Brycetech: Bryce on the Mat Part 2

By dragging the transparency slider, you can determine how much you can see through an object. The higher the transparency, the more of the surrounding environment is visible through the object's surface. Different values of transparency.
When a material drives the transparency channel, the lighter areas of its alpha channel are transparent and the darker areas of it are not. This is reversed with image texture, i.e. with pictures the lighter areas of the alpha channel are not transparent, and the darker areas are transparent. The image to the right represents texture driven transparency.
At 0 the object is fully visible, at 100 the object is invisible. Any value between these 2 numbers will vary the degree of transparency. (There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.) Notice that you can partially see through the sphere at this setting of 50.8 transparency.
The transparent color picker will determine what color the object is when light passes through your object. This attribute also determines the color of the of the light that passes through the object. Notice in the example to the right that the transparent color is green and the light passing through the sphere is green as well. If you look at the interior of the sphere, you can see that the sphere color is a mixture of the blue diffuse color and the transparent color. This is because the refraction setting is above 100.
Look at the sphere to the right, can you pick out the colors for: Diffuse Specularity Specular Halo Transparency	The Material Lab image above has the settings for this sphere's material.

Metallicity

Metallicity is (as its name implies) a Material Lab component that gives an object a more metallic appearance. It works with two of the other components of the Material Lab: Diffusion and Reflection. A setting of the metallicity control determines exactly how much of the diffuse color will be included in the reflection of the material. Different values of metallicity. The diffuse color for the samples above was red.
The Material Lab settings indicated to the right are the settings for the preset material "yellow gold". Notice there is no setting in the metallicity area.
However if you apply metallicity, you can achieve a "brass" appearance as the diffuse color is included in the reflection of the material.
Remember, when making your metallic material, that Diffusion and Reflection are integral parts of the Metallicity function in Bryce.

Bump Height

The bump channel is used to create the illusion of deformations in an objects surface. Different values of Bump.
This function does NOT actually deform the surface of the material, it merely creates the illusion of the deformation.
If you were to render a bump map close to the camera, it becomes very obvious that no actual deformation is being made to the surface. This close render illustrates the lack of deformation and shows a decrease in quality of the material. With this in mind, to make superior images it is best to not have objects with bump mapping close to the camera.
To use bump mapping, you must have activated at least one of the channels and changed the control to the desired value (greater than 0). You can set it to positive or negative. Be sure to set your slider to some value other than 0 or your bump map will not work.
It's a good idea to supply a little bit of bump mapping to all materials (with a few exceptions) to remove the plastic/fake look of the objects. Even a bump value of .01 will help offset this appearance.
More about bump map information later in the tutorial.

Go to part3 of the Material Lab 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!

Brycetech: Bryce on the Mat Part 2

Transparent and Transparency

Metallicity

Bump Height

Go to part3 of the Material Lab Tutorial.

Site Note:

Hosted by DAZ3D