Interesting Bryce Technique

[rlucci]

I was messing around with Bryce and Photoshop today and came up with a an interesting effect. Don't know if it's really all that useful, but I thought it looked kinda' neat. Might be useful it for illustrating complex underground structures or something...

Essentially, it's just two terrain objects with a boolean operation - the positive terrain is the main floor plan and the negative terrain "chops out" everything below floor level. It wouldn't work for overlapping caverns, but I suppose you could stack terrain pairs if you needed to. (The entrances were also rendered - I just added some more negative objects and some green lights...)

-RLucci

[NeonKnight]

Amazing how often I see the KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS or the CAVES OF CHAOS showing up as projects for mapping, RPG Modding, etc.

[su_liam]

This is a very interesting technique. I also think it would be a really interesting way to make some sort of space station or something.

@NeonKnight: Everybody has KOTB and COC. A lot of us have been staring at those maps for nigh unto thirty years, now. Time, love and the blindness of hindsight have made those crapulent old maps beautiful to us. Of course, we also feel a need to fix their crapulence, but hey, this is the Cartographer's Guild. How many maps of the fricking Earth are there out there? Nobody seems to think that's been done to death. Besides, I just think the technique was worth it.

[NeonKnight]

Don't get me wrong, I LUV the maps, they are probably the one set of maps I can see that are not of this world and in a second say: I KNOW THAT PLACE!

I've re-mapped them out myself. I've seen them done over for Neverwinter Nights Computer Game and Neverwinter Nights 2. I love the 3D perpespective, but note that in that technique the true 3Dishness of the map can't be done. Cave's cannot sit overtop of other caves.

[ravells]

Time, love and the blindness of hindsight have made those crapulent old maps beautiful to us.

Oh how true! Imagine someone producing a KOTB today, and the players saying, 'Right, you want us to believe that there's a room of 20 orcs right next door to a room of 10 kobolds and at the end of the corridor is a Minotaur. What do these guys do when there are no adventurers around to molest?'


Lucci - that Bryce trick is great! For some reason I didn't think you could do boolean operations with terrain meshes. I wonder if you could do another negative operation and carve out walls for all the rooms?

[Gamerprinter]

Of course, I never finished, but the Asteroidal Pirate Map that I was working on back in January - my intentions were to cut the complex from the asteroid with a Boolean operation then place the furnishings within. I just never finished that...

[su_liam]

Don't get me wrong, I LUV the maps, they are probably the one set of maps I can see that are not of this world and in a second say: I KNOW THAT PLACE!

I've re-mapped them out myself. I've seen them done over for Neverwinter Nights Computer Game and Neverwinter Nights 2. I love the 3D perpespective, but note that in that technique the true 3Dishness of the map can't be done. Cave's cannot sit overtop of other caves.

Actually, you could. You could make very tall areas where the xz-projection of two caves overlap and then boolean out the space between them. This would involve the precise placement of objects in Bryce. Fun... , but it could be done.

In another note: my Wacom tablet and Bryce don't get along. Even using the tablet mouse, the track balls and sliders all fly off into infinity if I try to adjust them. So I had to break out my old Logitech lasermouse to use Bryce. Guhhh...