Creating a scene with Bryce 5 and Poser 4

Getting Started in Bryce 5
Part 1: Creating a scene in Bryce 5
Part 2: Creating two figures in Poser 4
Keyboard Shortcuts

Part 3: Importing the figures from Poser 4 into Bryce 5 and making the finishing touches.

This lesson will be using the files that we created in the first two parts. You should have a Bryce file with the scene that you created in Part 1 and two Poser files for the two figures we created in Part 2.

Start Poser and open your first figure. Ctrl-O or File>Open... from the top menu. Your first figure should be the 80's brawler.
Export the figure as a Wavefront object by Selecting File>Export>Wavefront OBJ..

Hit Ok to only export a single frame. Hit OK again to include everything. Save it as '80s_brawler.obj' so that we can find it later.
Close the file and open up the second figure, the business suit with the pony tail.
Export him in the same fashion. Save him as 'businessman.obj'.
Close Poser and open Bryce 5.
Create a new file, choosing the default document size.
Now it gets a little tricky--we're going to import the figures that we made in Poser into Bryce. But, we have to do it in two parts. First the 3D shape of the two fighters. And then secondly, the colors & textures for the surface of the shapes. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you. You'll see it firsthand as we do it.
You can download the two figures here in compressed format.
From the top menu, choose File>Import Object...

Select the first figure ("80s_brawler.obj") and click on the Open button.
An error message should pop up that says that the file has either been moved or deleted. Bryce is looking for the texture for the figure in the same folder that we saved "80s_brawler.obj". Hit OK to this error message. We'll have to locate the file 'Casual Man Texture.tif' on our hard drive. Go to "c:\Program Files\MetaCreations\Poser 4\Runtime\Textures\Poser 3 Textures\Casual Man Texture.tif". You can either enter this whole path into the File Name text box OR drill down to the file. Click on My Computer, then C:, then Program Files, etc...

Click on Open.
OK, there's the first guy. You'll probably want to zoom in and rotate either the camera or figure to get a better view. If you want, go ahead and render--it's a quick render.

Hit ESC to return to the wireframe view and we're going to select JUST the hair. Hold down control and click on his head. A menu will show up showing you all the objects that are directly at your mouse cursor. If you don't have hair_1 in your selection, keep trying until you do. Select hair_1.
With the hair selected, choose M for materials on the edit toolbar. This will take us into the Materials Lab again. Notice in the top righthand corner, there's a box labelled "Male Hair 3 Texture". That's our texture. Notice that there's not really any hair color in the texture, just a gray conic shape. That's because this texture is just a shape and contains the information that makes up the hair shape. But notice that the rightmost square is solid white. That's no good. Click on the Pink dot just to the left of "Male Hair 3 Texture"--the title. This takes us into the texture editor. Copy the contents of the first box & paste it into the second box. When the box pops up to ask whether you want to delete, delete. Hit the checkmark to accept these changes.
So, we want this texture to apply to the bump height and not the diffuse color. We'll choose our own color of hair, thank you. Click on the black oval next to Diffuse. This will bring up a color palette. Choose the hair color.
Now, click the first second circle to the right of Bump Height, under A. Bump Height will bring out the texture that we have in the top right corner.
Change the Diffusion to 100.
Change Ambience to around 10, Specularity to around 15, Bump Height to 100 (full texture on), and Refraction to 50.
Accept the changes and exit.
We'll do the same for the eyebrows. Select Head_4 (which is the name of the eyebrows) and just change the diffusion color in the Material Lab.
Ok, that's it for our first fighter. Let's start on our second one. Zoom back out and select your whole fighter and move him to the left so that he doesn't get overlapped. Import the second fighter. Remember that we named this one "businessman.obj".
Unfortunately, fighter #2 doesn't have the color in his suit anymore so we'll have to put that in ourselves. To do this, we'll select each object that makes up his suit. By holding down Shift+Ctrl, you can continuously select parts until you have everything you want. Notice that in the image below, I selected everything except for hands, feet, tie, and the part of the shirt that is showing.
Go into the Materials Lab and select the diffusion color. I used a dark gray here.
Now, select the tie. It's in three different parts. Go into the Materials Lab and choose a suitable color. I chose a light gray with high reflective and metallic values.
Return to the wireframe view. Remember the landscape scene that we made in Part I? We're going to create a raft that will float in the lake for the fighters to spar. Zoom out and use the camera views so that you can see both fighters. Make sure that you have the Create palette open and click on the cube tool.
Click on the ground plane(that grid underneath our fighters) and choose the A for attributes. Click on 'locked' and accept the changes. This will lock the ground plane so that we don't have to worry about accidentally selecting it later on.
Now, select your cube. and either drag on the size modifiers on the wireframe object itself or use the resize tool in the Edit Palette to make that cube the shape of a raft big enough for the two figures. To use the modifiers on the wireframe object, click on the small square in the middle of one of the sides. By dragging left or right while keeping the mouse button pressed, you'll modify the shape. You'll probably want to switch the camera view to Top View to more easily define the depth of the raft.
Click on the M on the edit toolbar and we're going to change the material to look like wood. Go into the Materials Library (that top left flippy arrow) and from the Trunks library, choose a wood grain like Mangrove or Bamboo (something with a straight grain). Accept the changes.
Notice in the Nano-Preview that the figures legs are fused into the wood. Select each figure and using the Reposition tool in the Edit Palette, raise each figure so that they are out of the raft. Do this by clicking and dragging right on the top cone on the reposition tool.
Our fighters need to be facing each other. In turn, use the rotate tool on each figure so that they are facing each other. Remember that you'll be rotating around the Y (or vertical) axis.

Don't hesitate to use other camera views in aligning your fighters perfectly.
Now select both fighters and the raft. Hold down the Shift key while you select them so that you get all three. Now click on the G on the edit toolbar to group the objects together. Now click on the A to bring up the Attributes and name the fighters on the raft, "fighters on raft".
Save this file in case you want to access it later. After you're through saving, select our grouped fighters and press Ctrl-C to copy them to the clipboard.
Open up the file that contains your original scene with the mountains and water. If you don't have this file, you can download it here. Once everything is loaded, press Ctrl-V to insert our fighters into the original scene. We could have imported the wavefront objects directly into this scene earlier but by doing it in a separate file and then copy and pasting it into the scene, we circumnavigate a lot of the headaches dealing with multiple objects on the screen.
Now just resize and rotate our fighters and reposition them in the water so that the raft looks like it's floating. If you want to, tip one of the sides up so it looks like there's been some footwork in action.
Ok, we're done! Render the image and take a look at your finished product. Don't worry if it doesn't look just like what I have here. Bryce is all about playing around and having fun. Enjoy!
To download the completed Bryce file click here.

For a more in-depth tutorial check out http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/BryceTuts/BryceTutSet.html.