Bryce animation questions

vindazi

I want to use an aspect ratio of 16:9. When I put it in it is too big to use even when I set the resolution to 1:0.25 or 540x303. How can I set a 16:9 ratio for use in Bryce 7 Pro on a Mac?

vindazi

Is it possible to animate instances to act like particles? How?

Oroboros

Question one:

Set a frame size of 1280 x 720 pixels for 720p, or 1920 x 1080 pixels for 1080p. These are both the standard 16:9 sizes.

16:9 is a ratio between the horizontal distance to the vertical distance. Pick a number, any number: let's say... 20.

16 x 20 = 320
9 x 20 = 180

So, a 16:9 ratio image would be 320 x 180 pixels. But while the ratio is correct, this would be viewed as a small animation window.

Pick another number. Let's say... 80.

16 x 80 = 1280
9 x 80 = 720

So, a 16:9 ratio image would be 1280 x 720 pixels. In broadcasting terms, this is also known as 720p HD.

===

Question two: No. Not even Bryce particles work like particles.

You're welcome.

Rashad Carter

In accordance with Oroboros I will suggest the following:

Q 1: All you need to do is to set up the screen at the proper ratio, which for your current screen should be 1280x720. In the Document Set-up at the top left of the screen, you need to change the Render Resolution to one of the multiples of 1280x720, such as 1920x1080 for example. The Aspect Ratio is locked with a red checkmark until you unlock it. This too will help you get the exact resolution you want.

In theory by setting it up this way you can keep your working window size minimal while still getting high resolution for the final renders. Hope this helps.

Q 2:
Once you decide on an "emitter" then the real issue comes in. I suggest you create all of the instances you plan to use as particles in frame 1. Make them super small and parent them to the emitter in frame 1. If you move the direction of the emitter in subsequent frames the micro-instances will follow it. Think of the emitter surface as the starting point for your particles that the viewer doesn't know already exist in the first frame. Because the Attribute of "Hidden" is not animateable, you cannot hide then unhide the objects later down the line, they've got to remain visible from the start, just small enough not to be visible to the viewer. After that all one needs to do is to manually set the key frames for the behavior of each particle instance when they are ready to be seen. You will have to enlarge the instances so they are visible as particles when the time is right. You will have to manually assign any bounce or other interactions with the floor and other objects for each instance particle. You might even explore creating Paths that can be reused by multiple instance objects at different times. Maybe a one bounce, two bounce and three bounce sequences randomly applied. The look might be worth it, but I'm not sure it would be enough by todays standards. As Oroboros says, it is not an easy task, as even the installed particle system is very basic and not terribly useful:

Edit: I forgot to add a couple other considerations. If I were you I'd give my source particle a unique family color before I start painting its instances onto the emitter. This way, even if you make them super small, too small for the cursor to allow you to re-select them, you can always use the family colors to select them. If you plan to have multiple generations of emissions, then you might want to consider giving each generation of "instanced particles" their own family color so that you only enlarge and animate the instances you need at this particular moment in time while the others remain small until needed.

Best of luck!

vindazi

Thanks both of you.

Oroboros

Rashad Carter said:

Edit: I forgot to add a couple other considerations. If I were you I'd give my source particle a unique family color before I start painting its instances onto the emitter. This way, even if you make them super small, too small for the cursor to allow you to re-select them, you can always use the family colors to select them.

Eeek.

Vindazi is a Mac user, Rashad. Families in Mac Bryce have been very dodgy to use as a selection tool since Bryce 6.1. When I try to select objects via Families, I sometimes see the colors are either black or radically wrong. I say "sometimes", because the times I DON'T see wrong family colors are the times when Bryce crashes seconds after accessing the Family Select palette.

My recommendation is to use Families for wireframe clarity only, and not to rely on them for selection under MacOS.

vindazi

Thanks for the heads up.

How do I do a fly around an object animation? The camera selection is only "free camera" and seems to swing on a pre defined axis.

In other words, how do I center on an object in camera view and animate the action from that camera's motion?

Oroboros

Track it.

Easy way: Select your camera. From the fly-out menu, hold down on the Track Object button (4th one down). Drag to the object you want the camera to track until the object turns green. Release. The camera will now always be pointing to that object.

Other Easy way: Select your camera. From the fly-out menu, click Edit [A]ttributes... button. Click the Linking tab. In the Track object drop menu, select the object you want the Camera to track. Click the OK checkmark and the camera will now always be pointing to that object.

Any object can track anything else, but all objects EXCEPT the camera get a few extra orientation options. I won't go into those.

Go crazy.

vindazi

Oroboros said:

Question one:

Set a frame size of 1280 x 720 pixels for 720p, or 1920 x 1080 pixels for 1080p. These are both the standard 16:9 sizes.

16:9 is a ratio between the horizontal distance to the vertical distance. Pick a number, any number: let's say... 20.

16 x 20 = 320
9 x 20 = 180

So, a 16:9 ratio image would be 320 x 180 pixels. But while the ratio is correct, this would be viewed as a small animation window.

Pick another number. Let's say... 80.

16 x 80 = 1280
9 x 80 = 720

So, a 16:9 ratio image would be 1280 x 720 pixels. In broadcasting terms, this is also known as 720p HD.

===

Question two: No. Not even Bryce particles work like particles.

You're welcome.

This what I tried and the result I got. The grid result is rather faint but, the camera view ends up in the bottom left corner ad overall view unusable. When I use the magnifying glass on the left to shrink the view it distorts a lot.

Oroboros

Nothing strange there. All this means is that you have a physical laptop screensize of about 1024 to 1440 pixels across, right?

Unlike modern apps (meaning: any graphics app, 2D or 3D made after 2000), the Bryce document size window doesn't scale. You can scale your view WITHIN the document size you've set, but the window is the window: If you've set a window that has a greater number of pixels that your screen size can actually handle, You'll only see a portion of your document size, starting from the top left quadrant.

And there's no document size scrolling :/

The way to work with Bryce is to work with gradually increasing doc. sizes. For animation, I tend to work in the smallest screen size tolerable that still gives me a sense of how the elements work together, then change to the correct document size as the very last step. My workflow goes like this (for either a 720p or 1080p movie):

• Set the Paper color to White and Depth Cue to 0. Both of these settings are on the right side vertical strip. This gives you highest contrast of the wireframe.

• Set a small window size of 720 x 360 pixels. This is a 16:9 ratio screen a quarter of the size of 720p.

• Compose my scene and set keyframes as normal.

• Thumbnail test render: There's a little film icon in the Animation strip. This gives a rough idea for flow and timing.

• If the Thumbnail's OK, then I do a wireframe render. I think this is an undocumented tip for animation:
Select Render animation... > Edit the settings as you'd like, but don't click the tick mark: SHIFT-click the tick mark. This is REALLY fast, and will give you a document sized version of your animation in wireframe. This tip is useless for material animation, but great for model movement.

• If timing and flow looks about right I'll save the file, and change the doc size to something small: about 360 x 180 is tolerable, and render out either a Default or Regular grade animation at full frame rate. Here I'm looking for lighting and material choices, seeing if this works.

• When that's done, I might tweak a few things and go to a full frame sub-render. That's rendering a small working range (look it up), say, 2 seconds of a key moment, and see if there are material concerns I need to check out. In particular, shimmer and duration: if the material looks like ants are crawling all over it (see my tutorial link, bottom of my posts) I'll need to adjust, or if the materials are creating render times that will mean DAYS to render out short scenes, I might swap out some materials for cheaper ones.

I try to put out 30fps footage. If each frame takes 5 minutes (which is around the max. I can tolerate) that means 1 second of finished movie takes about 3 hours. It's likely you'll want at least 10s of any animation. 30 hours is 1.25 days, and you'd better hope you don't inadvertently stop the render, re-boot, crash, or discover AFTER the render is complete that you missed something. That's why I work (and even the pros work) in incremental steps. It's worth thinking about.

• Finally, full render at final resolution. If I have a small physical screen, I might only see the top left quadrant of my document BUT BRYCE IS STILL RENDERING THE CORRECT, FULLSIZE SCENE, the same scene I composed at a smaller document size.

So, to sum up: you can increase wireframe contrast, paper color and several other settings (like wireframe density) on the right side of the interface, and to make animation efficient to produce, work as much as you can in small sizes and save full renders as the last step.