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Jen's Recipe for River
Valleys
This is for all of you Brycers out
there who have tried to fit mountains together just right to make a nice
valley. Or, it's for any of you who just plain like rivers... and hey,
if you didn't like rivers, you wouldn't be here, right?
(Picture of end result
of recipe, plus texture and clouds.)
Ingredients:
Bryce 3D (Bryce 2 may
be substituted)
Adobe Photoshop 4.0
(may work with other versions)
I used a Windows 95 oven for this,
but it should work in a Mac oven too. Extra detail on how to prepare ingredients
is provided for beginners. Some experienced chefs could probably figure
it all out from the pictures alone.
First, preheat Adobe
Photoshop to 512 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fire up Photoshop and create a new
file with dimensions appropriate for a Bryce terrain. I usually don't go
below 512 x 512 pixels, since I think that gives me the nicest winding
river. I could always scale it down later to 256 or 124, if I so desired.
For these examples I'll show small halfsize versions of the results for
each step. Like this! (ooh, aah, blank image. Big thrill eh?)
Next, use a black and
white linear gradient.
Set your key colors (is that what
they're called? I have no idea), to black and white. You know, the two
at the bottom of the Tools window. It doesn't matter which is which.
Then, select the Gradient tool. That's
the little white, gray and black rectangle beneath the T (text tool), if
you've never used it before.
Doubleclicking on the gradient tool
will call up the options dialog box. You want settings of... Normal, Opacity
100%, Gradient: Foreground to Background, Linear. Other settings will give
you some interestingly strange valleys -- experiment!
Anyway, use the gradient tool to create
a shading from black to white in your terrain image. Basically, you drag
a line across the center of the picture horizontally, and that's the range
of your gradient. A longer line will give you a wider gradient and a more
winding river... a more narrow line will give you a straighter river. Here's
two examples, the left a wider gradient, the right more narrow:
Click
here to Continue