New frog in the pond
meco
Posts: 0
I am shamelessly cut and pasting a post on another forum as per Miss B's advice:
After a daunting install of Bryce Pro, please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a boat builder by trade, and use a surface modeling program called ProSurf to design aluminum boats. ProSurf is an incredible application that does many things well except one - that being, rendering the 3D geometry output. Nor does my beloved general purpose CAD program, DesignCad. Prosurf exports to DXF, IGES, STL and TXT. I understand that Rhino is a favorite of the boat crowd, but, alas it is ‘spensive. After much searching, I chose Bryce because of its amazing price and that it imports DXF.
I am not a geek in any way. I do not program nor am I a power-user of ANY application. To me, a computer and the attendant software is merely the same as a drill motor: I just want it to drive a screw and not talk back or squeak while doing the deed. This, of course, after my requisite training period.
So, after a bit, I put one of my skiff’s in a nice body of water, with a nice cloud cover. It looks only OK. Could someone please tell me how to get in the proper mental state to approach, what is for me, the least intuitive piece of software I’ve ever encountered, that being: THE MATERIALS LAB! It just seems impossible to me that I can easily choose to make the surface of my skiff some phantasmagorical nightmare but that it could be a click or two away from ‘looking’ like aluminum is beyond.
Am I missing something too simple?
Regards,
Mark
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Comments
Welcome to the Bryce forum, meco.
In the Material Lab you see a preview pane in the upper left corner. At the top right of this pane you see an arrow, click it and you will be taken to the Material Library where you will find a variety of different materials. There are also material packages in the DAZ store, and if you Google, or use whatever search engine, you can find additional material for sale and free.
Welcome to Bryce Mark....we will help you anyway we can.....that said I am awake and am not that great at explaining things but I have posted screen shots to get you to the basic materials....If you want to go to the material editor and create your own...one of the experts on that will be here in the morning and be glad to help....Trish
Good job Guss glad your here we were cross posting.......Trish
And mentioning free materials. THere was a set offered just recently, all metals
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/34871/
@meco - welcome to Bryce and this forum. You've already been given good advice. Be aware that any material you apply on an object will change according to the light setting. A good strategy is set the light first, then apply materials and tweak them so they look right in the light.
Thank you all for the most warmest of welcomes! Having gotten the crap knocked out of me on various forums, it is nice to find kindness here.
And to bullit35744, you led me to exactly where I needed to go. I tip my hat to you. Attached is a jpeg of the results after only minutes.
A couple of things:
The reflections bouncing around inside the skiff are way too confusing. I will skin the model and have an interior surface to try and manage better. Does that make sense or am I again spinning needlessly?
Does one have a recommendation for settings to get the best image for press? The default image is small and to my taste, rather 'muddy'. I exported this image (tiff) to Corel PhotoPaint to tweak color.
Again, thanks to all. I have a lot to learn. If any of you are interested in the best , most powerful and least expensive surface (NURBS) modeling program on the planet, please let me know and I will be pleased to give anyone the particulars.
R/Mark
Mark: Don't forget you have all of these settings you can play with also like reflection....but yes I see now what you are saying you would need another surface for the inside to make it a different material...
You can also change your sky if that helps......click where I have circled and mess with those settings...have fun...Trish
@meco - image to press: You need to know how large the image will be printed. This dpi and ppi are a bit confuse. Take the expected printed image size and what print resolution you need. A photographic print has around 100 lines per inch (they count lines, not ppi or dpi, but it comes down to the same). So if you go for 100 per inch and your print is to be 8 x 10 inches, set the document size 8 inch x 100 lines = 800 pixels x 1000 pixels. If you go for 300pi, that would become 2400 x 3000 pixels.
Never mind any dpi setting. It's the actual pixels that count. You need enough pixels to make up the size and resolution. I print my renders at 27.5 x 19 cm, about 10.8 x 7.5 inches and use a document size of 1600 x 1067 which amounts to about 150 dots per inch. The resolution is very good. Contrast is the greater issue. The best you can get from a photographic print beheld under the most favorable light conditions is 100:1. The screen displays at 256:1 so the print gets less than half.
Mark
I tried to buy a license for ProSurf a while back for developing flat patterns from CAD models, but it seems the company is out of business. Their web store is offline, although the website is still functional. No one ever returned my calls.
If you have any current contact info for them, could you pass it along ...
Thanks
Chris
Chris, it's been several months since I last talked to Steve Hollister, the creator of ProSurf. I mailed him last night and have not received a reply. I did find a Prosurf site that did not have a working link to the home page. Here is the fully functioning website:
http://www.newavesys.com/
The number listed there is the same number I've used for years: 401-423-1852. I know Steve has done quite a bit of work outside of the ProSurf venue recently.
Have you downloaded any of the programs? I was able to do so last night. I suggest Pilot3D, at only $69, it is a complete steal, believe me:
http://www.pilot3d.com/
On that page, there is an example of some work that I use it for. You will see some 2D salmon that I made in Pilot and then imported them into CorelDraw to fill and further enhance. Of ANY program that I've ever used, Illustrator, Draw, MicroGrafx and others, it has the BEST shaping and line control tools bar none. It is very basic; no bells or whistles. It's small; it opens in 3 secs. It's incredibly powerful; you can just about do all the basic surface modeling functions that Rhino does. It has two ways to create surfaces; one can use NURBS or ruling lines between curves which can then be transformed into NURBS. It's not specifically designed to do 2D drafting but it has all the tools to do so.
"I tried to buy a license for ProSurf a while back for developing flat patterns from CAD models."
I assume you are meaning it's ability to do what's called DEVELOPE PLATE in the program? It does this flawlessly. Last year, I built a 40 ft landing craft and had all the parts router cut - they fit beautifully. When I'm working on a new design, I build 1" = 12" models out of mat board by plotting out the principle parts and adhering them with a weak spray-on adhesive. I then cut them out with Xacto and hot glue them together. I can prototype a hull in a couple hours. Another cool thing is the ability to slice and dice any 3D object in any plane at any angle. I could go on.
Mark
Thanks for that info. Its good to hear they are still in business. Maybe I just caught them at a bad time.
I did try Pilot3d but ProSurf has some additional functions I might use, and the cost its really not that much more. In the meantime I had purchased a license of SolidWorks but discovered that there are additional capabilities, or more efficient tools, that are in ProSurf.
Instead of shipbuilding, I am looking at it for sculptural fabrication.
You will be very happy with your choice!!
Here is a pic of a sculpture that I did in ProSurf for an artist friend. It was a gov. gig and the engineers wouldn't let him build it out of plywood and epoxy so I did the larger main components from take-offs from his model, plotted them out and he then transferred and cut them out of 3/16" A36 and welded them up. There were some loooong plots in that puppy. One thing that takes sometime to grasp the feel for is - the tools the application has to help the modeler stay within the bounds of developability. You can see that some of the shapes have quite a bit of twist in them. This is at a downtown park in Anchorage, AK
@meco: That's a very nice looking sculpture.
The water is getting warmer and this frog is happy. I once again realize the long road I have ahead to really harness the power of Bryce. But, I can see that it will do what I want it to do.
Placing a skin inside does the trick to control the need for contrast. I am not used to the very nominal geometry that Bryce displays in the wireframe view. It is just some hash that doesn't really show anything very recognizable thus the geometry really isn't editable; in my case, that's no issue.
I'm intrigued with Daz Studio and what I may find of use there but when I ask Bryce to send it to Daz it doesn't work. If I do it without Daz open, the request opens Daz but then it shuts down with an error message. If I try sending it with Daz already open, nothing happens.
Thanks again for everyone's help.
Horo, your explanation of pre-press should be a sticky if it isn't already.
R/Mark
Mark: really cool looking sculpture!!! ....If your wireframe is two separate parts click on the square to change color so it will show up better...your boat is coming right along nicely ....Trish
Meco - Welcome to the Bryce family here. Hope you enjoy the community we have here. Lots of talented and very helpful and friendly people hang out here.
Nice looking sculpture and I like how your boat is coming along. Have a great day !
Bruce / goshtac
@meco - the boat is progressing nicely. The bridge was made to bring Studio content to Bryce though it works the other way - sort of. Studio is great to render characters, hair is particularly difficult to get right in Bryce. Otherwise, Bryce gives you superb results.
As for the wireframe, you can set the resolution. Bryce gets very sluggish when there are many meshes so it makes sense to have mesh resolution low, sometimes even just a cube of the outline. For construction, you would set it higher. If you export meshes, the resolution set is also taken in account.
I will become tiresome by continually giving thanks for the spot-on guidance and answers you all have provided. As I get further below the skin (no pun), I'm amazed at the labyrinth there is underneath. What's more, that this power can be had for such small a cost is even more amazing. If I would have bought Rhino, which isn't as good of a boat modeler as ProSurf, I then would have paid yet more for a top-line rendering module!
R/Mark
Mark: Bryce is an amazing program...the more you discover... the more you will want to dig into it...Trish