Can Bryce create an entire continent if not world?
madmaxneo1
Posts: 148
My idea: I am looking to recreate a few different continents in 3d for a few games I play and have it so others can view the landscape from possibly a flying point of view. This is only for viewing an not for playing any games (at least there are no plans for this).
1. Can Bryce do this?
2. Would it be resource intensive?
3. If not Bryce, what would be the best program for doing this so it is not that resource intensive and that others can view or even download the files and view without having to purchase a program?
I saw GeoVox (Unity) on Steam and it peaked my curiosity. But it seems that there are no good export formats for the program so others can see it. Only those that own the same programs....
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Comments
A continent, yes; a world if it is flat, like on a map. Here are two examples. http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/33458 and http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/25985. The problem is rather if you want to zoom in. It's a question of resolution, no matter what program you use.
Not a bryce user but like horo suggested, it's the detail, video games do this, the whole world does not exist but loads as you approach parts with lesser detail in the distance.
One would have to make several scenes with increasing levels of detail taking in less area
I figured it would require multiple resolutions for zoom quality stuff.
How hard is it to create an area that has better resolution as you zoom in?
Please note that I am still a newbie and I really have not started using Bryce yet. Part of the issue is my older video card (GTX 750 Ti) but I am currently saving up for the 980 Ti 6gb card.
Also, what ways are available for people to view the landscape outside of Bryce? Would it be better through a browser or some other kind of free program?
Your card will make do difference, Bryce does not use it
you may be better going with the Infinito plugin in DAZ studio with iray for that sort of thing
or maybe use Unreal 4 UDK with Matinee to render, you can import DAZ content for renders without a game developer's license, it has a paint tool for plants, I just found it too confusing for my non script thinking brain to create events for matinee renders, the actual interface for everything else was quite easy.
this uses a Bryce terrain in UDK, not my video BTW just one I found, you can export Bryce trees too and use them to paint on terrains, I did it with Carrara trees
i of course use Carrara with Octane render but UDK is free so for a free way that will use a graphics card it is worth a look.
To view the landscape outside Bryce, you would render your scene to create an image (like a .jpg or whatever) that you could then provide to others without Bryce to see. I've not used animation and don't know the resulting format, but whatever that is could then be viewed by others as well. Of course, they don't have any control over the animation, it's just whatever you recorded.
I'm not certain I understand the question correctly...
But if you want to zoom in from a view of an entire continent all the way down to, say, what it would look like if you were standing on it: You would have to create an insanely large number of individual terrains, each at an increasing level of detail, and render each frame on one terrain while zooming in a little, then using your second scene with your second terrain, getting it lined up, repeating, etc. Sounds like years of painstaking work. :-) But I could be wrong, and perhaps there's some way to automate it, using each terrain as a base for the next or something. The largest single terrain you can create would be 4096x4096 pixels. You can of course create multiple ones and line them up (probably a lot of work) to make a slightly larger one but only up until you hit Bryce's memory limit, which is only a few GB. So you couldn't create the millions of highly detailed terrain pieces it would require to stretch from coast to coast, it would be like trying to take enough photos with your camera to capture the entire continent of North America, then line up all the paper photos in your photo album.
However, if you wanted say an orbital view, zoom in a bit, then have the camera "dissapear into the clouds" then suddenly you are looking at an area only a few miles across, etc. that might be much more doable, because you only need one continent-wide view and a second scene that's a local view, and you could stitch together the two animations from the two separate scenes.
One other thought: I have not thought this entirely through and maybe it's a false lead, but if you could somehow fake it with a procedural material, rather than actually getting the detail from manually constructed terrains, then perhaps one could do a significant number of steps from any point to any other point (although requiring manual adjustment and rendering at each frame).
Looking at a continent or larger doesn't need a terrain, a plane with a picture texture would suffice. Only when you get nearer you can actually see high mountains, if you descend more, also hills.
You can make any terrain in Bryce up to 1,024,000 Units large. The best resolution terrain is called "Planetary" (a misnomer, in my opinion) and 4096 pixels square. If such a terrain is enough for a detailed shot, the same terrain could also be additionally generated in lower resolutions for viewing from afar. When zooming in, replace the low resolution terrain with a higher one. This also saves memory.
Bryce can also do animations and you could create several animations when zooming so the terrain(s) can be replaced. However, as I understand, a game is interactive and it creates the landscape anew wherever the hero walks or looks. I don't think Bryce is the ideal game landscape machine. Perhaps Bryce could be used to create spherical or cylindrical backdrops.
Whole worlds are usually left to "progressive formulas".
Potentially, yes, you can create entire worlds... You can infinately stack surfaces on surfaces on surfaces... which is where you get that infinate detail. (Minecraft)
The game Fuel (5,560 sq miles or 14,440 sq km)... but it is honestly 100% infinate. It uses multi-layer progressive detail math-formulas to create the world. Then they went-in and picked spots to "make roads" and "add details", just like how the real world was made. You "found" good spots to begin construction, you didn't "make the world and construct everywhere to potentially build". That made the HUGE game fit into a small space, and allowed it to have super-high detailed locations.
This is something similar that I am trying to get Daz to do.
Bryce can use height-maps. You can use any height-map creator to make pure random realistic maps, or just create many sizes of repeating panoramic or wide-area height-maps yourself. Each needs to be split appropriately.
As you zoom-in, you are loading a section, and adding the tiled "detail map", and letting Bryce do it's terrain-level things. All camera-tricks that you have to do manually, that games are programmed to do internally. But, Bryce is not setup to do this all manually, internally... (It could be, but it isn't.)
Your fractions of the world with higher detail should just be created from the merger of those stacked-maps, giving you the output needed to "craft" that section of the world. You sould just subsitute your modification maps for the generated maps which they were originally created from.
I still use VisualBasic 6 to help me craft my infinate terrains. Same code that minecraft uses.
My largest world is a planet that is 1/4 the size of earth... one pixel per 1/4 mile... 24,900 pixles wide, each 1/4 mile pixel having a 5280x5280 pixel terrain, representing one/quarter foot (3") per pixel. All just math...
That is 620,010,000 square (1/4 miles) * 27,878,400 square (3" blocks) = 17,284,887,000,000,000 pixel-volume, or a (131,472,000 x 131,472,000) pixel image. That is just the terrain! Not the details.
Largest JPG I could make was about 65535 x 65535... Largest PNG was potentially about 4,294,967,295 x 4,294,967,295... but I only got up to about 1,600,000 x 1,600,000 after that, it crashes the computer or runs out of memory... on my hard-drive, not RAM. (I write directly to the hard-drive. I was writing in chunks... Still couldn't make it fit using 2-color format, compressed! As if I had a program that could open it, to look at it... I was going to write one. :P Filled a 1TB drive.)