Managing objects by grouping

The ability to group objects may not be something you are aware of when you start using Bryce but it can be very useful when working with a lot of objects in your scene.

Grouping objects will help manage multiple object editing - groups can be selected and moved or resized rather than having to select each individual objects. This is helpful if you have small or difficult to select objects. Groups can be ungrouped very easily, and each object in a group can still be edited individually if required by selecting the object as normal.

Groups can be renamed to anything you want, just like individual objects and can be organised by colour making it easy to differentiate and therefore select and use different groups in a scene. Here's how to do it:

1. Select the objects you want to group and click the 'G' from the object menu. This will group the object and give it a basic name which will appear in the selection list (accessed via the selection palette). To ungroup click the 'U' which will appear instead of 'G' in the menu.

Once the group is made you can change the name by clicking the 'A' from the object menu to access the object attributes and change it there.

2. Once your groups have been made you can organise them by colour by selecting the group and then clicking on the grey square from the object menu. Choose and apply a 'Family' colour fro the colour option window that will appear.

In my example I have chosen pink, so the square in the object menu is now that colour:

The wire frames for the groups will now also be coloured the family colour that has been applied. In the example below I have 3 groups, each with a different 'family' colour (pink, green, light blue).

The bounding box will also be displayed in the family colour chosen for other display modes (see the tutorial  Customising the Bryce Interface). In the example below I am using the Smooth Shaded display mode but you can see still the family colours.

How to customize the Bryce Interface

Here's the video version of the tutorial on how to customize the Bryce Interface. It's applicable for Bryce 6 and 7. I hope you find it helpful!

How to customize the Bryce interface

Something that may not be obvious when you first start using Bryce is that the interface can be customised to a degree. It doesn't have the functionality to let you divide up the window space like some other apps but you can make some minor changes to the way the interface looks. I'm using Bryce 7 in the making of the tutorials below, but the same steps apply to previous versions.

• Changing the display mode
• Changing the background appearance
• Repositioning the palettes

CHANGING THE DISPLAY MODE

This can be done from the Advanced Display Palette located on the right of the interface as shown below (shown where I've highlighted the Display and Wireframe modes in the tutorial The Interface )

Select the icon that looks like a wireframe cube (fourth icon from the bottom), and a list of the modes will appear.

The default is always 'Default Wireframe' as shown in the above image. Other options though can be very useful in setting up scenes.
There are two types of mode:
Default Mode
Default Wireframe
Default Mixed
Default Rendered

Open GL Mode
Texture Shaded
Lit Wireframe
Wireframe
Hidden Line
Wire Shaded
Smooth Shaded
Wire Texture Shaded

Sometimes Bryce takes a little longer to respond when using OpenGL, but this is much improved in Bryce 7 compared to Bryce 6.
You can also just scroll through the modes by clicking the display modes icon repeatedly instead of opening the list. Bryce will scroll throgh the modes in the mode category, i.e. if you select one of the default modes it will scroll through those, or if you select a Open GL mode it will scroll through those options.
The image below shows the various default mode options with a brief explanation of each below that::

1.Default Wireframe - a simple wireframe display
2.Default Mixed - if you have rendered to screen this will show the last render in addition to a wireframe, otherwise the display is similar to the Open GL Wireframe mode. If you move your object in the scene the object remains and moves as a wireframe object, but the rendered image remains on the screen behind this.
3.Default Rendered - shows you the last render to screen. As soon as you move/edit an object in the scene it will revert back to the default wireframe view
The following images show the OpenGL modes with brief explanations again after:

1. Texture Shaded - shows objects as solid with textures and shadows.
2. Wireframe - shows objects as a simple wireframe
3. Lit Wireframe - shows objects as wireframe with light and shadows (not clearly seen I'm afraid in my example image, please click the image for a larger view)
4. Hidden Line - shows only those parts of the object visible by the camera.
5. Wire Shaded - shows the object as solid with a wireframe.
6. Smooth Shaded - shows the object as solids with light and shadow. This looks similar to 5. but ifyou look at the ground plane (click the image to enloarge it) you will not see any wireframe.
7. Wire Texture Shaded - shows the object with textures, shadows and wireframe.

CHANGING THE BACKGROUND APPEARANCE

This is also changed from the Advanced Display Palette. The effects only really work if you are in the'Default Wireframe Mode' as in my screenshots (see the tutorial above for the various modes).
If you hover your mouse over the fourth icon down you'll see it says Background Paper in the tooltip and the text display area. It looks like paper with a corner turned up.

If you click on the icon a list of the various background appearance options appears:

As you can see I have my background set to 'Paper' which I have used for all the tutorials on this site (click the image above to get a larger view) . Try out some of the options - you can even change the colour completely by selecting 'Select Color' from the list. Here's how some of the options look:

So go ahead and customise your background!:)

REPOSITIONING THE PALETTES

Did you know that the various palettes of the interface can be moved around? It's not a totally customizable interface like many other apps are but the option is there to move them around.In the image below I've coloured the regions that can be moved (each of the 3 palettes in the green region can be moved separately).

So here's what you do:
1. Hover your mouse over the palette you want to move and hold down your keyboard spacebar. A hand icon will appear in place of your mouse icon.
2 .Keep holding the spacebar down, left-click your mouse and drag the palette to where you want it.

In this way you could for example move the Edit palette away from the top palette as shown below:

Moving the palette only seems to be useful when using the Default Display modes, as if you use one of the OpenGL ones and go to edit your scene, the palette seems to disappear behind it. The next image show how I've moved nearly all the palettes to new positions. It seems to work best with the document setup reduced from the maximum recommended sized (File>Document Setup), as shown in my image. I think it would probably work better too on larger monitors, mine is only small.

But still, it does give you the possibility to customize the interface a bit, if you find a layout that works better for you.

TUTORIAL LIST

The Interface

Okay, so you've purchased Bryce and installed it. Let's take an overview of the user interface. I would suggest as you work through the tutorials that you have Bryce open, so you can switch to it and try out the controls - learning is always helped by doing:)

So, when you open Bryce this is what you will see on your screen:

You have a nice large viewport which at the moment only contains the default ground plane and default sun and sky settings. The File menu is at the top left (File, Edit, Objects, Links, Help) and there are various controls on all sides of the viewport. We're going to take an  look at these in these tutorials.  The ones you need to focus on to get started are the camera and render controls, and the edit, create and sky palettes.

•  On the interface you will see a number of little triangles, either pointing down or to the right. Clicking on this brings up further options or libraries relating to the control it is next to.

• To select objects and controls in Bryce click your left mouse button. Some controls  require you to continue to hold down the  button as you move the mouse to activate the control or make a further selection. We'll come across this in the tutorials as we go along.

Next tutorial -  The Camera and Render controls

TUTORIAL LIST