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Bryce 5 Ambience - Tutorial Introduction

Now that we understand the power of the Bryce 5 Sun and Moon, let's move on to ambient lighting and the power that Bryce 5 offers with this type of light source. This really helps in dramatic lighting. Bryce is such a strong program and offers so many possibilities, that there is plenty to experiment and play with to get some fascinating results! And ambient light in Bryce 5 works with the Sun and Moon, so it's the next logical step as we progress to being really comfortable with all the power of Bryce 5 lighting FX.

Ambient lighting is a very large subject. You have to play with it to develop a "feel" for how it can work for you. We're going to limit some of this for the tutorial, but hopefully our experiments will inspire you to explore further and make new and wonderful discoveries. The more you experiment with the settings we'll describe, the more comfortable you'll get with it.

Before we begin, let's understand something about light, especially how it is used in Bryce 5. Light generally travels from a source (i.e. a light bulb) and reflects or bounces off an object.

However, in Bryce 5, as well as most imaging programs, there is also kind of light source that is actually an object or scene property. This is called "ambient light" or sometimes, "ambience".

The Bryce 5 manual defines ambient light as: "... light that has no point of origin or specific direction and is presumed to strike every object with equal intensity... it can make objects visible even with no visible light source." In Bryce 5 all objects and even the environment itself have ambient values and colors that can be set.

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About the Author:

Tim Thompson, author of this (and our other Bryce 5 tutorials) has been working with digital media for 14 years. He started with Bryce when it first appeared and has followed the program through its upgrades to the current version 5. Tim uses Bryce 5 for a multitude of projects, including some of the interesting games on our ClydeSight2.0!, the fun and games cat site, and for the multimedia interaction in our CD-ROM, System 12 Self-Improvement Interactive: Smoke Free! Tim has also been a teacher, having instructed continuing education classes for five years at Boston's Emerson College in desktop publishing and design and Web design classes in the Boston Urban Scholars program. Tim is a man of many talents. He not only creates digital art, but also composes music! ClydeSight Productions is pleased to publish his two albums, Symphonia Felina and Other Musical Masterworks and Forestdale-Tone Poems Inspired by Nature. Of course, Tim designed the covers for both albums! Tim's tutorials and digital art have won him high praise from the prestigious Renderosity.com digital artist's Web site. His tutorials for Bryce 5 have been enjoyed the world over and are used in local schools to augment their curriculum.