Bryce DTE tutorial

DTE tutorial part 1 : Getting started ..Feb 2000
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The purpose of this tutorial is to help you understand how to use the Deep Texture Editor in Bryce 4 a bit better by taking you through the construction of a new material with a height dependent colour. It's not a short tutorial but it's fairly easy to follow.
Good and varied materials make all the difference between a natural-looking picture and one that looks , well , a bit artificial.
To get there you can't avoid getting into the DTE and 'tweak' things to your taste : it's not as difficult to do as it looks at first.
(Mac owners : the keys are listed between parenthesis. I have substituted Command for z)

A terrain rendered with a height dependent material will look like this : notice how the terrain looks gradually darker nearer the waterline, where it gets wetter ?
Looks more natural, doesn't it ?

It's not difficult to do , really. It uses just one material which changes colour depending on height.

Open a new Bryce file and create a terrain and a cylinder.

Hold down the Ctrl (Command) button as you create the terrain and the cylinder so they will be in a uniform grey , without a material attached to them yet.

Shift the cylinder a bit to the left.
Why a cylinder ? Because it will show the new material we'll create without too many shadows and angles cluttering it up.
We can delete the cylinder later and replace it by a nice rock, when we're done.

Now select the cylinder by clicking on it and open the materials lab ( click on the M next to the cylinder).
Since no material was selected the cylinder will be a uniform grey.

Click on channel A for diffuse ( outlined in bright green) : Bryce selects a texture for the A channel at random.
Bryce will randomly open a texture : in this example it selected Vortex (could have been anything..).

A material can be made up of up to 4 textures : A,B,C and D.
Depending on the channels that are used you can select properties, like diffusion or ambient colour to be determined by the textures or set directly with the sliders on the left.
In this case only diffuse colour is coming from the texture Vortex.
The other properties are set directly, like transparency, which is set at 0 : this material is not transparent.

We need to select another texture , so click on the texture's name or on the button in the top righthand corner of the texture to open the texture lists.
Better still : Shift and click on the texture's name or on the button in the top righthand corner of the texture to open the texture library.

That will enable us to see what texture we're selecting.
Select Rocks and choose greystone ( the colourless stone in the righthand bottom ).
Close the texture library with the check mark to enter your choice.

Make also sure the World Space mapping is set , otherwise click the downward arrow in the bottom righthand corner of texture A and choose World Space mapping.

This makes the mapping of the texture independent of the position of the object in the world. Instead the mapping of the texture will depend on it's own position in the world.
This is important , since we want the colour of the material with this texture to change to a darker hue near the waterline, independent of the position of the cylinder.

In simpler terms , if we move the cylinder up or down, the transition from a lighter to a darker hue will not move up or down with it, but stay in place.

This tutorial is based on two very informative Brycetalks led by Susan Kitchens, which I felt deserved to be remade into a proper tutorial. These used to be posted on Metacreations Brycetalk site, which disappeared when Corel bought Bryce.
As for Copyright : you can download

or printout this tutorial for personal use because that's what it's there for.