Possible ambient color issue on Windows 11?

mbario

Hi everyone! I'm mbario and I'm a new Bryce user. I've started using Bryce just a week ago, and I'm learning the basics at the moment following the tutorials and the official artist's guide for Bryce 7.

I have a question about ambient color for the surface material: from the guide's Ambience section (Setting Ambient Color) for surface material, I read:

The Ambient Color channel is also related to the Ambient Color you set in the Sky & Fog palette. The Ambient Color of the environment is added to the Ambient Color of the object, so if your environment is blue and your object's Ambient Color is yellow, your object appears green.

However I don't seem to get this result. Setting a blue rgb(0,0,255) environment color in the sky & fog palette and a yellow rgb(255,255,0) ambient color for my object's material, the object appears black for every ambience value.

Thinking of it, this seems to be the correct behavior because with no diffusion the only light the object can scatter is the one from the ambient, and if the ambient emits only blue light, which doesn't have any yellow component, there is no light the surface can scatter. If this is the case it could be just an oversight in the guide, but I've also read that sometimes Bryce can show issues in newer OSs, so I just wanted to be sure this isn't related to something unusual with my computer.

I hope I'm not making too much confusion, I'm sorry, English is not my first language.
I'm using Bryce7.1 Pro. Thanks in advance :)

Horo

mbario - welcome to Bryce. Ambient light has no shadows and it can be used to create a self-lit object like a fire. For lighting an object or environment it is not a good choice because the objects appear flat and bump gets lost. I hardly use any ambience.

In the Sky Lab, there are some controls that are global: Ambient should be fully white always and the ambient colour for an object can be set in the Materials Lab. In this way, you can have several objects with different ambient colours.

The Sky Dome colour, which I always keep black, is a light source in the zenith and shines down without casting any shadows. I find this light very seldom useful, better use a radial light.

Another global control in the Sky Lab is Sun/Moon Shadows. It should always be set to 100. If the Shadow intensity is lower, light passes through all objects in the scene. If Shadows is set to 75, 25% of the light passes through the objects and therefore the shadows they cast from the sun are less dark and bump less obvious.

This Shadow control also affects all light sources in the Light Lab, no matter how the shadows for the different lights is set - and also for IBL.

To create less dark shadows by a lower Shadows setting, or Ambience, was a useful method in Bryce up to version 5. Since then, there are better lighting methods: Dome and Fill Lights in the Light Lab, IBL (Image Based Light) in the Sky Lab and the True Ambience render option.

I do not (yet) use Windows 11 but still use Bryce 7.1 on a Win 2000, a XP, two Win 7 and 2 Win 10. Bryce works the same on all machines - though not at the same speed

There are many tutorials on my website and free assets (link below).

mbario

Hi Horo, thanks for the help! I'll stick with fully white Ambient and black Sky Dome then, and I've already set the Sun/Moon Shadows to 100 as recommended in an online tutorial I found.

Also, thank you for your installation guide, it helped me a lot, it was very clear. Thanks again :)