Bryce grass terrains - a 25 minute tutorial by David Brinnen

The illusion of grass.
WARNING This video is intended only for advanced uses and Bryce veterans. It has been uploaded because a few people have expressed an interest in how to obtain this effect. The topic it covers is difficult and you will need access to a fast computer to replicate these results (I use an i7 920 CPU). The topic is not, in material terms, as complex as making volumetric clouds. That being said however, it is one of the most fiddly, temperamental, irritating and downright frustrating effects to set up. Please consider yourself duly warned. It is fairly fast paced, because the aim was to complete the scene in fifteen minutes (and in the end it took 25). Some additional text is included in the video, you may have to pause the video to read it.
Better viewed in HD - some of the controls in Bryce are quite fiddly and small.
For more tutorials visit www.bryce-tutor...

[@tradivoro]

You know David, I haven't used Bryce in a long time, but it's truly a marvel to look at your inventiveness in getting amazing results with a program that has for all intents and purposes been abandoned by the developer (I know why, there's no money). To create a field of grass using procedural textures and a terrain shows amazing ingenuity of how to coax yet more results out of this program. I hope if any company ever picks this program up to develop it further, that they have the brains to hire you as their main consultant. I don't think anybody else on the planet has the knowledge of this program that you have.

[@davidbrinnen]

+tradivoro Thank you for your kind words. Well, I do know some bits of the software rather well, but I can't claim to have complete knowledge. In many respects Bryce is not so far behind its peers as its antiquated interface might have you believe. It has TA which can give physical based render engines a run for their money (all be it more of a walk for their money), but it can do it - eventually. And the procedural materials are up to a high standard. It is a shame that it has not undergone continuous development, but even still, there is fun to be had, if you are so inclined, in trying to figure out how to get some unexpected effects from the tools available.

[@tradivoro]

+David Brinnen You may not know "everything", but you certainly know how to create artistry in Bryce with what you do know. And you're right, the procedural materials creator is an amazing piece of kit that has been around since the 90s and early 2000s. It's just that you really have to wrap your head around all the different parameters in there. Most of my time with Bryce was from the late 90s to the early 2000s. I moved onto Vue d'Esprit, mostly because of the vegetation and the skies. But I'll always have a soft spot for Bryce, I spent a couple of happy years doing stuff with it . Last version I got from Corel was version 6, which finally had trees, but with the funny indentation in the bottom of the trees. They still haven't fixed that.. :) I grabbed the version 7 from DAZ when they had it for free. I still open it up now and then just for nostalgia sakes. It will always be a great program, but in your hands, you truly bring out the magic. Thanks for all the great tutorials.

[@davidbrinnen]

+tradivoro, I have considered Vue, but I've been put off by a couple of things. A bit, price, also I have seen many people complain about instability and while the vegetation renders I've seen look amazing, the render itself often seems a bit "noisy" well... grainy. Terragen is also tempting. I suppose the main thing that puts me off is learning something new again. The last couple of years I've been learning modeling, first in the form of Wings which I was more familiar with then in Modo for larger projects. Which also meant learning UV mapping. And some basic rigging. Maybe when I feel on top of this challenge I will look at more software, though that might have to be something more practical before I can experiment with something more indulgent like more rendering software. Anyway, I'm glad you enjoy the tutorials!

[@tradivoro]

+David Brinnen Yeah Vue is definitely pricey, especially the more advanced editions. I got it back in the early days, I never got the advanced versions. I haven't done much work with any of these now, mostly been concentrating on photoshop and other software I use these days. I dabbled with DAZ studio for a while, and it's another great software for free. The thing with all these programs is that they consume a lot of time in order to master them, and that's part of the reason I stopped doing them, I had to trade time doing the 3D stuff, or other stuff in my life. In any event, thanks for all the tutorials, I'm sure that someday I'll go back to using this stuff when I have more time.

[@davidbrinnen]

+tradivoro aye, learning new software is very time consuming to reach a decent level of competence. The other issue is if you have a workflow that involves several bits of software, it takes some adjustment learn to switch from one to the other. And then there is the trial, for me, of dealing with Windows. My computer is stuck in a bad loop of attempting to install 70+ updates, failing, reverting and then going back and doing it all over again. Which means it takes about 2 hours for my PC to boot. I'm trawling the web at the moment to see if there is some kind of solution out there.

[@davidbrinnen]

You are right of course, I know I do this and find it difficult to not do it. The problem often is that I don't know what I'm going to do next until I do it. Even if I rehearse the video a few times, which on a 25 minute video is quite time consumings as I am sure you will appreciate, I still manage to surprise myself by doing something unexpected when a new idea occurs to me. So, yes thank you for your feedback, and yes I will try to control my mouse. Maybe I should wave my hands instead?

[@davidbrinnen]

That is a possibility, but for conifers at least, there is the option of using the terrain editor to achieve this effect. Take your terrain, copy and paste it, then edit this new terrain and add noise in the terrain editor. Then lower this terrain into the first so only the noise pokes out. Given the right semi transparent green material, from a distance this approach can provide quite convincing evergreens. But... it can be somewhat slow to render.

[@davidbrinnen]

Well... not really, for a beginner with the Materials editor I think the best way to begin is by modifying existing materials and seeing what happens - this being a bit more interesting and enjoyable than watching some else do it. After you have played with the interface a while, there are many videos I made which cover aspects of the Material editor (it is too big to cover all in one video) and beyond that consider the DVD, which has an extended range of tutorials along with related content.

[@Ullimately]

Agree, fractal function are very intriguing and there can be so many versions of fractal geometry and only a part of it is covered in Bryce and its DTE. The DTE makes Bryce different from Maya, Cinema4D and other programs and I think its very important to get your head around it if you want really good results with Bryce. I will think of something that would make nice tut material.

[@GanShin]

To ceate this illusion I tried to duplicate the mountain terrain, apply general noise and let the spikes protrude from underneath the first terrain just a bit, give it a mat (jungle canopy) and soften it a little not to be too spiky. In the foreground I put some of the billboard trees drom DAZ (xfrog) and used some cone lights for the far mountains to make it look as if the sun is peeping through the clouds creating spotlights.

[@Ullimately]

Thanks David, I think it will takes me a long time to understand the DTE but after that I will be really good at it.

[@GanShin]

In one of the pictures you did with this material (maybe I saw it in the Daz forum?) there were hills covered with grass. I thought something similiar could let you create the illusion of a mountain covered with trees, lots of fake trees that still look good enough from a distance.

[@davidbrinnen]

Ah well if it is the DTE you are interested in, there are a whole range of noise function related videos linked from the Bryce Tutorials site. The advantage of getting to grips with the DTE is that the same functions can be used to create terrain height maps in the terrain editor, clouds in the sky lab, as wel, obviously as surface and volumetric materials. Because I like to play with fractal functions, you might gather, I'm a big fan of the DTE. Feel free to suggest specific topics for tuts.

[@Ullimately]

Yes, :), better wave your hands instead. I do appreciate all your movies and it always surprises me what you can get out of Bryce (although I am missing an integrated mesh editor) You are probably just so familiar with Bryce that you are doing those things automatically. Do you have a Materials editor Tutorial? nice and slow enough for a noob to understand?

[@mlaforce]

So it seems as though I am late to this thread, your last reply was 2 years ago so I am hoping you are still seeing if anyone posts here...So I find much easier on my pocket book to watch these tutorials than to go to a much higher of learning, college, tech so on...My question is do you put out learning videos that go into much greater detail on this particular video here, the materials lab? and thank you in advance...

[@GanShin]

I tried with a semitransparent one but that did'nt look convincing enough. Tried again with a very bumpy "conifers + ???" from the terrains section, increased the scaling as well and that gave me what I was aiming at. By the way, today I downloaded the latest Bryce version as you suggested and installed it. But it has the same weird picture lab bug that turns all newly loaded pictures to be blue. Well it's a luck I still have my 6.1 on the other machine.

[@Ullimately]

Thanks for the tips David, For the Materials editor: playing around with some textures is a nice idea, but I rather know what everything is for and why it is used. e.g. you made one tutorial with a rocky landscape and some grass on the tops, rocks on the steep slopes. Why do I have to use texture A, B, C colour? why is C for slopes and B for heights.? Its just very complicated for me.

[@davidbrinnen]

A not unreasonable question and one I've pondered myself. Well, for a start, you could goto the Bryce Talk forum at DAZ 3D and append your views to one of the many threads relating to this topic. That may not seem like much but it will bounce the thread back up to the top of the forum - (as opposed to out of sight out of mind). As for the prevalence of PC's here in the UK at least it is explained simply by cost, for some reason they are very expensive here. Maybe so in other countries too?

[@GanShin]

How can I badger DAZ 3D? Can you suggest an address there? I also imagine there must be quite a lot of Mac Bryce-users, but the Windows users seem to have increased more than I exspected.

[@Ullimately]

David, your videos are very nice but what makes it difficult to follow what you are doing is: You are always waving that mouse cursor around. Its in constant movement. You want to point your muse cursor somewhere, click onto something and in the same moment it goes all over the screen to a lot of different places.

[@davidbrinnen]

Aye the Mac users really need to start badgering DAZ 3D to get these little (and not so little) Mac bugs fixed. It is a shame really, since Bryce stared on the Mac, there must be a fair sized community wanting to use 7.1 pro and are being thwarted.

[@davidbrinnen]

Well here you have a choice, wait for me to get around to making more material lab related videos - which I will add to me ever expanding to-do list, or fork out for the DVD which has a dozen Matlab videos on it dedicated to topics such as this. I can offer a quick answer also. AB combined are a crude form of altitude filter with A below and B above. ABC are AB blended using C as an alpha channel control. So if C is slope the slope will select A or B according to the alpha of C.

[@davidbrinnen]

Ha! I didn't look at this answer before I answered your first question - and now don't I look silly?

[@cult5956]

Круто!!!😝

[@davidbrinnen]

Спасибо. Я рад, что вам понравилось.