Understanding Material Components

Each Bryce material channel can contain up to three components that determine the channel's setting. A component can be a color, a texture or a numerical value. A texture can be either a 2D texture (picture) or a 3D texture.

Each Bryce material channel contains components that determine its settings. You can have up to three texture components in a channel, and some channels let you use four textures and a value as components.

Colors can only be used in the Diffuse, Ambient, Specular, Specular Halo, Transparent, and Volume channels. Values are used in the Diffusion, Ambience, Specularity, Metallicity, Bump Height, Transparency, Reflection, Refraction, Base Density, Edge Softness, Fuzzy Factor, and Quality/Speed channels.

When you're using a texture as a component, the information in the texture's channels is used as the value of the material channel.

For example, if you're using a texture to set Diffuse Color, the texture's color channel is used.

If you're using a texture to set the Diffusion value, the texture's alpha channel determines the Diffusion intensity.

Components are combined using one of three modes: Mode A, Mode AB, and Mode ABC.

In Mode A, only one component is used to set the channel's value.

In Mode AB, two components are combined to set the channel's value, based on altitudes. The values from texture A are applied at low altitude and values from texture B are applied at higher altitude.

In Mode ABC, the values of two textures, A and B, are blended based on the alpha channel of texture C.

When you're using textures as a component, you can choose from a number of preset textures or you can open the Deep Texture Editor and create your own textures.

In some channels, you can use both a texture and a value. In this case, the value determines how much of the texture's value is used to drive the channel. For example if you apply a texture to the Bump Height channel, the texture sets the shape of the bumps and the value sets how prominent those bumps appear.

In this example the shape of the bumps on the object is set by the texture component in the Bump Height channel, but the height of those bumps is set by the Bump Height value of 100.

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