tutor bryce fire n ice

Brycetech: Fire and Ice part1

Brycetech: Fire and Ice

In this tutorial you will learn how to simulate the effect of fire and the effect of winter. To achieve these effects requires decent materials and lighting techniques as well as a bit of ingenuity on the artist's part. The following will introduce you to ways to make a convincing fire or snow scene.

Fire

Learn how to create a convincing fire effect within Bryce.

Hell

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Ice

Learn how to create a convincing winter effect within Bryce.

Hell frozen over.

Fire

To create the fire effect within Bryce requires a texture created by Clay Hagebusch. This texture is a 100% volumetric Bryce texture and will bring your scenes to life. This Bryce4 texture can be found at:

http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/volumetricfire.html

What? You don't have Bryce4? Ok, then use the material settings to the below to create your own in Bryce3. This will NOT work in Bryce2 because you do not have volumetric materials.


http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/volumetricfire.html


Start with the preset material "Redlayers" from within the 'rocks' category. Then set the frequency and other settings as is indicated above.

Ok, if you're like me...you like stuff done for you.



The image to the right was created using his Bryce3 version of the material.

Creating a convincing fire with this texture is a very simple matter of creating a variety of spheres and applying the texture to the spheres.



● Create a sphere. ● Then duplicate the sphere.

Continue to duplicate it until you have about 5 spheres for each fire generation area within your scene.

After applying the fire material to these spheres...select them all and go to the edit palette and '3D disperse/size/rotate' these duplicates.

You may find it necessary to 'land' all the fire spheres. However this is purely up to your eye.



The resulting random placement of the fire spheres will produce a very nice effect.

With this technique in mind, look at the image. Some of the various fire generation areas are marked.



The fire in the background was created by making some very large fire spheres and placing them behind the objects in the scene.

It's on Fire!

If you have a scene in which you wish fire to engulf an object, you can try the following technique to add a bit of depth to the fire. Lets assume you have fire that you wish to appear around a stone in the scene.

● Create the stone and texture it. ● Duplicate the stone.

● Go to the Edit palette and convert the duplicate object to a sphere.

● Apply the fire material to this sphere.



Now follow the same steps as above. Duplicate the fire sphere about 5 times and '3d disperse/size/rotate' them.

You will get the effect of the fire engulfing the stone. It may be necessary to enlarge the spheres to make a believable effect.

This is how the fire around the stones was created in this image.

If you look closely, you will be able to pick out the fire generation areas within the image. Each of these areas represent about 5 fire spheres each.



Set it on Fire

If you want to have walls or other vertical objects appear to be burning, it is a necessary to create the fire spheres and carefully place them so that they barely stick out of wall you wish to have burning. This will take a bit of patience.

In the image to the right, fire spheres are just barely sticking out from the stone wall.

Unnatural Lines

There are a few problems with this technique. I have seen a lot of images that exhibit this particular error.

Notice in the image to the right that there is a visible line in the flame material. This line is a result of the fire spheres overlapping. This overlap creates a very unnatural effect.

To fix this effect, simply open the image in an image editor such as Corel Photopaint or Adobe Photoshop (etc.) and apply a bit of smear with the smudge tool.

Notice in the image to the right that the line is now gone.



Lighting

Creating a decent fire is not just a matter of creating the fire itself, it is also a matter of creating the lighting of a fire. The easiest way to do this is to create a light in the area of a fire generation area and color that light the same color as a flame.

To do that, create a light and edit it.

Once in the edit area, change the preview to 'render in scene'.

Now you can pick the color of the light directly from the preview window. Just click the color swatch and change it by dragging the color picker to the flame in the preview window. This will produce the yellow/orange glow for your fire scene.



You may even want to apply the fire material as a gel to your light. This is up to you. To do that, just create a light...click the "M" to enter the Material Lab and apply the material just as if you were applying it to any other object. Notice how this method gives a more "flamish" effect. The image is a combination of flame spheres and a light over top of the spheres.

Hey, I reserve the right to create words for the tutorials on this site. :P

If your scene is outside, you will probably need to create a sky atmosphere that has the same yellow/orange color by dragging the color selectors of the sky to the preview window for color selection.

Click a sky color swatch and pick the sky color from the scene's preview window.

Don't get burnt!

Go to Part 2 of the Fire and Ice Tutorial



Brycetech: Fire and Ice part 2

Fire gives off light so once you have a setting made that suits your needs...

Notice in the image to the right that no light appears to being emitted by the fire.

complete with things to burn which will show through the fire...

To help add realism to your fire, it is very useful to add extra's in the area of the fire so that Bryce will render some depth to it by showing these objects in the fire.

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It may be helpful to create a conical spotlight and make it slightly larger than the circumference of your fire...

Notice the circumference of the conical spotlight is larger than the area that will be on fire in the image. This allows the falloff in the light's settings to take effect outside of the fire. The light is pointed down toward the ground.

Then adjust the light's properties by turning off 'cast shadows' and adjusting its intensity...

Notice that I have turned off 'cast shadows' in the light's properties dialog. This will ensure a very nice glow in the area of the fire.



Be sure to add variety to the size of the spheres you apply the fire material to. The image to the right has the default gray material applied to it to illustrate the placement of the spheres.

to add a glow to the bottom of the fire and make it appear like a hot bed of ashes is at it base.



Go to Part 3 of the Fire and Ice Tutorial



Brycetech: Fire and Ice Part 3

Snow

To create this snow effect, you will need to download the snow material. This material is a Bryce 4 material.

If you do not have Bryce 4, set the settings in the Material Lab similar to the settings below. Start with the preset material "Cave Wall" in the "Rocks and Stones" category of the Preset Library.



Creating snow is actually a very simple process. To create the fallen snow, simply create your scene then select all of the objects in the scene and group them.

Next duplicate the group and raise it very slightly along the Y axis.



Apply the snow material to this duplicate group. This will give the illusion of snow accumulation on your objects.

To add to the effect, you can apply a sky setting that will give the appropriate atmosphere. The preset sky "A Midsummer Afternoon" doubles quite nicely as a setting for snow.

To create the effect of falling snow, see the Rain tutorial of this site. There you can download a material to help simulate the effect of falling snow.

Go to part2 of the Fire and Ice tutorial.



Site Note:This is not meant to be an all inclusive instruction on every possible way to have made the final image or produce the desired results. Bryce offers zillions of wonderful ways to replicate, multireplicate, reposition, etc. in its powerful interface. Experiment!


tutor bryce fire n ice

Documents

bryce4 texture

volumetric bryce texture

ice part1start

ice part1brycetech

ice part1ice

ice part1the image

convincing winter effect

effect of winter