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Question: How would you make a
scene in Bryce appear as if it's underwater? Answer: There are lots of ways and when you have completed this tutorial, you will hopefully be able to create your own. |
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| Create a scene. Attend to the
details, just as if a scene for above water were being made. You may want to look at the Sky Palette area of Bryce before proceeding because to achieve the under water effect it's more "environmental" than "material". |
 This is the scene I started with. |
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| For this scene, I set the Cloud Cover to
0. Do this by dragging the Cloud Coverage control left or right with your mouse until the indicator reads "0". |
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| Set the Cloud Altitude to 0 by dragging the control left or right with your mouse until the indicator reads "0" | |
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| Set both the frequency and amplitude of
the clouds to "0" by dragging the frequency control until it is flat. Drag either left-right or up-down to make the indicator read "0", "0". |
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| Set the Haze to around
"25". Do this by dragging the control until the indicator reads
"25". Haze is one of the most important environmental effects to achieve
the under water appearance. (Along with the "Volumetric slab") I also chose blue for the color of my haze however you may like gray, white or even green...you choose. |
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| If you render the scene now, it will have an underwater feel to it. However, there are still some things that can be added to increase the quality and feel of the underwater environment. |  |
| Add a few underwater objects. For instance, I
added a shark and bubbles. So add plants, animals or other objects to add to the
underwater feel. Spheres were given a "glass" material to give an illusion of the bubble. For each bubble, 2 spheres were created. One sphere was assigned a positive attribute and a smaller one was given a negative attribute. These were grouped to make a boolean group which make a nice bubble. |
 Notice the bottom bubble. The boolean group supplied the illusion of "air" inside the sphere. |
| If you have a fast computer (or a lot of
patience ) you can also use the "Volumetric Slab". Remember to resize it
to encompass your scene. This is created by holding down the "Alt" key while clicking the "Create Plane" item.
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| Add a "waterish" material to it as
indicated to the right. By making it semi-transparent (transparency set to 84.7 in this instance) a much deeper more murky feel is added to the water. |
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| You can also give a rich feel to you water by making the volume color of the volumetric slab's material a different color and turning off the haze (or some mixture..see below). | |||
| Volumetric Slab material Notice different volume color. |
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| Haze on Volumetric Slab |
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| Haze on No Volumetric Slab |
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| Haze off Volumetric Slab |
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My chosen result, "haze on" with "volumetric slab" Click to see full size picture. |
| Hopefully now you
can create your own underwater scenes. Remember that haze and the volumetric slab
play a huge part in the appearance. By combining one or both with your scene you can
create your individual underwater picture. You can use the settings above as the basis to make your scene, but please remember to experiment. Don't expect perfection the first time. Keep trying If you have a technique that you like to use and you would like to share it. I'd love to see it. Also 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! |
This is a variation of the resulting picture. Click the image to see the gallery picture. |
