Bryce3d/4/5 SS/Contiuum Ship Building Tutorial By ZiGNoTZaG Copyright 2002

This text file will hopefully help you along on your path to making some ships and other various vehicles for Subspace/Contiuum using bryce3d/4/5. The first section contains some various tips for the actual contruction of your ships. The second part expains the 2 template files and how to use them. please understand that this file is not to help you understand bryce itself,  i would advide that you need to play around with it and make sure understand the basics before attempting to make some ships. i used bryce3d to make all my ships, so some of things here MAY be differant in newer versions of bryce, but i doubt it.

And dont mind my horrid grammer and spelling. :)

i wrote this up in about an hour.

Part 1: Tips for making your ships.

You can either make your own file to build the ship in, or make a copy of one of the template files and use it. the template files allready have the camera setup and sun setup. make sure to keep a copy of the original template animation files around.

Make sure to double check that your Materials are applied in object space. This will make your materials move with the object, as opposed to World Space which makes your textures absolute and your ship moves "through" the texture. Much like your ship was made of glass, and the texture is under it. Bryce3d likes to default to worldspace, so make sure you check this. its hard to notice unless you know what your looking for. more likely then not, you would render your ships and then find out it aint right, even tho it looked fine during the render. so... ya... check that before you render :)

Give all your Materials an Ambience value of at least 20 or greater. there is room for experimentation here of course, you can get away with lower numbers depending on the material iteself. basically, the less ambience the better. not many things in real life have ambience, so the more you have, the less realistic your ships will look. Ambient light is light that your object will give off all the time. the whole reason for nay ambience at all is that it will prevent your Ship from having any see through spots, which is quite important. i think even the vie ones have some holes in em(ghetto)

For a better looking canopy, position an infinte plane, with a cloud texture above your camera(there is one in the full animation template, you could delete it if you would like). then use one of the chrome like metal materials on your canopy(make sure to give the canaopy an ambience value of 25 or greater).

Dont worry about negative objects that make your ship center uneven. do whatever it takes to make your ship cool. that problem can be solved once your ship is complete, and you are ready to animate.

Avoid using textures that are very detailed, unless of course you plan or rendering a ship bigger than the default 36x36. i would suggest doing some test animations with the basic flat template to see if the texture is going to remain steady at your chosen render resolution.

build your ship in a large resolution setup, but every now and then make sure to switch to your final resolution size and test a render to make sure its looking ok.

While building/test rendering your ship at the large size, i would suggest that you set the Antialiasing level to normal and that you use fast preview render mode, but when you switch to the small actual final size, make sure to set it to High and turn off fast preview. just to speed up your development.



Part 2: The animation process using the full animation.

Ok here we go!! 

1: Open the bryce file with your ship inside. Make sure you have it grouped as one object. make sure the camera is NOT included. Make sure its oriented nose up (nose poitned at top of screen) when you paste it in.

2: select your ship and make a copy of it, either by using the Edit menu's Copy or hitting Ctrl-C

3: Open the template file. Paste your ship in by using the Edit menu, or hitting cntrl-V

4: Roughly move your ship to the center of the camera, at the level of the triangle.(move it so its basically centered and the same disatnce away from the camera as the triangle. also make sure that your ship is oriented in the same fashion as the triangle. ie the nose of your ship should be pointed torwards the top of the screen when you are in camera view looking down on it. NOTE: again, it should be this way when you paste it in. so if it isnt. dont change that here, open the original file again and rotate the ship so that when you paste it in, its oriented correctly. if you dont, the animation may behave oddly.

5: You will now need to most likely do some resizing of your ship to make it fit in the rendering window. switch the view mode to the camera mode by clicking the image right under the render preview window until you see the little icon that looks like a camera. move and or resize your ship until its as centered as you can get it, and so all its edges are within the borders of the MAIN render window. do not take into account negative objects while you do this, ONLY the visible parts of the ship. this does not have to be perfect. but as close as humanly possible. i would suggest using the Bryce EDIT menu and the resize tool(by clicking on the square in the center of the resize tool and draggin the mouse you can resize the ship in proportion) to do this to avoid distorting your ship, but you may have to distort its shape a tad bit when all is said and done.

6: with your ship still selected veiw its Attributes by clicking the "A". and put a check in "Show Origin Handle". this will display a green dot that discribes the center of your ship. Switch to Top down veiw. grab your origin handle and (click and drag)move it to the very center of the camera which will be visible as a blue triangle wireframe. i suggest starting zoomed out some and zoom in closer so you can get the origin handle as close to the center of the camera as possible. be careful not to grab the camera handle.

7:now we need to attach the ship to the triangle which has all the animation applied to it. since your ship is most likely right over the triangle at this point you will need to temporarily move the ship out of the way. do this by selecting your ship and hitting the page up or page down key a couple times. just MAKE SURE you keep track of how many times you hit either one so you can move it back right where it was when you have the ship attached to the triangle.

With the ship selected you will see the flaoting contols for the object to the right of it. there is one contorl that looks like 3 squares in a diagonal line. if you hover the mouse over it you will notice that in the lower left of the screen it says "Link to parent" click, drag and realease this to the triangle(a blue line will point to the triangle from your ship, and the triangle will highlight blue)

Now move your ship back however many page ups or page down you hit before.

Next click the attributes of your ship again and switch to the "Linking" Tab. UNCHECK all the propagate options EXCEPT ROTATION.

Your ship is now almost ready to render!!

8: since the animation starts rendering with ship allready tiled 45 degrees to the left. the final step before you render is to rotate you ship 45 degrees, you guessed it, to the left.
Heres how: With the ship selected, click the down arrow undernieht the Bryce Rotate tool(it looks like a square with some circle around it). a menu will appear, from that menu, click "3d transformations". in that dialog enter "45" in the "rotate" row in the "Z" column, and press enter. this will rotate your ship 45 degrees to the left.

Your ship is now ready to render.

9:some final tests before commiting to a render.

as your ship rotates and tilts. some parts of it may go outside the edge of the render frame.

better to see if it will now than finding out after the render.

we now need to switch to the animation VCR controls. if you are not allready looken at em that is. there is a small wireframe globe at the bottom right of the screen. click it until the controls at the bottom of the screen look like a VCR control and a slider bar, versus a bunch of squares and spheres and things.

switch to your final render resolution. now grab that slider and drag it around some. occasionaly testing a render or two at spots you might think to be trouble. trouble spots are usually when the ship is around 27 degrees tilt. because this is a perspective render, the ships wings will get closer to edge of the screen before they get farther away. ie as they get closer to the camera they get larger. its not much, but sometimes enough to start clipping your wings!! if it is clipping... lets fix it now!

return to the first frame of the animation by either draggin that slider all the way to the left or better yet just click the VCR control that is all the way on the left(line with triangle after it) then click the down arrow below the Rotation tool on the Bryce Edit menu and click the "Unrotate" option, your ship will now return to flat. make it a bit smaller as needed. when your done do Step 8 and 9 again.

10:lets render that bad boy.

make sure you are at the very first frame of the amimation by clicking the VCR control all the way on the left. make sure Fast preview render is OFF. the render control are on the right of the bryce window and look like a bunch of spheres. the Fast Preview mode is the circle just to the LEFT of the main render button(sphere).

click the down arrow to the right of the render controls and make sure you have the antialiasing set to "Fine Art"

Make sure your set at the resolution of the final render.

click the file menu and choose "render animation". from that dialog choose to output the animation as a "series of bitmaps". and choose a folder that you want all the frames to go to as bryce creates them.

click the check mark at the bottom right.

now sit back and smoke a bowl, drink a beer, pick your nose, masterbate, or whatever it is you do, and watch your ship render. you will this first time, ide bet money :)

final prep and notes:
some of the frames created in the animation are not needed in the final ship. these are transition frames where the ship is moving from one angle of tilt to another and are agian..not needed. i have made some software which is not at all ready to be realesed which takes this in to account and assembles the ships for me. since you do not have this software, here are the frames you need to delete before assmebling the final bitmap: 40,81,122,163,204,245,286,327,368,409,450. that should leave 440 frames, which is all the frames needed for the ship. 40 for each degree of rotation left and right, and 40 for the flat ship. 

left 45, 36, 27, 18, 9 , flat, right 9, 18, 27, 36, 45

the first 200 frames are the ship rotation left, these go at the top of the roll file.

the next 40 frames are the ship flat, these go into there own file

the last 200 frames are the ship rotation right, these go after the first 200 frames. :)

the frames need to be tiled 10 per row. in consecutice order from left to right, top to bottom.

manualy assembling the frame would TAKE forever, while i personaly do not know which particular proggies will assemble the frames for you, i have heard that there is one called compupic that will.

NOTE: the steps for making a flat only ship are the same, only you do not need to tilt the ship before you render. and you will most likely only need to delete one frame: 40. just make sure you only have the first 40 files in your completed bitmap :)

Have fun, and try to drop me a line when you ahve some ships made, ide like to check em out.

i will also be happy to help you out if you are having problems understanding these crappy instructions. but you will have to ICQ me for that. :)

zignotzag@yahoo.com

ICQ:125470560 (make sure you note that you are wanting help with ships in the authorization request)

ive prolly forgotten alot of stuff to include here. hopefully i didnt leave any major steps out in the process. but email me if you think i did and ill amend them to the text.















