Tips & Tricks

S Ray

Thought I'd start a thread here where people can share information anything to make the work flow easier or faster.  Keyboard short cuts, easter eggs, render setting, things that make Bryce crash,  Ect.

I'll start with how to launch Bryce to a preferred state. Set-up a Bryce Document to your preferred state, The resolution, any sky and any objects you want or clear any objects you don't want. Then save the file to your main Bryce directory  (the folder where Bryce is installed) name the document       Default     (if there is already a Default file replace it)  Now every time you launch Bryce it will start with that scene file. If you render the scene it will launch with the render. If you don't want that,  go into the Main Bryce directory and delete the Default Bmp. Anytime you want to change your Default Scene you can.

 

mermaid010

Cool idea to stat this thread S Ray

 

mtnmen

S Ray... Great idea... Your keyboard shortcut for the color picker has really helped me... it's great that you are doing this thread...  Thank you so much

Steve

Horo

Anisotropy works with specularity. Tangent, Planar and Radial mapping can be selected. However, Circular mapping is implemented as an Easter Egg. To activate Circular mapping, hold down the [Shift] key while clicking on Radial mapping. To disable Circular mapping, either click twice on Radial mapping or hold down the [Shift] key and click on Radial mapping. You have to remember if you enabled Circular mapping or not, there is no indication. For those interested, I have a 10 page PDF with 100 renders showing different anisotropy settings.

Bryce features quite a few keyboard shortcuts. Some I collected in a 9 page PDF I have on my website.

S Ray

Not sure if this is a bug or my system, or if it's been documented.  When I change the mapping mode for the Anisotropy Channel the Material Lab preview does not automatically update ( render out ) to show the new mapping mode. My work around is to switch between Current Selection and Actual Selection in the preview drop down menu.

Electro-Elvis

To set an object "Positive" or "Negative" it is not necessary to click "A" and open Object Attribute Function. Simply select the object and press SHIFT + P (= positiv) or SHIFT + N (= negative).

Slepalex

Electro-Elvis said:

To set an object "Positive" or "Negative" it is not necessary to click "A" and open Object Attribute Function. Simply select the object and press SHIFT + P (= positiv) or SHIFT + N (= negative).

I did not know that! Although, I remember that some random keystroke resulted in a change in the Boolean properties.
*****
Then I will add:
Ctrl + Alt + E - open the attributes of the object.
Shift + I - Boolean property "intersect".
Shift + O - Boolean property "neutral".

Slepalex

I already somewhere about this wrote, but I do not know how to find this record on the forum.
The point is that you can not exclude a group from the light source. But, it turns out, it's possible!
To do this, you need to assign all Boolean properties positive, negative, or intersect to all objects in the group and all nested groups. If there are neutral objects in the group that can not be assigned a positive property, then create a group with the positive properties of all objects, set the group a positive attribute, and group it with the main Boolean group, which also assign a positive one.
Now you can exclude / include this group from / into the light source.

Slepalex

There are two ways to change the color somewhere in Bryce.
1. "drag and drop". Open any source of color. Open the file with any picture. Drag the mouse cursor from the sample color to Bryce to any location in the photo. Release the mouse button. Your sample is painted in the color on which you released the button. You can do the "drag and drop" operation inside Bryce by dragging the cursor to any position on the interface. This is very helpful when you want, for example, to copy the sky on the horizon or at the zenith or the color of the haze from the photo.
2. Call three color palettes.
a) Click and drag and drop:

b) Alt + Click:

c) Ctrl + Alt + Click:

ed3D

_good tips_

StuartB

Don't forget the Particle Emitter easter egg, as described here by Horo.

https://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials/bryce-7-hidden-easter-egg-particle-emitter

 

 

Slepalex

StuartB said:

Don't forget the Particle Emitter easter egg, as described here by Horo.

https://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials/bryce-7-hidden-easter-egg-particle-emitter

 

 

Create primitives with Ctrl (1st line) and Shift (2nd line).

Horo

There are many more available for the Create Shelf, see https://horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/CreateShelf.pdf (https://horo.ch/docs/mine/txt/CreateShelf.txt).

S Ray

Bryce will render out a wireframe animation by holding the  shift key when checking out of the render animation dialog. I find this very useful to check how fluent objects move and camera tracking views before rendering a full animation. Bryce will no longer continually play the animation in wireframe mode anymore when using the VCR play button or when scrubbing the time line (only about 5.3 sec). Bryce will start to play the animation then give a roundy round  until the scrub point or last key frame. It will also do this when rendering out the wireframe animation. but every frame will be rendered as a wireframe animation to the saved location.

S Ray

S Ray said:

Bryce will render out a wireframe animation by holding the  shift key when checking out of the render animation dialog. I find this very useful to check how fluent objects move and camera tracking views before rendering a full animation. Bryce will no longer continually play the animation in wireframe mode anymore when using the VCR play button or when scrubbing the time line (only about 5.3 sec). Bryce will start to play the animation then give a roundy round  until the scrub point or last key frame. It will also do this when rendering out the wireframe animation. but every frame will be rendered as a wireframe animation to the saved location.

Made a few mistakes on the Wireframe animation easter egg. 1.  Hold the Shift/Ctrl/Alt keys. 2. Sometimes the play button and scrubbing the time line will work properly. 3. What ever viewing mode ( wireframe, texture shaded Ect} will render out that mode. But if you use the preview animation option it will give a roundy round until all the Bmp are rendered in the preview window. 

Jamahoney

Cheers, S Ray...have never used such shortcuts...simply because I was not aware of them.

I suppose, I'm old-school, and so stuck in the older conventions of rendering animations (as I write, I have a 11-hour-long animation render ongoing in the background - concerning an old caldera on the Moon). I'm half-way there, so it will be finished in the next few hours or so, but further editng will have to be done.

Jay

Hansmar

Great information, guys and galls! Some of it I knew and some of it I forgot or never knew. Keep the coming, please.

S Ray

When creating trees, hold the Alt key to bring up the list menu of Bryce's default tree types.

Jamahoney

Yeah...

Horo

Yes, called Bryce Tree Objects (BTO). Here all of them are rendered https://horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/BTO-Trees.pdf

S Ray

Horo great reference page, booked marked it.

Another tip

Holding the Shift key When using the Edit Translation tools will snap object to a constrained value.  Size tool = increments of 12.42 BU  (all or any axis)  Rotation Tool = increments of 45º   Move tool = increments of 2.56 BU

S Ray

Every terrain resolution ( in the terrain editor ) Will generate a different size terrain. The size of X & Z in the attribute Menu is the size of the Bounding Box, The actual size of the mesh is smaller. This is a cheat sheet to use when tiling terrains, by following Horo's Tutorial Tiling Objects Or My tutorial Tiling Terrains & Their Height Maps

 

 

 

mermaid010

SRay - thanks for this sheet and the links to the videos.

Electro-Elvis

I stumbled on this accidentally. In the Object Attributes dialog box the Arrow-Up and Arrow-Down keys can be used for changing the cordinates of the position. This can be sometimes quite handy for modelling in Bryce. For example if you want to add some identical objects all with the same distance to each other.

In my example I duplicated the existing cylinder by pressing CTRL + D. Then I opened the Object Attributes dialog box of the new cylinder and moved the cursor into the numeric field whose value I wanted to change (here Position Y with a value of 38.912). Normally you would now type in the coordinates, but you can also press the "Arrow Up" or "Arrow Down" key to increase or decrease the value by 1. (BTW Ctrl+Arrow Up/Down increases respectively decreases the value by 5.12, and Shift+Arrow Up/Down by 10.)

If you want to add a third cylinder above your second one you just have to select the second cylinder, duplicate it, open its Object Attributes dialog box, position the cursor and hit the Arrow Up so many times as for cylinder 2. So all you have to remember is how many times you had pressed the Arrow key. This might be easier, as to figure out the positions of cylinder 1 and 2, the calculate the difference and finally add this value to the position of cylinder 3 and type it in.

 

mermaid010

Thanks Electro-Elvis, nice tip

Electro-Elvis

You're welcome. BTW I think it works nearly with every field, where numeric values can be entered in Bryce (but I haven't tested it)

PixelPie

Slepalex said:

There are two ways to change the color somewhere in Bryce.
1. "drag and drop". Open any source of color. Open the file with any picture. Drag the mouse cursor from the sample color to Bryce to any location in the photo. Release the mouse button. Your sample is painted in the color on which you released the button. You can do the "drag and drop" operation inside Bryce by dragging the cursor to any position on the interface. This is very helpful when you want, for example, to copy the sky on the horizon or at the zenith or the color of the haze from the photo.
2. Call three color palettes.
a) Click and drag and drop:

b) Alt + Click:

c) Ctrl + Alt + Click:

Wow!, I did not know you could bring up the color paletts this way; Thank you SO much for this tip!

Horo

Electro-Elvis - interesting. Never thought of that since I'm so used to enter the values. Thanks for the tip.