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Download the PDF of this tutorial.
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 |
| Ice
Learn how to create a convincing winter effect within Bryce. |
 Hell frozen over. |
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: |
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| 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. | |
 Start with the preset material "Redlayers" from within the 'rocks' category. Then set the frequency and other settings as is indicated above. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. | |
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| 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. |
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| The fire in the background was created by making some very large fire spheres and placing them behind the objects in the scene. |
| 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. | |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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 |
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| 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. |
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| Don't get burnt! | |
