randomly selected materials, are they randomly generated or chosen from the library?

srieschsriesch Posts: 4,241
edited December 1969 in Bryce Discussion

When you create new objects (such as a terrain, a tree, etc.) are the randomly selected materials randomly generated, or could they be randomly selected from products in your material libraries?
I'm wondering if it is possible to use these random materials in commercial products or not.

Comments

  • TapiocaTundraTapiocaTundra Posts: 268
    edited December 1969

    I to am interested in how random random is in Bryce, good question :)

  • Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,800
    edited December 1969

    It depends on which area we are talking about. If you are referring to the main Material Lab interface with all the sliders and what not...those are not truly random those are taken from whichever library was last used. So if you had recently been poking around in the user files when you select random material it will pick one from that library. The DTE however (Deep Texture Editor) generates random patterns differently and doesnt refer to any one library if my memory serves me. David Brinnen probably would know this better than anyone so I suggest holding out for his feedback.

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    It depends on which area we are talking about. If you are referring to the main Material Lab interface with all the sliders and what not...those are not truly random those are taken from whichever library was last used. So if you had recently been poking around in the user files when you select random material it will pick one from that library. The DTE however (Deep Texture Editor) generates random patterns differently and doesnt refer to any one library if my memory serves me. David Brinnen probably would know this better than anyone so I suggest holding out for his feedback.

    As Rashad says, depends on which area you are talking about.

    As to what can be used in a commercial product, hmn... so far as I know, no product yet has focused on the sale of procedurally created texture components, but given the difficulty most folks seem to have with these, it would be a very limited audience that was interested in texture components anyway. If existing texture components from the texture library were used to make new materials, then I don't see any problem with that.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,638
    edited December 1969

    Terrains are created randomly with a seed number that changes each time. At least if you tile terrains, that's what happens. If you switch off Random Extend, Random Position and Character those 3 seed numbers won't change. For the default terrain, these randomisers are not available so I think those three random numbers are generated by different seed numbers every time and the seed numbers may be derived from the date and time, though I don't know for sure but that's the usual way.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,638
    edited December 1969

    Trees are yet different because they come up with Randomness 70. If you set Randomness to 0 for that tree and generate another one, it comes in again with randomness 70 and if you set it to 0, the tree gets almost the same as the first one. The materials applied to trunk and leaves however, change.

  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,241
    edited December 1969

    So it sounds like a mix of random and materials from existing products, and I should just continue replacing all randomly-genereated materials that Bryce applies to newly-generated objects with my own custom ones to avoid any problems?

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,638
    edited December 1969

    Yes. The only thing I know to stop randomness is holding down the ctrl key when creating a terrain. It comes as a random terrain into Bryce, but with the default grey.

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited December 1969

    Horo said:
    Yes. The only thing I know to stop randomness is holding down the ctrl key when creating a terrain. It comes as a random terrain into Bryce, but with the default grey.

    Oooh, I didn't know that, handy tip, thanks Horo. I find I can judge how a terrain is looking better when it is default grey. I kknow it is only a couple of clicks to change it back to that, but far easier to start with a grey one.

  • TapiocaTundraTapiocaTundra Posts: 268
    edited December 1969

    Similarly with trees, holding down the Alt key when creating a tree with the tree icon, at least we get a choice of the family of tree, and of course a slightly different shape each time, thing is with materials it seems although choosing the same tree in the file browser that appears, Bryce gives me a mixture of unlikely seasonal materials for some of them, must be a way to control the materials to be more unified.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,638
    edited June 2013

    Yes, this is also how you can access trees stored elsewhere and with ctrl+alt you can save it anywhere on the computer. There is a video discussing these thingies Saving and Exporting Bryce Trees and there is also a Transcript.

    Post edited by Horo on
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