Waves and boat wakes in Bryce

Bryce does a nice job of rendering calm bodies of water. So your garden pond scene should work well. For a sea scene you'd need to pan back a fair way to disguise the fact that the waves don't actually have any height. Bryce waves take no notice of anything in the water with them, and don't break on beaches either.

To get a bit of texture into your water, you need to model your waves. In most cases the Bryce terrain editor will do for this.

About terrains...

Create a new terrain object and drop it into your scene. With the new terrain selected, go to the Edit menu and select "Edit terrain/Object". The screen that appears looks like this:

What this shows is that the terrain is made from a greyscale image. White marks a high point, black a low one. Graduations of grey give you slopes. The square in the top right corner of this screen is a "top down" view of the picture which makes up your 3D terrain (which is shown in 3D at bottom left).

By creating a "top down" view of how you want your waves to look (either by painting in the Terrain Editor, or in a 2D paint package like Paintshop Pro) you can create waves in Bryce that look halfway decent as long as you don't get too close up.

Creating a wake for a ship

Create a new document. You should make it square for this bit (400x400 is about right). Start off by placing a boat in your new scene. If you don't currently have a boat, you can find links to sites which offer a selection of downloads on our links page. In the meantime, you could work through this tutorial with a "Tuboid" object from the standard Bryce objects menu (it's a cylinder on it's side). Make it a nice obvious colour in the materials editor, and then switch off "cast shadows". The menu that lets you switch shadows off is here:

Change Bryce's view to "From Top", and do a "Mask Render". The menu that lets you change render settings is here:

Your rendered image should end up like this:

Pretty boring huh? But with this as a template you can create a terrain which gives you a "wake" effect, which in turn gives the impression of forward motion to our boat (or Tuboid in this case).

File | Export the picture to your hard drive somewhere.

Create a new terrain on top of your Tuboid boat, then with the terrain selected, go to the "Edit menu" and click on "Edit Terrain/Object".

Click on the tag marked "Pictures". From here, load your boring black and white image. It'll probably look a little washed out, so load the same image again in the second box (or "Copy" and "Paste" it into the second box if you like). Click "Apply". The result will look a bit like this:

The next step requires a moderately steady hand and the use of the painting tool. Start with white and a thin brush. Paint on to your terrain a shape a bit like the one below. The amount the wake spreads out depends on the speed of the boat. The faster it goes, the narrower the wake will be. The boat will also cause a "Bow wave" as it pushes the water away, hence the wave in front.

Next, return to the "Elevation" tag and click on the "Smoothing" control several times (marked on the picture above). This will "round off" the ripples. Paint out the boat with black, leaving just your waves. Finally, trim off the flat black square on the bottom of the terrain by dragging the slider to the right of the painting area up a little. When you're done, click the "Tick" to apply your terrain to your Bryce scene.

Your waves will probably be too high to start with, but it's easy to use the "Resize" tool on the Edit menu to Resize "Y" (in other words, squash the terrain down a bit without changing the size of it in other dimensions).

Finally, apply a water texture to it. The "Foamy Seawater" material in the Materials lab works well for a boat wake. You might need to fine tune the position a bit (dropping it level with the water surface for example, since you trimmed the bottom square off).

You should be able to get something that looks a bit like this:

Group the wake to your boat in case you want to move them about. This technique works best if you don't look too close. Proper waves? That's the subject of the next tutorial...