MetaCreations Bryce 2.0 Materials and Manipulating Objects Jared White
So you've created all these hills and mountains. Now what? You have to edit your environment. This includes the atmosphere (sky, sun position, fog, haze, cloud cover, etc.) and, of course, the objects in your scene itself. The atmosphere is controlled by the Sky&Fog palette -- however, since Bryce 2 includes a large amount of sky presets, you may never need to adjust this. However, the scene objects are up to you. The first step is assigning materials to your terrains and ground planes. As I said before, Bryce is designed to create 3D landscapes, therefore it excels in the area of landscaping capabilities. It features a wealth of landscape materials, ranging from plain, desert, hill, and mountain materials, as well as over twenty different water types. However, Bryce also has many of the usual 3D modeling materials, such as glasses, woods, metals, and more.
Manipulating Objects
Of course, there is more to landscapes than just terrains. Bryce 2 includes several primitive objects, such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, pyramids, and toruses. However, Bryce has several modified versions of those primitives that can come in quite handy, including eggs, discs, bricks, towers, and others. Unfortunately, these primitives won't let you create more than a few simple shapes -- unless you could group them together with boolean properties (e. g., moving a negative object into a positive object would create a new shape with a cut-out of the negative object). And following in the footsteps of its other features, Bryce does indeed have those features -- which makes Bryce's reliance on other programs for sophisticated 3D object modeling even less. And, better yet, if the textures of the negative and positive objects are different, the cut-out part of the positive objects inherit the negative objects' textures! Now that is certainly impressive.
Instead of hard to use virtual trackball tools -- or manipulation using many different camera angles -- terrains, planes, objects, and lights are all easily manipulated using the Edit Palette. The Edit Palette includes ridiculously simple tools such as Resize, Rotate, Reposition, Align, and Randomize -- all of which are 3D interactive tools. Just click on one of the highlighted sections of the tools, and drag to the left or right, and the object will perform the selected action as you drag one way or the other. All of the tools can be customized with their related pop-up menus, which can be accessed by clicking on the arrows below them.
