A Simple Bryce Waterfall
There are many ways to create a waterfall in Bryce, most of them long and complicated. To create a beautifully flowing waterfall to rival Niagra falls you will have to spend hours of work laboring over Bryce's Terrain Editors. I offer in its stead a far simpler method to create waterfalls that, while not a rival to nature, will serve very well in most any simple scene. The process will only take a couple of minutes and only requires a single mountain terrain (as opposed to the manyterrains that a more complicated one needs).Each step is followed by a picture to help guide you through the process.
Step 1: Click on the create mountain button to start us off. (Highlighted below)
Step 2: You now have a generic mountain in the middle of your scene. Click on the 'E' button that is floating alongside it. This will bring up the Terrain Editor.
Step 3: Start by clicking the 'New' button in the top corner. You should now have a black space off to the right. Beside it you will see 3 spheres and a series of horizontal lines. Click and hold on the second sphere. By moving the mouse the white sphere inside it will change in size. Move the mouse until you get a 'hard' sphere (that is: it is solid white instead of a dispersed, grainy white).
Step 4: Go onto the black space and draw an arc, from the bottom left corner to the bottom right corner. Leave a fair amount of room underneath the arc, this is essentially where the waterfall is. Fill in the entire area above arc pure white. Along the right side of the picture you will see a } shapped thing. Click at the very bottom and drag up a little bit until the black area that is left in your picture turns red.
Step 5: Back in the main screen you should have something like this:
You want to select both the waterfall and the ground terrain below it. To do this simply hold the 'shift' button on your keyboard and click with your mouse anywhere the two objects overlap.
With them both selected you will now want to hit on the arrow next to the 'Edit' button at the top of the window.
Select the 'Waters & Liquids' button on the side of the menu that pops up and then choose what you want the water to look like. For my waterfall I choose 'Mercury Surface' (4th one on the top row).
Step 6: You should now have something like this (when rendered):
Notice how you can barely see the top of the waterfall? This is simply because it is the same as the lower water and so blends in very well, but it's there. What you do next is entirely up to you. You can add walls to either side or hills or anything you want. The basic idea is to cover up the sides with something and to prevent people from seeing its empty side. You can get rid of that empty space beneath the water by going back into the Terrain Editor and clicking on the little down arrow underneath the drawing area and selecting 'Solid'.
You can go about tweaking it as you like. Perhaps add some fog, some trees/rocks and some islands. Using this simple technique I was able to make the following scene:
