Genetica Viewer textures in Bryce – a quick tutorial

Genetica Viewer textures in Bryce – a quick tutorial

Using Genetica Viewer 3 to generate textures is very easy. What to do with them in Bryce might be a little daunting to the n00bs – myself included. So here is a quick-and-dirty tutorial to help you:

First of all fire up Genetica Viewer 3 and select the texture that you want to render:

Then select the "Render Effect Maps" on before rendering. (The Genetica Viewer 3 can only render to a maximum of 2048 X 2048 pixels but that is fine for most needs)

 

Sit back and wait…make yourself a cup of coffee, read your e-mail, take a walk around the garden… because some of the textures will take a long time to render. Once the texture is rendered it is time to export to a usable format.Click the Export Image:

 

Once the "Diffuse" image is saved change the drop-down menu (to the right of the 6 big numbers) to a channel other than "Texture" to save the Bump map and other maps like Specularity etc.

 

…in this case I want a bump map (which is called "Bottom Material" in this instance) so I export that.

 

Export to .JPG format with 0% compression the reults will be quite satifactory.

 

Once that is complete it is time to fire up Bryce, create your object and set your materials (by clicking on the tiny [M] button next to the object in Bryce's Main Editor)

 

Select the P button to select or create an image-based texture.

 

Then click the rightmost button above the "Leonardo Vitruvian Man" thumbnail to open up the texture editor.

 

 Click on an emply block to load the diffuse channel image.

 

…then click on the middle white placeholder to load the bump map as an alpha channel to drive the bumpmapping.

 

If the results look like this, you can click the green check mark on the lower right corner to exit the Texture Editor.

 

 Now set your Bump Map in the A Column on (with the blue button switch) and set the value to get the right bump detail. (I used a value of 50+)

 

The render will show you if your settings are correct. In this instance the Ambience is set too high and the image is washing out a bit.

 

Return to the Material Editor and set the Ambience to 0.

 

Fiddle with the Specularity too by putting a blue button in the A column next to Specularity.

 

This will make the rock texture less washed out and shinier.

 

That is it – in a nutshell – of the basics of using Genetica Viewer's textures in Bryce. It think you will agree that the results are quite spectacular!

Keep on Brycin'

David

aka Hamfast