Quote
Originally posted by Legion:
**Can anyone here just give me a little help with bump maps in bryce. Ive made a ship hull texture, as well as a bump map (just back and white).
I load the textures into the 2d materials section, and apply the hull texture to the model. I go to the materials editor and set the specular properties etc.
But I cant figure how to apply the map. I know its got something to do with the A B C D 'channels'? on the right hand side, but i dont know how to use them.
Help?
Thanks 
l e g i o n
**
Is actually pretty simple once you get used to it. The Bryce Materials Lab, for all the fancy graphics, is essentially a matrix. CHANNELS (the rows) are aspects of the final material (Diffuse Color, Reflection Strength), and the COLUMNS (including the ABCD holes for beads) are used singly or in combinations to set the value of those aspects.
The key here is that a channel (like Diffuse Color) can have a single hue, or be driven by a fractal pattern or imported image. In the case of a Bump Map, you need to have the imported image as one of your Texture Components (the little palettes on the extreme right of the display). It can be in any of the slots A B C or D; any single slot behaves the same. You also, in the case of bump maps, need to pull out the little slider on the extreme left to set the strength of the bump.
Where Bryce materials get complex is that you may use more than one Texture Component in a channel (indeed, you can use different combinations of elements in each channel!) An A + B texture, for instance, is height-dependent and fades from one to the other. A + B + C fades from A to B depending on the value of C. There are also tricks such as Alpha Scaling, which allow you to use a texture but adjust how much it effects the channel.
If you get truly stuck, I could screen-shoot a few of the hull textures I've been using.
A last note; Bryce by default creates materials with a fairly high ambience. In almost all cases you want to turn that off pronto. Most of my picture-based textures have the picture setting diffuse and ambient color, diffusion = 100, ambience = 0. Specularity also works best when driven by a texture (metallicity spreads the specular highlights out and makes things look a lot less plastic.)
Clear as Bryce mud, eh? I hope this helps!
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