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Fractal Formations |
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| Applying the colour. | |
| Press Escape to return to a wireframe view and with the Terrain selected press the 'M' to enter the Materials Editor. | |
| This will open showing the default grey material that we saw when we rendered the Terrain. | |
 fig7 |
Referring to fig7 click the two dimples in
the 'A' column next to Diffuse and Ambient (1). Two markers will appear
to show these are now 'active' and a random material will appear on the
right pane. The preview terrain on the left will also auto-render using this random material (basic wood in this case). |
| The material shown is a 'procedural' material which means it is calculated within Bryce using various formula and filtering routines. What we want is to replace this with our fractal image map and this is done by pressing the 'P' (Picture) button shown by arrow (2). | |
| The previous texture will be
replaced by something resembling Fig7a. Click on the upper button (3) which will open the Picture Library (fig8). |
fig7a
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 fig8 |
The Picture Library screen (fig8) will usually open with a default picture of 'Leonardo' in the top 3 windows and a small thumbnail on the top left of the 'grid'. (fig8 shows the result 'after' we have loaded our Fractal image). |
| Click on the second thumbnail square (1), from the file selection window that appears select the image you wish to use (bob6.bmp in this example, the very same image used to create the Terrain). Note if you are using Bryce3 then you can only load .bmp or .tiff format images. If using Bryce4 then you can also load .emf, .fpx, .gif, .jpg, .psd, .tga, ( another good reason to upgrade). | |
| A quick explanation of what the top three preview windows represent - The lefthand window shows the colourmap, the middle ( which is empty at the moment ) holds an Alpha channel, whilst the Right hand shows the resulting combination of the Colour and Alpha channel. | What is an Alpha channel? it's just a fancy way of saying transparency map, it only contains shades of grey and it is used back in the Material Editor to control which areas could be made Transparent or used to control Bump effects. |
| Click the OK tick to return to the Material Editor, luckily Bryce has set the texture mapping mode to 'Parametric' this means the image will be placed like a transfer (decal) onto each face of an object. You might like to experiment with Object Top and World Top mapping modes later. | |
 fig9 |
If you return to the scene editor and render
again you'll see your new fractal terrain coloured by itself (fig9). That is basically it, as far as applying the image map is concerned. If you'd like to know how to add the bumps and highlights and also get a completely different terrain with just one click in the Terrain Editor then follow on to Part 3 |
| Onto Part 3................ |