Brycetech: Create a Background

**Explosion #2 Tutorial**
Part 1	Part 2	Part 3	Part 4	Part 5

In this tutorial you will learn how to apply a picture as the background of a Bryce render. Using these instead of or in combination with the Bryce environment will give you more freedom to make your own personalized scene.

If you check the NASA site on a daily basis, you can get some really nice high resolution images to use as backgrounds for your images. They also have an archive of the ones previously posted so you can see what you have been missing.

Now deselect all objects and go to solo mode again. Create a 2D pict by clicking on Leo.
The 2D picture editor will open. Load a picture into the first channel from your hard drive (or paste it in place).
(1) Load the same image into the second channel by clicking copy. (2) Then paste it to channel 2. In this case, (3) I clicked the "Invert" button.	Remember that channel two drives both transparency and bump.
Apply your changes. You still need to edit the materials so click on the "M" for materials of your 2D picture and drag the settings accordingly. For transparency, click channel "A". Drag the control to suit your taste. Be sure to turn off "Cast Shadows" and "Receive Shadows"	If you need to edit this later, you can always come back.

Apply your changes. Bryce will have created the 2D pict at its default position. You will want to change this. So go to the preset camera position that you want to see the action from and look at the position of the 2D pict.

Rotate it so that it is roughly parallel with the camera. Position so that it is roughly centered in the scene.

Then resize it so that it encompasses your entire camera view.

Drag the object farther away from the camera. You want it to be behind all of your objects (in this scene). Click the preview to see what you have done. Be sure to resize the 2D pict so that it encompasses the entire camera view.

To make it easier to change the position of the pict in relation to the camera change the edit mode in the "Edit Palette" to "Object Space" (or "Camera Space").

Apply any necessary environmental effects. I chose to add stars, however sometimes the stars won't render as is shown below. I also chose a basic black sky from the sky presets.

The result

Troubleshooting

Look closely at this close up of the background. What do you see?
Did you see a problem? Look again, see the lines? This is an after effect of using a jpg image as the basis of your background picture and resizing it to the large size it took to encompass the camera view. JPG files compress in a linear fashion, thereby creating this unfortunate effect. To prevent this from happening, you need to edit the image you got in JPG format in an image editor.	Compare this picture to the top one.
Open your image in an image editor and apply a very slight "Gaussian" effect to it. It will smooth most of the lines from your picture. There may still be some slightly visible lines in the picture. Save this as an uncompressed file...such as .BMP. Then use this image as the basis of your background.

Site Note:

You have completed the second explosion tutorial. Hopefully you picked up (or remembered) some techniques. Have fun creating your own scenes.

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!

Brycetech: Create a Background

Troubleshooting

Site Note:

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