Need Bryce 5 help

[Gary Childress]

I seem to have somehow lost the shadows in my 3D world. I've checked a couple places where I thought might resolve the problem but to no avail. I tried the shadows on/off button and that doesn't seem to make a difference either.

Thanks for any help.

 

[TopGun]

Materials Lab. There's a button top right...click it. That's where the shadow menu is.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Maybe not. Maybe you fiddled with the Sky/Atmosphere settings.
Sky/Fog... then the 2nd little window is for Ambient Shadow seetings.. If its at Zero then you have no shadows. 100 and you have very DARK shadows.

 

[Gary Childress]

Materials Lab. There's a button top right...click it. That's where the shadow menu is.

Hi TopGun, thanks very much for the reply. I just checked the shadows menu in the top right and everything seems to be checked off for shadows. The model in the left top corner of the materials lab which demos the textures and such shows a shadow but then when I go into the main screen there are no shadows. If I open a new document then the shadows come back. I've compared everything I can think of between the new and old document and I don't see any difference in the settings.

I'm absolutely stubbed.

 

[Gary Childress]

Maybe not. Maybe you fiddled with the Sky/Atmosphere settings.
Sky/Fog... then the 2nd little window is for Ambient Shadow seetings.. If its at Zero then you have no shadows. 100 and you have very DARK shadows.

Hi Wyrmshadow, I just checked the sky/atmosphere settings and as best I can tell everything seems to check out.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

check your PM's.. dont know unless I see it for myself.

 

[Bjornlo]

Shadows in Bryce are set in only those two locations.

The easiest to mess up are the Sky settings, which is also the hardest to set back. You might want to save a copy of your BR5 file and see what happens when you select a different sky.

Other alternatives:
Open the problem file
select the model
hit CTRL + C (places the model in the copy buffer)
open a new blank scene, and hit CTRL + V places the item in the buffer into the scene
Or open a blank new and select MERGE with your problem file and see if that fixes it.

Also, I suggest you get the new free copy of Bryce 5.5

 

[Gary Childress]

check your PM's.. dont know unless I see it for myself.

Thanks Wyrmshadow! I replied with a PM containing the link to my 2nd unit "Blockbuster" featured in the Units forum. Everything works fine with the unit except there's no shadow of the bomb approaching the ground. I happen to have the original Bryce file included along with the FLC download for anyone who wants to play around with the animation. Just in case, here's the download link.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=157842&d=1186724702

Thanks again!

 

[Gary Childress]

Thanks Bjornlo, I'll try that method when I get home from work today!!

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Okay here is what I saw:
I didn't see any problems with shadows, you got plenty of them. From what I can tell some of the textures you are using for your explosion effects get iffy when it comes to shadows.

Here are my suggestions:
1. Don't do Gamma Correction. I did that on my early units and it made all the colors bland.
2. Decrease your Ambient Shadow density from 90 to somewhere around 20. That should take care of turning your dark shadow vs. Gamma correction need.
3. Use multiple spheres for your explosion rather than just 1 with a lot of different textures. That should improve things quite a bit.
4. Pick a darker Magenta color for your background, not so bright. The default Magenta in your Simple Colors should be fine.
5. Check out this file Template and you can see my Sky/Fog settings. Your colors should become much more clear. Also check out my bryce tutorials in my signature.