| Awesome Distance Blurs In Bryce :) |
| I hope you found my tutorial helpful... |
   |
|
| Hello again my friends... I know it's been a while since my last tutorial, but I wanted to show you a simple trick you can use to add a very interesting and dramatic look to your Bryce renders. |
| Today, I will simply be elaborating on a very old technique used to "fake" the appearance of exaggerated distance in Bryce using A Bryce render, a "Distance Mask" of the same image rendered from Bryce, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and a cool and FREE filter from Flaming Pear called "Ghost" to achieve the blurred distant look you see in many of my images. I am assuming that the plugin can be used in many various 2d applications such as Painter, Paint Shop Pro and the like as well, and the free filter "Ghost" can be downloaded by clicking >>HERE<< |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| 1. Render the Distance Mask First things first, I am assuming you have completed your scene, and have rendered it to your liking. Now, we want to have Bryce render the Distance Mask (DM's) we will need in order to achieve this awesome effect. Change the render settings/output to DM, and then render the scene again. Be sure not to overwrite the original render, I usually name my DM's "titleDM" to avoid conflict and help keep confusion down. These for the most part render very fast, no worry :) |
| 2. Open Your Paint Program and Prep Images Next, we want to bring the images into our paint program. I use Adobe Elements 3, but I suppose any 2d program that can handle the "Ghost" filter will do... |
| --- Helpful Hint --- This is a good time to adjust the DM... Change contrast and brightness, or be as imaginitive as you desire. Blend in and incorporate Object Masks, distort the Masks themselves, endless possibilities... But let us not worry about that for now :P |
| 3. Copy the DM Over the original/base image Simply copy>paste the DM on top of the base image. Positioning and alignment must be absolutely perfect!!! |
| 4. Apply the Ghost filter I am assuming that the Flaming Pears free plugins have been installed by now. Now simply apply the Ghost filter to the layer in Elements that contains the DM. |
| --- Helpful Hint --- It has been EONS since Ive used Photoshop, but if Im not mistaken, users would be able to "bypass" the Ghost filter using either channels or the color selection tool (that incorporates the magic wand) to select the white areas of the DM. |
| 5. Selecting the work area This is a critical but simple step. Now we need to have our program "extract" or select our distance. In Elements, I do this by holding the mouse over the DM layer, and while holding down CTRL, I select the layer (you should see a square appear inside the "hand" now)... I can not begin to assume how this is done in other programs, but the same method does work in Photoshop. What is important is that the white ares are completely removed, the gray areas partially removed depending, and the black areas remain intact... The Ghost filter works by removing white areas of a greyscale image... This means that fully white areas would be erased completely, gray areas would be "partially" erased, and black areas would remain untouched. |
| 6. Selecting the work area II You want to make sure that the area youre selecting is indeed the background you want to set off in the distance... Elements, when selecting transpareny, selects the filled sections, so I simply inverted the selection. --- Helpful Hint --- Sometimes, selecting the foreground IS the desired effect, depending on what you would like to achieve with your image... |
| 7. Applying the Blur Now we get to the fun stuff :) Now that the DM has fulfilled his duties, you can send him on a cruise to the bahamas for an extended vacation... Delete the DM layer, but make sure you keep the selection!!! Elements retains this info, no need to worry there... I like to hide the selection marque for better viewing of the effect of the blur... CTRL+H to hide the "ants"... Fear not, your selection is still there Photoshop users... Now Go to the Gaussian Blur Filter!!! Slide until the desired effect/look is achieved, and then accept changes... |
| 8. Finished You have applied the Distant Blur..... :) |
| Here, you can see the comparison of the actual image, and the Bryce rendered DM... |
| The completed image, distance blur applied... |
| This image uses a "reverse distance blur"... The objects in the back have better focus, creating an illusionary effect. |