Elusive legacy of early Brycers and 90-00's 3D art culture

hubert

NGartplay: Yep, that maze is really "a maze thing". Not easy to escape from there!

PS: It might be a nice challenge to create such a world in Bryce7 with displacement. But that's far beyond my "landscape" ambitions. ;)

NGartplay

Mine too hubert

Hansmar

Hubert, great suggestion! Let's give it a try. I am sure that Horo will be able to do it.

hubert

NGartplay, Hansmar:

Yesterday, I tried in Bryce7 with Displacement (using a bitmap with a simple fake maze pattern).

Working with Displacement in Bryce7 caused quite many crashes. It worked much more stable after I set the Bryce "Nano Preview" to "Sky Only". Iirc, Horo once posted a helpful hint how to avoid some crashes with that (imho too unstable) feature.

Here is one result:

Nevertheless it was fun to play with this feature.

Horo

hubert - very nice maze sphere. Remember, as long as you use the Mat Lab to set up your scene using Displacement, set Render Priority to Low. Once you do not open the Mat Lab anymore, you can set Priority to Normal or High.

hubert

Horo:
Many thanks for the "Render Priority" hint! -- Actually, I had saved it from your post in the "Game on - if anyone is up for another one" thread (on page 7).... but forgotten about it. I am getting old! ;)

 

hubert

Horo:

I just tested.... yep, it's darn better with the "LOW" Priority setting while working with the MatLab. :)

Btw: Do I assume right that the Bryce Displacement is not working with real geometry, that it is just sorta visual/lighting effect? -- I think so because the outer edge of the Sphere remains smooth (even for large Displacement values), although one would expect getting gaps and peaks there.

NGartplay

WOW hubert!  That looks amazing.  I feel like it's not quite smooth at the edges on the left but looks smoother on the right.

PS, I'm not sure how to get back to regular font.

mermaid010

Wow Hubert really awesome try, the maze looks fantastic 

hubert

NGartplay:
Said roughness is imo just from the colors/shadows. The rim of the sphere is still perfectly round.
Besides: Did you double-click the "WOW-Button"?? ;)

Mermaid:
Thanks.

Meanwhile, I tried with different mapping, tiling and scaling of the bitmap based Mat, but never got the desired look. I added also two colored globe lights for a nicer "coloring".

Romour has it that this planet is 110% citified.

mermaid010

Very nice colored maze Hubert

adbc

hubert : great monochrome and colored maze.

Horo

hubert - again a very nice spheric maze. You can use all primitives, also a 2D-Disk and 2D-face, except Metaballs.

NGartplay

Hubert, the greenish maze looks like you can see all the way into it.  Is this displacement?

hubert

NGartplay: Nope, that impression is just from smoke and mirrors. ;)

"Displacement" works comparable to a bump map and serves to add more details/structure to an object.

This new MatLab channel was introduced in Bryce7, but not explained in DAZ's unfinished user manual "Bryce 7 Artist Guide".

Unfortunately, this new feature runs quite unstable and causes many crashes! As far as I know, it's implementation was still incomplete when Bryce7 development got stopped. There occur less crashes when following Horo's advice to set the "Render Priority" to low, as long as you work with the MatLab. Set the priority higher again for the final render run. (Even then, I get occasional crashes during the rendering.)

PS: I searched the DAZ Bryce Forum and found some helpful information from Rashad Carter and David Brinnen.
Their posts from December 2012:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/13247/bumpyness-crashes-bryce-every-time/p1
 

> (quoted from Rashad Carter)
"Displacement and bump are entirely different features. Bump uses shading to create the impression of added geometry, while displacement literally creates new geometry. It is in the generation of the added geometry that Bryce gets fouled up with displacement. Bryce uses a micro-polygon displacement that is controlled in the Attributes tab at the very bottom. Only once you have enabled displacement in the material lab does this option become ungrayed out in the attributes tab. The smaller the microplygon size the more polygons are created and the more ram is required. Try using larger settings like .05. You only have a few moments from the time you first enable displacement to quickly get over to the attributes and lower the default micropolygon quality from default .0.1 to a larger setting.

Displacement never quite got completed in the most recent dev cycle. Clearly it is the top of the list for the next cycle if that indeed happens. There's the short and the skinny."
 

> (quoted from David Brinnen)
"Graham reported that displacement was mostly usable on one of his single-core P4 machines. And suggested that setting the priority to low might offer improved stability for multi-core processes. Note "improved" - you will still experience frequent crashes with displacement, but with care you might get to complete a render. It's a interesting feature, but somewhat broken."

 

mermaid010

Interesting info, thanks for sharing Hubert 

S Ray

I've noticed when using displacement that you have to let the Material Lab Nano finish rendering out before exiting or it can crash Bryce.

hubert

S Ray: Thanks for the hint. I had noticed this too in the MatLab (but only few times).

@ all:

To speed up the developing of such a scene, for faster testing of different settings and more stability, I suggest the following:
- Use Render Priority always with setting "Low"!
- Set the Nano Preview of the Bryce GUI ro "Sky Only". (This seemingly helps also to reduce crashes.)
- Set Render Quality to "Regular (Normal AA)" or even only "Default (No AA)".
- Use a much smaller canvas size ("Document Resolution") instead of the intended final render size.
- Save and save often, esp. before starting a render run. ;)

Below is a test scene with a Cube (with different texture mapping than on the Sphere). "Displacement" works indeed on the object's rim! -- There are still pixelation artefacts along edges of the maze, most likely because I didn't optimize its bitmap image.

That feature is "crashy"... ..but fun!  :)

 

haraldseiwert

Hello there,
by accident I found this thread and that I was mentioned as an early Brycer. That's true, used it (and Poser) for many years since the beginning before I switched to ZBrush etc.
I'll attach an early Bryce rendering I did of a gothic Cathedral, all modelled with terrain modelling in Bryce.
Harald Seiwert

haraldseiwert

Hello, I found a "webarchive" link to my old online Bryce gallery,
Harald Seiwert
https://web.archive.org/web/20010124002000/http://www.xs4all.nl/~seiwert/