Walk With Me - Terrains - Part 3
Textures
- Altitude
Copyright 2003 Robert Cox (Meski)
Much as I would like, I would love to do an in-depth tutorial on the Deep Texture Editor. However, my brain may not be able to take it. I work in silence and I don’t verbalize while I am working. I move from one thing to another in the Deep Texture Editor without thinking. To put everywhere I go into words, well… it would be straight jacket time.
But… there always is one isn’t there? For this tutorial, I am going to cover some very basic but dramatic uses of the Deep Texture Editor. Perhaps, in your own silence as you work with these procedures, you will fall in love with the DTE too. If you haven’t used the DTE much, I believe that you will open a very large door for your art if you do. Patience and persistence are the watchwords.
Min, Max and Altitude - A great family when they are not fighting.
Altitude
1.
Start Bryce and accept the
default settings or not. Me? I changed the default to one of my
environments. That way I know the sky and settings are about normal for
me. To make your Bryce load your environment, just setup what you want
and save the file into the Bryce directory under the name default.br5.
After that, it will load that file each time Bryce starts.
Your environment is VERY important when working on textures. Change the
sky, haze, sun glow, sun, ambient, horizon color, or fog, and your texture will
look different. So it is best, to start where you know where you are.
Want a nice neutral starting environment? If you haven’t loaded the
Starter Sky, here is the link to get it:
http://www.janthevillageweaver.com/walkwithme/TheSky/index.htm
2.
From the create menu, create a
cube and elongate it using the "Y" handle shown below.
3. Click on the "M" and go into the texture editor.
a. Set the ambience as shown in 1.
b. Click the ball into channel A as shown in 2.
c. Hold the SHIFT key down and RIGHT click on the dart as shown in 3.
4. Select the texture that I have outlined in RED and click the OK check mark.
5. Make sure that you have the World Space mapping mode selected.
6. Leave the texture editor with an OK check and render.
What in the heck do we have going on here? Well, let's investigate. Go back into the texture editor.
7. Click the ball shown outlined in yellow below.
8. Clicking on the darts in component 1, component 2, or combination palettes reveal nothing that would indicate altitude mapping. Where is the action? Do you remember where the action is from "Walk With Me - The Sky" ?
9. Wow! Your good! Yep! Our friend the Filter is where the action is. Click on Filter. Looking at the formula, we can tell that "a" is the slope and "b" is the offset. Or... "a" is the amplitude of the disturbance ( red and blue) and "b" is how far up the red and blue go. Also, it is worth noting, click on the dart outlined in yellow for the "combination" palette. Spline interpolation gives us yellow on top, then blue, then red, the exact order of color on the rendered cube.
10. Take a minute and select the "B" channel and adjust "a" and "b" and then OK out and render. Play with these adjustments and render until you get the idea of the effects of these two controls. We are going to get intimate with this formula later in the tutorial!
