Part 4 of the 3D Artwork Series will cover such concepts as giving an object a certain color or texture, and texture mapping images onto objects. Again, it is highly recommended that you have read the previous 3 articles before reading this one. Article three covered briefly the Bryce interface. Hopefully, you've experimented a bit with Bryce, and you should be pretty familiar with its interface. Most buttons or controls are pretty self-evident.

We'll begin by creating some basic objects so that we can see how texturing works. Here I've created a cone, a sphere, and a cube. Now, select the cube, and click on the little M next to it. A window will pop up. This is the material menu. Here is where you set how your object looks like. At the moment, everything is set to default - flat grey. In the main part of the screen you'll see assorted controls. There should be controls called Diffusion, Ambience, and Specularity. These are the three main controls. Diffusion controls what kind of light the object bounces off - and therefore, what color the object is. Ambience controls what color the object gives off without any light present. This will also affect the color of your object, since there is never 100% light in the scene. Specularity controls the shininess of the object. A high specularity makes an object look like plastic. There are two sets of controls for each of these. The topmost set is the color control. You'll notice the ovals next to diffuse, ambient, and specular. Clicking and holding down on these will bring up a color gradient. You can select whatever color you want. The middle set of conrols affects how MUCH diffusion, ambience, or specularity the object has. Let's try giving the cube that is selected a blue color. Right now, diffusion is at maximum, and there is a little bit of ambience. Notice that the diffusion color is set to gray, which is why the object is gray. Click on the oval next to diffusion and make it blue. Press ok, and you should see that the cube is now blue.

Now, select your sphere. We'll play around with specularity here. Click the M to get to the materials menu. At the moment, specularity is set ot 0. Move the slider bar to the left of the word "Specularity" outwards, until you have a value of about 75. As you can see from the preview image, the object now looks shiny, and does indeed look like some sort of gray plastic. Click the check mark to apply your settings to the sphere. Now, select the cone. We'll use it to play around with some more settings. Again, click the M to enter the materials menu. Now, look at the very bottom of the set of controls. You'll see two controls that are called Transparency and Reflection. These are fairly self-evident. One makes the cone transparent, while the other makes it reflective. Lets play around with these a bit. When you're done, click the check mark, and return to your scene. Render it to see how it has turned out.

As you can see, the cone can be made reflective like a metal, or see through like glass. Using all these controls together, quite a large number of textures can be created.

However, just solid colors aren't really good enough. For that reason, we'll take a look at the texture presets. Texture presets are lots of textures that come with Bryce. They can be useful on their own, but more importantly, they can provide a base for creating a huge number of other textures. To access the presets, click the small arrow to the right of the preview window.

As you can see, there are lots of preset textures. Go ahead and explore all of them. You can use them for whatever you want. Select a texture, and then play around with the reflection or transparency to create a new texture. Especially useful in the presets are the glass and water presets. With these, you can create far more realistic glass and water effects than you could by just using a regular material that you created yourself. You can modify, for example, the diffusion on a glass preset texture to get colored glass. As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless.

Once you've finished playing around with textures, create a new scene. In the middle of the scene, create a cube. The last major texture effect that we'll be looking at is texture mapping - the most useful tool by far. Click on the M to enter the materials menu. Now, open up a paint program. I'll be using photoshop, but this works perfectly well with any program - even MS Paint, for those of you who don't have anything else. Create a new document in your paint program - say 300X300 pixels. Now, paint something. It could be a logo of some kind, or whatever you want. Save your image as a BMP. If you have Photoshop, it is important to note that if you have transparency in your image, you can save as a PSD. Bryce will load this up, and your transparency will work in Bryce as well. Now, go back into Bryce. You'll have noticed that there are four collumns of dots running down the control menu. Click on the dot immediately to the right of the Diffusion Color setting. A box will open up to the right with a texture in it. This is a default texture at the moment. We want our image to appear on the side of the cube.

Right under the three little images side by side, there are two buttons one has a T on it, the other has a P. Click on the P. This will set the texture to work with an image. Now, click on the pinkish button right above to get to the image loading menu. You should see three images side by side. Above each is a little button that says Load. Click the load button on the right-most image. Load up your image.

Press the check mark to get back to the materials menu. The image will look slightly faded. That is because the Ambience setting is set up a little, and it is making the image look whiter. Set ambience to 0, and click on the check mark to apply your changes. The image will now be applied! It is in fact that easy! That's why I like Bryce so much - to do this on another program would be somewhat more difficult. You can apply images to all sorts of objects. The most important thing with 3D graphics is that you play around with them. Practice makes perfect.

As usual, at the end is an example of some stuff I've done with textures. This is another image from Zeta - the very first draft of the largest ship in the game - the BattleCruiser. This is the most powerful ship you'll be allowed to pilot in Zeta, but it is rather slow and bulky.

That concludes this tutorial! Stay alert for the next article in the 3D Graphics series. And, of course, if you have any sort of 3D program, keep on working and practicing. That's the only way you'll get better.