 Mechstorm's Complete Map Making Tutorial or MCM for Short. Covering Mechwarrior4, Mechwarrior4:BK and Mechwarrior4:Mercs. If you have any questions feel free to drop by our Mechstorm Editor/Scripting help Forum after you have registered on our forums. |
Bryce 5 Tutorial.
Introduction.
Bryce is a very powerful tool but like most PC applications it is perhaps not the most user friendly one. So I think its time to add a Bryce tutorial to the Mechstorm MCM Tutorial. With Bryce you can create some very high quality terrains and height maps for games such as Mechwarrior 4 as well as several other games.
Who this is for.
If your a render once and that will do type stop reading now. If your the type that knows the height map makes the game play on a map and the terrain texture adds to the eye candy then you are the very person I want reading this. You have the power to make online gaming fun for millions and it starts right here.
Getting Started.
This will be an interactive tutorial. So it can be used to make your maps with whilst you learn.
Load Bryce and move your mouse pointer to the top left corner to access the menu, select New Document. You will see something like this appear. Untick Contrain Proportions, this will allow you to give your own Document Resolution for height and Width. Enter the size of your map or just put 1024 in both boxes. Then click on the topic.
Next click on the icon with a Blue circle around it below.
After you do you will see a small mountain appear in the main window and it will have some small icons down the side. You may have to use the Bryce controls on the left to move the view around. This aspect of Bryce is not so friendly so if you cannot find it I wouldnt be surprised. They look like a Sky or DVD remote menu buttons. With the mountain selected move it so you can see those tiny icons down the side.
The icons we are interested in are M and E. But we need E first to access the Elevation page, that's height maps to you. We will soon completely replace the mountain with our own height map. We need to do that first so click on the E.
You will see the following if you explore the page your taken too after clicking on E. Below are the 2 parts we are interested in for this tutorial.
Elevation is where you create your height maps.
Pictures is where you load in grey scale images for use in bryce as a height map and merge it (or not) with other height maps. Since Bryce supports a wide variety of picture formats, you need really need to worry too much if you make your height maps in one of the popular picture formats such as jpeg.
Now if you click on the Fractical down arrow you will get a list of possible types of terrain Bryce will render. Each entry will render several varations of the same terrain if you click on the round button before the word Fractal more than once. When you have a height map you like click on pictures and select copy from the first image and then paste from the white box. You now have 2 height maps over laying each other. But lets move on to some really complex and hard stuff shall we.
Ready ?
In your favorite paint package draw a picture using only shades of grey from white through to black. White will be the top of a mountain, black will be a deep valley. It can be anything so if you want to just paint the image black and type your name in white. This is only to demonstrate one of Bryces features. If you want to know the size of the image to make lets say 512x512 for the hell of it. Save it as a jpeg. The size doesn't really matter since Bryce stretches the image to fit the height map being used.
Now when you have your image, click on load from the second window and select your new height map image and load it into Bryce, then click apply and have a look at what the 2 height maps have created in the 3D window on the Elevation screen Rotate it around a bit and see what you think of your new height map.
Before you leave this section and go on to the material section take a look at the panel before.
These are the tools Bryce gives you to edit your height map directly. The big V thing sets the height your painting at and thus the shade of grey being used. I'll leave you to have fun figuring out the rest. Its not hard so I feel confident you will understand the tools once you mess with them a bit.
If your happy with your new height map click on the big Tick at the bottom right of the screen to return to the main Bryce window. If not just keep generating new height maps until you are happy. Try using the erode functions and other things, experiment a bit and get a feel for this part of bryce. You can really improve your map putting the effort in here. If you mess up press control Z to undo your last action.
Take a break and play around for the Elevation screen at this point if you want. The next bit will wait until you feel confident you understand the first part of making a terrain.
Terrain Materials.
In this section we will most likely be rotating the terrain, checking it out from different angles and generally looking like we know we are doing even if we do not. To help you need to get used to using the icons below.
Now instead of me telling you what they all do, I want you to play when those tools and figure it out your self. This is an easy part so you should not have any problems. Except perhaps not being able to find your mountain because you moved it out of view. However even this is an important thing because you have to be able find it again and the best way to do that is to learn how to use these tools. So learn you must.
Go a head and click on them, hold down the mouse, move it around. Try and make your computer explode :)
I will tell you this, that big round button with 2 small buttons on both sides is the render button and clicking on the big blue X will cause any rendered image to vanish and show you the height map again. You need to fully understand how these two work together so render your height map off a few times and use these whilst your messing around. Get a feel for them before moving on to the next step
When your confident you know how to control the map line the terrain up with the view so it looks like this.
Do not worry about filling the screen at this point. I'll be showing you how to choose the area to render later.
From the Height maps menu e.g. this one...
Click on the M.
You should see this...
Click on the small arrow pointing right on the image of a mountain to access this next screen.
.
Now you will probably want Rocks&Stones or something that sounds like a natural terrain texture. So look around, find one and select it. Cave Wall in Rocks&Stones is actually nice but be warned, not all textures render right from the over head view. Some look odd so you may need to choose a texture and do a quick render to see if it looks right for your map.
The area in the materials editor window under surface is used to change how the texture looks on your map. You will need to experiment with this to get the desired effect. I cannot really explain it to you in this tutorial so just have a play with the settings and see what you can achieve.
When your done click on the little Tick on the bottom of all material screen windows to get back to the main Bryce screen and do a test render by clicking on that big round ball below the big round ball with a blue cross on it. See if you like it and if you do move on to the next section.
Lighting.
Click on the arrow next to Sky and Fog at the top of the main Bryce window. Several skies should appear. Choose one you like and do a quick render to see what it looks like on your map. The small mini map in the top left corner usually is a good guide to how your map will look.
Now click on word Sky and Fog rather than the arrow to access some lighting controls.
The black ball at the end is the sun position, using your move move it around and check the little mini map to see how it lights your map. When you get the lighting right and the shadows are being cast in the direction you want them in you will be ready to render your map off properly.
Again, take the time to mess around and learn how to best use these features, you can do a lot from here the sun colour can change how your final terrain looks. If you know what sky your going to use for the map then you can even choose a matching sky from in side Bryce and render the map with that so it looks right on the finished map. This is where your lighting matters and where you can make the biggest difference if you think a head.
Do a test render of your map, make sure it looks reasonably ok before moving on to the next bit in the main Bryce window.
Rendering your map.
Look for these controls down the right side of the main bryce window.
The bottom 3 should be used to line up the map so it fits squarely at the center of your Bryce window ready for the next part. Once it is, do a render of the map then stop the render before it finishes. Using your mouse drag a box around the area of your map you want to use. When you have done it you should see 2 circles and an down arrow appear. You do not want the box to cover the blue areas, it has to be over your terrain only.
Select the down arrow and then click on Zoom Selection as shown above.
Your view will zoom in to the map and Bryce will make sure the area in the box is exactly the size you entered for the map at the start of this tutorial.
E.G. no Blue areas will be rendered if I rendered the above after zooming in.
Now you need to make an altitude render to get the Height map and you need to make a terrain render to get the terrain texture. So lets make the Altitude map first.
If you look down the left side of the main view you will see a series of down facing small arrows. Select the bottom one and then choose Altitude Mask.
Next we set the Quality from the same menu, the higher the quality the better the finished terrain will be. I recommend super fine as a minimum requirement but quick renders can be done on Regular or default.
Once your happy, click on Render and render off your height map.
A little timer in the bottom left corner tells you its still rendering, do not touch anything until its finished. Once it has finished access the top left menu and save the image off as yourheightmap.bmp using the option shown below.
Now go back to the menu where you set Bryce to render off the height map and select Altitude Mask again so the tick next to it vanishes. Then go and render your map off again. You should see your terrain texture rendering. Again, do not touch your PC whilst it renders the terrain. Once its finished save it off the same way you did for the Altitude map.
Finishing up.
Bryce has many features even I have not fully explored yet so its worth experimenting at each stage to see what happens. However you now know the basics needed to render off a single terrain texture and a height map so they match perfectly right from the first render. I recommend you spend some time practicing these basic steps before dashing off and making a map. You can for example increase the detail, increase the render size, use more dots per inch in Photoshop when importing the image to get high detailed terrain textures on your map and a number of other things. So the end results of all this practice will be well worth it.
Just remember, it all starts going wrong when you rush the height map, there is not cure for a boring height map.
Giskard