Bryce 5 - Selecting Objects

Requirements: Bryce 5

This tutorial is for the Beginner

For the most part you can just left click on an object to select it. Hold down the Shift key while you click to select several objects, etc. Holding the Shift key and clicking on a selected object will deselect the object. If you place your cursor over a cluster of objects and hold down the Control key when you click, a small menu will appear that lets you select from a list of objects/terrains/planes located below your cursor. You can even change your view to get at those tough little objects and terrains that are behind everything else. But selecting a particular object or group of objects can sometimes get a little tricky when you are working on a scene that is full of objects and terrains. And that trick with the Control key doesn't help if you don't know Terrain 4 from Terrain 8!

That's where the Selection Palette really comes in handy. In the very bottom right corner of your Bryce screen you should see a circle with a grid design on it. If you don't already have the Selection Palette showing, then click that circle to switch from the Time Palette to the Selection Palette.

Open up a New Document. Using the Create and Edit menus, start putting several spheres, cubes and cylinders into your scene and moving them around to various locations. Go ahead a fill it up as much as you want. See the example of my clutter below. My image contains 4 or 5 of each; spheres, cylinders, cubes and a ground plane. Kind of difficult to sort out what is what, isn't it?

By clicking on the small image that represents the type of object, you will select all of that type of object that is in your scene. I have clicked on spheres and now all of the spheres have been selected. Go ahead and click on cubes and then cylinders so you can see how they all look when selected.

Select all of the spheres again. Now we will use the Shift plus the Control key to select a few other elements of the scene, while still having the spheres selected. Hold down the Shift and Control keys and click somewhere over a cluster of objects. In the small menu that appears, choose an object.

It will now be selected along with your spheres. I used this method to select all of the cylinders in my scene by clicking on various parts of the scene and selecting cylinders whenever they were in the list. You can also deselect items in this same way.

An easier method would have been to hold down the Shift key and then click on the small Cylinders icon in the Selection bar. Now I have all the spheres and cylinders selected and the cubes and ground plane are deselected. Give this is try on your image.

Click once somewhere in the clear area of your scene to deselect all of the selections we have made so far. Now we are going to play with the little VCR-like controls. These are handy for isolating certain objects that belong to the same group, or for cycling through the various groups. Click on the arrow shown here in the image.

This is the Select Next Object Type button. Each time you click on this button, it will cycle to the next object family. Keep clicking until you have a sphere selected. With the sphere highlighted in red to indicate that it is selected, click on the arrow immediately to the right of the arrow you were just clicking. Notice that now instead of cycling through the various types of objects, it is cycling the selection through all of the spheres.

The ability to easily make specific types of selections will become very important to you when you have a complex or crowded scene like a forest with many mountains and a lake. When you want to make a change to the materials you chose, like grassy hills converted to desert dunes, picking out all the mountains in a vast field of wire frame objects can be daunting without these selection tips and tricks.

The images below (click to enlarge) show an example scene in wire frame and final render where I chose to make all the foreground mountains into more subtle green covered hills and the distant mountains a more snow-covered material. Several mountain terrains were flattened out and a water plane was added. As you can see by the wire frame image, the ground, water and mountain terrains in the foreground would have been very hard to pick out without some fancy selecting work no matter what viewing angle you use.

There are quite a few additional selection options available, but I suggest looking at the Bryce Help file for more information on those once you are familiar with the basics.