When you first run Bryce 2, you are presented with a new world. There are no hills or trees to start out with -- just a blue sky and a gray ground plane. Bryce worlds are built starting out with infinite planes, i. e., the ground is a visible square in your wireframe viewport, but it stretches on to the horizon in the actual rendering (or the Nano-preview -- more on that later). Of course, you can have more than one infinite plane (such as a cloud plane or a water plane). With an ocean scene, you would probably just change the ground plane to have a water texture, but for a clear mountain river, you would probably create a water plane right above the ground plane (so you could have a river-bed). The sky is not considered an infinite plane (because it's part of the virtual environment), but you can create a cloud plane if you want low-lying clouds. If you want to start out with some rolling hills, just create a new terrain object (which is highly visible on the Create palette). Terrain objects are created each time using random fractal noise, so you'll never get the same terrain twice. You'll no doubt want to edit your terrain, however, since the terrain Bryce generates is usually spiky and rocky. The easiest way to edit your terrain is to click on the E button next to the selected terrain, and bingo! The powerful and fun Terrain Editor will appear on your screen. The Terrain Editor is definitely one of the most incredible features of Bryce. It uses the standard method of creating 3D terrains -- a grayscale height map -- but with a twist. It includes tons of powerful effects specially designed for editing landscapes. And, since you can edit the height map directly using any number of specially designed brush effects, creating realistic terrains is as easy as creating sand mounds at the beach! If you want to decorate your terrain objects with trees and plants, never fear. Bryce includes many pre-built objects to put in your scene, such as trees and plants -- as well as hills, mountains, pedestals, boolean objects, and others.
