To begin with we will poke around a little and see where stuff is.
This chapter can be skipped by those who already know their way around Bryce, or are not curious what is what, and only want to get started making stuff.
Here is the Bryce interface. In my case, this is Bryce 6.1, but it works just as well in Bryce 4 or above. There will be minor interface differences between the versions. If you have a version older than Bryce 5.5, I suggest getting it. I'll just wait here while you do.
Back already? Ok.
If you are using Bryce 5.5 or older you will not see a toolbar across the top. Do not panic. It auto-hides. Just move your mouse to the top of the screen and it will show up.
If you are using a high desktop resolution, your Bryce window might be a little small. Mouse to the top, select the FILE menu and select document set up and set your size to one you like to work in. Do not set it to your desktop size because the "document" size does not take in to account the borders needed for the various tools and buttons. I am writting this on my Laptop. It has a desktop resolution of 1920x1200, and with this I find a workspace of around 1760x1010 seems a good fit. You can change this later. And, you change the image you are making to be larger or smaller.
The along the top are controls for creating and editing objects, along the right side are the view and render controls, the left side has scene options/controls, the bottom has animation and selection controls.
The file menu is where you will find the standard file operations. Load file (including import objects), save file, save image (once you have rendered on), and so on.
The Edit menu is where you will find short ways to copy an object(handy once you get an object in just the right position). Copy and paste materials.
The Objects menu is quick way to get to some of the object properties once you create some objects in your scene. If you look at some of the keyboard shortcuts here, they can be handy to remember.
The edit and objects menu will not be used a lot by most people while they are getting started, but they are handy to remember.
Bryce is a full-screen application. This means it can not be moved from one monitor to another (although it does work on PCs with multiple monitors). On Bryce 5 the only way to go to the background is to use the ALT key plus the TAB key. This is occasionally also neccessary on Bryce 5.5 and newer (most of the time the - (iconify) key works. Tabbing away is useful once you start a render because some of them can take a very long time. And, you might wanna post on CFC while you wait.
If you look across the top you will see (from left to right) the preview window, Create, Edit, "sky & fog".
These 3 "menus" function like tabs. You click on the word and the "tab" you are on changes. By default you will open to the create menu. This is where you place objects in the scene. You will always use Create and Edit. Next to each of these menus you will see little arrows. These are the actual Create, edit and sky menus. While the "tabbed" menu is called a "palette", but to avoid confusion I will only refer to the menu and the screen. So click on Create to go to the Create Screen, or Click on the arrow to go to the Create menu. Do not worry. In a few minutes of playing with it, you will cease to care what they are called. If you click on the edit screen, you will see that some of the objects across the top also menus.
Back on the Create Screen.
You can mouse over the object to see what they are called. (the name appears in the lower left corner)
The first 3 are infinite planes. Air, Water and ground. Infinate planes are shown as medium sized 2d squares, but in the final scene they will render as infinate. You do not need to use any, but they can be handy. By default Bryce opens with a ground plane. Cloud and water can be either a surface or volumetric plane. A surface plane is the same as the ground plane the only difference is the texture applied. A volume plane is basically a 3d object. Like the difference between a cloud bank (volume) and a picture of a cloud painted on a sheet of glass (surface). Volumetrics (stuff with volume which is at least partially transparent) almost always looks better, but takes much longer to render. For example, what if you had the ability to paint in the air so you could paint in 3d.
Imagine painting the cloud. Finding each molecule and getting it just the right shade, right transparency, right amount of refraction and making sure all the while that the layers would all add up to the precise effect you wanted. Contrast this with just taking a sheet of glass and painting a 2d cloud on it and hanging it in the background. Try and use surface objects whenever you can, they usually look good enough.
Next up is a terrain. It looks like a mountain. You can do a lot with these, but they are not needed to make buildings. But, how to use them to make parts will be covered later. Unlike a plane a terrain is not infinite. If you stretch or shrink it, it gets bigger or smaller in the final image.
Next comes a tree. This takes you to the tree-lab where you can generate a tree. Bryce trees are what are made from what is called metaballs. This means they are a bit of a pain in the rear, but look nice. They represent a considerable render hit, so add them sparingly. If you need a lot of trees there are work arounds which I will try to cover later.
Next is a rock. A rock is basically a random 3d mesh. It is no different from any 3d object you import. It can be exported from any version of Bryce. You can change the dimensions of a rock, but not the shape. To get a different shape, you need to create a new random rock (by clicking on the rock icon).
After the rock comes a Double sided terrain. This is sometimes called a Symetrical Lattice or SymLat. It is identical to a terrain, except that the top and bottom are mirror images. Like a terrain you can import a image to use as a height map for it.
Next is the bubbles stacked up. That is for MetaBalls. Those are like primitives, but they have attractors and so flow in to each other as they get closer (or repel each other). It can be used to make organic shapes, but is not as easy to work with nor as precise and so is not well suited to making buildings and so will not be covered.
Next are the 6 primitives. A Sphere, torus, cylinder, cube, pyramid, and cone. These are the building blocks from which 99% of the stuff in Bryce is made (ignoring the stuff made in external modelers).
Next are the 3 2d objects. A circle, a cube, a cube which starts with a picture on it. I consider these to be useless and pointless. I never use them. They do nothing you can not do with a thin box or thin cylinder.
Next are the 5 different types of lights. They can be modified... you can even use a image as a filter to create all sorts of effects.
Finally you may have a link to Daz Studio (varies depending on version of Bryce). Daz Studio is a free human posing program which can be used with Bryce (Daz Studio can be used for other things to). Since it has nothing to do with buildings, I will not cover it here.
Going down the right side:
Next to preview screen are 7 small check marks. If you find a view you like, you can place a check mark in one of the boxes and it will save that view for you.
This view is saved with the file or within the same session of Bryce. If you exit Bryce, and load a new scene, the saved views (camera angles if you wish) are lost. To delete a view, hold down the ALT key and click on the check marks to be removed. You will be using this feature a lot, it is a huge time saver.
Directly under the preview screen is a little arrow indicating a sub menu. Click on it and check out the options. You can turn if off with disable auto updates. Or you can set it to wire frame and some previous view if you are on a slower PC.
Next is the camera selector. There is alos a arrow to the right of this which allows you faster selection of the camera to use. I use this frequently. Very handy to look at stuff from different angles. Has the all import reset views for when you zoom or scroll way out of frame and forgot to use the Saved-Views.
Next is the view position tools. Slide left, right, zoom, and so on. Click on the arrow to review the menu here. It includes editing the camera position, very precise and useful.
Next is a big ball with arrows. This is like a joystick. You use to to reposition your view in the scene. It is particuallarly good if you have the camera set to Directors view and the joystick is set to trackball or center to selection.
Finally there is the 5 spheres. Make sure they are all solid in color. The large button in the middle is the render button. The others just leave alone for now. It should look like this when you render:
The menu to the side here includes useful settings such as render quality settings (default is fine) and gamma correction (disable it).
If you mouse over the controls on the left you can see what they are called. These are used a lot less, so I won't cover most of them.
The hand at the bottom is a handy re-position the scene control. Click and hold the hand with your mouse and you can quickly move up/down, right & left. The plus and minus above that can be used to zoom in and out. Click and hold one to have very fine control over the zoom.
The control above that toggles the display mode. I make stuff in WireFrame and render when I want to see something. Some prefer to have a OpenGL display mode to model in, but I think the performance hit is not worth it. Try both, you might not agree with me.
At the bottom.... in the right most corner is a globe. It toggles between the nearly useless menu with the same icons as the create screen and the animation menu. But, there is one thing on the "useless" menu worth knowing about. The "hide stuff button" also known as the "solo selection" control.
If you are building something complex and getting lost in the details, this can be a sanity saver. Hold down the shift key and select the object or objects you want to see and click the magic button. All other objects will be hidden until you click on that button again. RED means stuff is hidden, green means nothing is.
Also, to select items in the scene. CTRL + mouse = select a single object and list the objects. SHIFT+CTRL + mouse = select multiple objects and list the objects under the mouse. You can move through a scene selecting stuff, not just at a single location. For example, select all the brass objects to add them to a family so you can texture them all at the same time.
Go back to the create screen. Select a pimitive CUBE. (add a cube to the scene)
Next to the cube you will see and A a grey cube 2 strange symbols and an M.
The A is object attributes. Very import for making stuff.
Click on A, and you will see Neutral. positive, negative and intersect. These are the four types of objects. Normal is neutral. It is not affected by other objects. A positive will have part of itself erased by a negative object. A negative object will not be rendered in a scene once it is grouped with a positive one. A intersection is a special case of a negative. Normally when a positive is joined with a negative, the intersection is erased. When a positive and a intersect are joined, the point of intersection is the part which is NOT erased.
The rest of the screen is pretty obvious. Position, location, scale and so on of the object.
The gray square is which family something belongs to. This is very handy once you start texturing stuff, and this will be covered later.
The symbols have to do with animation and so will not be covered.
The M stands for material, and so will be covered later.
