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Other
ClydeSight Productions Bryce 5 Tutorials:
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Learn Bryce 5 modeling by building a robot model based on "Robby, the Robot™"*
See local media coverage of this tutorial!
| This tutorial is intended to teach Bryce 5 users basic modeling techniques by building a robot BASED on the character Robby the Robot™. The Bryce 5 model can be used for educational and personal use ONLY. Commercial use of the model will require a license from Turner Entertainment Co., A Time Warner Company. ClydeSight Productions does not condone or imply any use of this model that would be construed to violate their rights, nor does it use the model in any of its own commercial products. See Disclaimer |
Building
Robby's Pilot LampNote: This is a highly detailed tutorial. I STRONGLY suggest that you print these pages (there will be a lot of printed pages!) and use the hardcopy as a guide while working. It's much easier than having both Bryce 5 and your browser open and then flipping between applications!
Robby's head is filled with interesting things that move and rock and click and pop. He has, of course, a Krell super computer for a brain, yet much of it is mechanical in nature, based on the clacking relays and switches that were common to the giant computers of the 1950's.
Of course, we need to know when Robby is turned on, so, like any high quality piece of electronic equipment, he comes complete with a pilot lamp! It's located at the top of his head, and energized by a Krell power relay. We'll learn how to use an artificial Bryce 5 light and a special material in this section!
If you have saved and closed your model, open it now and go to the FRONT view. Select NONE and click on the SOLO button. You should have a blank workspace.
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Step 1: Make the Light Post If you are in wireframe mode and can see your model, make sure you have not selected anything and click on the SOLO button in the VCR controls. This will hide all objects in your wireframe view. You should be in the FRONT view (press 4 on the keyboard) and your workspace should appear to be blank. Click on the Cylinder in the Create Palette to bring it into your work space. Click on the Attributes Box and set the following coordinates: Position:
X = 0, Y = 156.85, Z = 0 Click on the Check Mark to apply the changes. Assign a material to the post. I chose Brushed Silver. This is a painted object so assign it to you "painted" family (I used the orange color cube) SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 2: Make the Lamp Base Select the lamp post (if it is not already selected) and DUPLICATE it. (CMD-D MAC, CTRL-D WINDOWS) Go to the Edit Palette and click on the double white arrow on the right (<-->), hold the mouse button down and slide over the CONE object to select it. Your duplicated cylinder will change to a cone. Click on the Attributes Box and set the following coordinates: Position:
X = 0, Y = 154.18, Z = 0 Click on the Check Mark to apply the changes. Assign a material to the base. I chose the brushed gold from the Simple materials. Because this is a duplicated object it is already assigned object to your "painted" family. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Note: It is sometimes helpful to use a material to do the work and give the appearance of multiple objects. It cuts down on "object overhead" for the program. You can see how Family is helping us organize our painting scheme. We're up to four families: dark green for the Robby Paint, orange for non critical painted objects, bright blue (cyan) for the voice coils, and now purple for the Krell power coils. |
Step 3: Make the
Krell Power Coil
The Krell power coil is a set of stacked rings of graduated sizes. We could make the rings from cylinders, but I have a shortcut that we can use thanks to a unique Bryce 5 material. Since it is useful to learn Bryce 5 materials and the function of the Material Lab, we'll use this method. Duplicate the pilot lamp base. Go to the Edit Pallet and do a FLIP Y. This is just like the Flip X we have done in the earlier sections of the tutorial. (Click here is you need a refresher). The cone will flip upside down. After it is flipped open the Attributes Box and perform a Set As Unity. Click the Check Mark to assign the Unity and close the Attributes box. Open the Attributes Box and set the following coordinates: Position:
X = 0, Y = 157.46, Z = 0 (Note: The rotation will automatically be zero for you thanks to Set As Unity) Click on the Check Mark to apply the changes. We will create a special material for the coil. This material will be used again later on, so let's assign the object to a Family so we can find all the objects that use this material easily. Click on the Family icon (2nd down in the icon column) and choose the purple cube-- the third from your left in the top row. Name it "Power Coils". Click on the Check Mark to apply the selection. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 4: Make the Power Coil Material Bryce 5 has a lot of very useful materials and we'll use one here to imitate multiple objects and reduce object overhead. With the pilot lamp coil object selected, click on its Material icon to enter the Materials Lab. First we pick the basic material to map onto the object. Click on the upper triangle next to the nano preview to enter the Materials Selector. Click on the bottom selection "Wild and Fun" Click on the top right material "Dali Bee Stripes" Click the Check Mark to select the material. We now will edit the material to make it more suitable for our needs. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Note: The Bryce 5 manual provides excellent and detailed information on the Materials Lab. Refer to the manual for more info on how materials work. |
Step 5: Edit the Power Coil Material In the Materials Lab, on the upper right corner is the Edit Materials box. There are several things going on here. First is the "space" allocation for the material. It should already be "Object Space". If it is not, click on the downward triangle and pick: Object Space from the pop-up list. This aligns the material to the object. We need to size the material texture for our object. Click on the far left upper "button" in the YellowBands6 Edit Materials Box. The Edit Texture box will open. Here is where you size and position materials on your objects. Set the following coordinates: Top
(size) By setting the Y scale to 110% we made Bryce 5 increase the frequency of the pattern. So it repeats more often. This gives the object the appearance of more occurrences of the pattern, not a larger pattern on its surface. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Note: The Bryce 5 manual provides excellent and detailed information on the Materials Lab. Refer to the manual for more info on how materials work. |
Step 6: Color the Power Coil Material Click on the second left upper "button" in the YellowBands6 Edit Materials Box. This will take you to the Deep Texture Editor. The Bee Stripes are Yellow and "almost black", we want to change the yellow to a tan color and the almost black to full black. We do this from the "component 1" box-- the only component that is active for the material. In the component 1 box (far left -- your left) Option (MAC) or ALT (WINDOWS) click on the bottom color circle (the yellow) to get the colors dialog box. Make sure you are in RGB mode and enter the following values R
= 240 Click on the top circle and set the color in the standard Bryce 5 color selector to full black. Do the same with the middle color circle. Click on the check Mark to return to the Materials Lab SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 7: Set the Power Coil Material Values Now all we have to do is set the light values for the material and we're all set. Bryce 5 has set the colors we now want, we just have to change the component values. In the Materials Lab, on the left (your left), set the following component values: Diffusion
= 100 All other values are zero (0) These settings give the material a semi-transparent appearance that will also respond to different external light values (the specular and ambience settings). Click on the Check Mark to leave the Materials Lab and set the material. You'll see the results when you render the objects. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Note: The size of a Bryce 5 light has no effect on a spherical light's appearance or power. It is simply a convenience for finding and selecting the object in wireframe mode. Conical lights are different, as we'll find out later. |
Step 8: Make the Pilot Lamp Bulb You knew that eventually we'd get to do some lighting, so here we go. The pilot lamp does illuminate the interior of Robby's dome, and it looks nice, so we'll use a Bryce 5 light to get the effect. It WILL add to render overhead, but the effect is worth the extra wait. Go to the Create Palette and click on the YELLOW sphere on the right side of the objects icon row. This is the Spherical Light. When it enters your work space (it is an object like everything else in Bryce 5) open the Attributes Box and set the coordinates as follows: Position:
X = 0, Y = 161.62, Z = 0 Click the Check Mark to apply the changes. We can pick this object from the lights selector any time. Bryce 5 has automatically set it in Family 4, the yellow color cube in the Family selector! All lights are assigned by default to that family. We need to edit the light values next. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 9: Edit the Pilot Lamp Bulb We cover a LOT about lighting in our "Bryce 5 Lighting FX" tutorial. Refer to that tutorial if you want to learn more about lighting in Bryce 5. Here, we'll just set the values. With the light object selected, click on the E in the icon column to enter the Light Lab. Set the following values: Intensity
= Between 10 and 25 (25 will give a lot of light to Robby's
dome) Click the Check Mark to close the Lab and apply the changes. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 10: Make the Pilot Lamp Glass Your Bryce 5 light will have NO appearance the way we set it up (we turned off "Visible). This cuts down rendering overhead. But we still want to see it. We'll a glass object with refraction will give us that nice "glow". Select the Sphere object from the Create Palette. Click on the Attributes Box for the sphere object and enter the following coordinates: Position:
X = 0, Y = 161.60, Z = 0 Click the Check Mark to apply the changes. Pick a glass material from the Materials Lab for this object. I chose the "Water" glass, -- it has a good refraction index and no color. You could use any of the colored glasses if you want to give Robby some "mood" lighting! You can increase the color effect by changing the color of the light itself! But the default white will do just fine for now. Assign this object to the "painted" family. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 11: Group the Pilot Lamp Shift-Select (or use any method you like to select multiple objects) all the objects made for the Pilot Lamp. You'll see a little G in the icon column. Click the G to Group the objects. Click on the Attributes Box for the group and check the following coordinates: Position:
X = 0, Y = 157.84, Z = 0 If the figures you see are the same as mine (or close-- within .01) Name the group: pilot lamp group Your family icon will appear gray, that's because more than one family is called by the objects in the group. So the group is assigned to the default family. But the objects it contains all have their proper family assignments. SAVE YOUR WORK! |
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Step 12: Render the Pilot Lamp When you render the pilot lamp you'll see how your work takes effect in Bryce 5 renders. The material we used for the Krell coil now presents the coil as we want to see it. A "solid" object - the inverted cone-- is made to appear like a series of smaller separate objects. Technically, the object is hollow, so this is really a set of rings, but we'll never look "into" the object, so the illusion will work for us! The Bryce 5 light has an internal glow and appearance without the added overhead of making it a visible light-- thanks to the refraction of the glass used for the lamp. To see how your Pilot lamp looks on Robby's head, click the SOLO mode to go to the full model and render. It should look like the image here. SAVE YOUR WORK!
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Congratulations! You have completed Robby's pilot lamp and learned some new Bryce 5 tricks. You learned how to edit and manage a material map for an object to create an illusion, how to edit a Bryce 5 light and how to use a glass object light to give an internal light source appearance while not actually using the "visible light" option in the Light Lab.
Now , we have to make Robby's "gyroscopes", those things that kept spinning around in his head. They are located at the base of the Pilot Lamp, which is why we made the lamp first. They will require a few objects, as we can't really "fake" them using a Bryce 5 material. But they are easy to make, AND, we'll set them up so they can be animated to behave just like they did in the movies!
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Tutorial copyright - © ClydeSight Productions - 2004
