool is the stretch tool.   This allows you to stretch objects on the X, Y, or Z axis.  You can also use this to mirror objects.  Next is the rotation tool.  Click and drag on either the ring around the X, Y, or Z axis to rotate the selected object around that axis.   After that, there is the move tool.  This allows you to move the object along all three axes.  To the left of that is the align tool.  You can use this to line up all of your objects in reference to one thing or another, but I rarely use this and think it could be left out.  Next is the randomize tool which will allow you to have your objects be sent flying in random directions.  The last tool is the terrain editor tool.  This brings up different edit windows for mountains, infinite planes, lighting sources, rocks, etc.  You can also edit objects in the manipulation window with the mouse.

You can resize the object by clicking and dragging one of the dots along the object, and you can change its position by dragging it around but it is more exact, sometimes, if you use the edit bar.  You can also pull up the materials editor from the manipulation window. 

Finally, we are at the Sky&Fog bar.  This allows you to create custom skies and atmospheres for your scenes. 

This is a complicated tool.  Each control has a color and a slide feature.  The control on the far left selects the sky mode and sky color.  The second control selects shadows and ambient color.  The third control modifies haze amount and color and the fourth control modifies fog and fog color. The fifth control modifies the cloud height and skydome color.  The last control modifies the cloud cover and cumulus cover.  The next tool on the sky&fog bar is the cloud frequency which Bryce uses to randomize the positioning of clouds.  By dragging the mouse while over this field, you cause the shape of the tan part to change in a logarithm way, and thus modify the clouds for a real looking effect.  The little sun can be toggled to night by clicking on it, and the sphere beside it determines sun color and position.   The dots on the side are used to save atmosphere settings while you are playing with them.  Atmospheres are amazingly simple to make but there are also a multitude of pre set atmospheres in the quick sky&fog menu. 

Quick Menus Make Scenes a Snap
There are three such quick menus, one for creating, one for editing, and one for the sky and fog. 

The quick create menu allows you to use pre made objects or to save objects or object groups that you have made so you can use them later.  This makes sets of theme scenes easier to make.  For example, let's say you have made a very cool model of a space ship.  Instead of saving the scene and repositioning it for every subsequent picture with the space ship, you could just save the object group under the user section of the quick create window, and place it in your scene on a whim.

Next is the quick edit menu.  It is very handy and is used often.  It allows you to choose from a selection of pre made textures and materials.   You can then use the materials straight from the menu if they are what you need in your scene, or you can edit them in the materials editor that can be accessed through the edit toolbar.

You can also save favorite textures with the quick edit menu as you can do with the quick create menu.

Finally, the quick Sky&Fog menu allows you to create and save custom skies.  Although the skies are easy to make, you may not feel like making a sky, or you may see just what you are looking for in the pre set menu.  However, I prefer to make skies from scratch because all of the pre sets leave the scene shrouded in black since the clouds block out the sun. By contrast, made from scratch skies allow the sun to shine through.

Setting the Scene into Motion
The really outstanding improvement in Bryce 3D as opposed to Bryce II, its predecessor, is the ability to set your scene into motion.  Bryce 3D comes complete with a animation tool.  Although the process seems daunting at first, you will soon master it and be able to use it with ease. The majority of the animation is controlled by a small toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

The green slider controls how far along in the animation you are.  To animate a scene, first make the scene with the slider in the 00.00 position.  Then click the little plus beside the key.  Next move the slider forward to a desired time in the animation (the measurement is in seconds).  Then change the location, shape, and texture of objects.  When you play the animation, the objects will change to match the outcome of the animation.  The result is similar to a 3D morph.  When you set the scenes at more than one time, the result is the object paths become curved in a Brazier-type fashion.  That is how you make animations in shape and position, but how do you animate the object material?  Simple, you use the material editor.

With this editor, you can change many different aspects of the object's texture such as ambience, specularity, bumpiness, transparency, reflection, and refraction, to name a few, and you can wrap textures around them as well.  You will notice a similar animation control on the bottom of this screen.  It is used in a similar way!  You change the texture according to the time slider and click the plus beside the key to add a key event.  When you render the animation, the texture will change scene by scene to match with what you have changed it to.

Practical Usage
If you frequent GO INSIDE, you may have noticed the Go Inside Review Lights.  I created these for our magazine using Bryce.  They are really nothing more than a torus (donut) with a green or red sphere inside.  I then made a futuristic texture for the torus and rendered the final product.  Even though the Inside Review Lights hardly use Bryce to its full capability, they are a real world example of Bryce in action.

Bryce 3D is an excellent program, I only give it four out of five Go Inside Review Lights because it can be finicky and has a few minor bugs, but you won't be sorry if you go out and get it.

GO back Inside

Copyright © 1998 by Shawn Lankton
"Go Inside" is a David Boles Trademark