Or anything organically shaped that have very sharp edges. Both Amorphium and Zbrush creations tend to have a signature look. Very rounded edges as though made from soft clay. I have yet to see a piece of machinery with machined looking edges - 90 degrees or mountains that have eroded by fracture and not by wind or rain. Does anyone have some examples, if they exist, to contradict my observations, or a tutorial that is graphically illustrated?
Thanks
Greg Smith
here some sharp edges http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001312
and you can use this allso
http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=003566
Hi Greg
I expect Zbrush can produce such terrains, the fact that it can use 65536 shades of grey in its alpha palette it has the potential of even greater complexity than Bryce. The problem, as you point out, is the ability of the artist to produce such an alpha for use in a terrain.
A workaround perhaps is to use geological survey maps that you can find on the web or even use Bryce’s Fractal terrain creator and import it into Zbrush.
I have seen some very convincing terrain produced here thou with Pixolator’s Alpha Century zscript by different people like Aurick, Pinheadpaul,Mentat7, Juandel and others. Perhaps as we go along new frontiers will be reached! A fractal generator would be a nice addition to Zbrush I agree.
'Morning Greg . . . 
Greg wrote: “90 degrees or mountains that have eroded by fracture and not by wind or rain” - I’m assuming that your referring to something like the image below??? 
If so, it’s really quite easy. 
Have a good one . . . 
Mark.
It seems to me that the major difference is really in the smoothing. ZBrush by default has subdivision activated. If you turn off SV and SH at the top of the Tool palette, you deactivate that subdivision and get the more polygonal look of Bryce. From there, your material choice will take it the rest of the way.
Digits I believe Bryce also incorporates 16bit grayscale info. I know that in one of the Susan Kitchen books it even says the same thing about using alpha maps made in Photoshop- that they do not contain as much info as a native Bryce grayscale. Just an FYI
Here’s a gear I made once. Aurick is right about turning off the SV and SH in the tool panel. It helps make sharper edges.
Perhaps noise amount, and noise radius settings applied to an Alpha? That should enable any roughness level you need…
Just a guess, since I don’t do much landscapery!
You’re on the right track Stonecutter! If you set the noise level and change the curve settings on the Modify menu you will get different results too!
hi, Greg! 
after reading your request i gave it a quick try and came up with this (in addition to the great ideas already posted 
:tu :):
i am not sure if this is jagged in a enough way for your gusto but it only took me a few minutes and probably could be taken to much better results. in case you are interested, here is the recorded script (which goofs up towards the end renderwise, but the crucial things i did, were recorded methinks).
what i basically did was creating 2 alphas: one for the terrain and a jaggedone for use with simplebrush (in z-sub-mode) and the hook-brush (in z-add. - alpha or bump brush may work better, i havent tried them for this project yet).
i dont know nada about bryce or any other terrainbuilder but i think zbrush to have powers that still wait for their discovery - and i wished you would join in the hunt for them + 
+ 
Hey Zoid! Awesome gears. For some reason, I never thought of turning off the subdivision with those. Doh!
Very jagged and very angular, indeed. What I was really trying to ask was how to produce actual geometry from within Zbrush that filled these specifications, without painting in 2.5d. Which primitives would you start with, and what tool settings would you use. As far as following along with a Zscript demo - even after setting delay to 1000 and checking the “show actions” box, it is hard for me to keep track of all the various settings and tools used. A “rewind” or “pause” and “slow down” button would be very helpful in this case. People like me who are using Zbrush at this stage for creating original organic and mechanical geometry files and then texturing those files, need to know the specifics for high quality creation and exporting from Zbrush for use in applications that supports high quality animation.
Now, on another related topic, I mentioned in a post about perspective that if Zbrush could be used convincingly to produce matte background and foreground paintings for use as camera “projection” maps within an application such as Electric Image’s Universe 4.0, then many of us who can paint faster than we can model would really be in business. Any takers? Very accurate camera perspective is needed to achieve this illusion. Can Zbrush do it?
Greg Smith
as far as machines are concerned, i have no clue as i never tried to do one in zbrush until now, Greg. hmmm, mountains, no 2.5d? i guess its still the best to try to create an alpha with jaggy tools like deformed cubes for instance, mrgbz-grabbing them with the wonderful mrgbz-grabber-tool and proceed the way Pixolator described in the AlphaCentury script which was pointed out above in this thread.
in the below one i did something different than the AlphaCentury3dPlaneWay (for the first time): i edited a cone primitive until it started looking like a mountain. in order to do so, i had to fiddle with the brush-shape (accessible via the transform-palette>modifiers when in edit-mode: i cranked the graph by making edges into it (to do so, you place the cursor onto the graph, drag it outside of the graph-window and return into it with the mouseclick still hold - voila, the first point! repeat this several times until you get a kind of sierra, then add a lil noise with the slider below) furthermore i activated the transformation to be made on z-axis only be de-activating the xyz-button and activating the z-only (for some time - i returned to the brush shape a few times to change graph, noise, axis). playing with different draw-sizes and z-intensitys and by switching into edit-move mode now and then i did the mountain as a 3dconecopy.ztl this was placed 4 times for the above image by rotating/sizing/moving in gyro-mode.
i hope this might be of some help for your purposes!
regarding your suggestions for certain additional script-features: i support them! in fact my yesterdays script was a very bad example, as i only quickly recorded it - as the lazy person i am, i did not feel like placing any notes into it, which might have helped you. if you watch Pixolators luxury AlphaCentury script you will find the explanations for what i did, as i was doing the same, basically!
i think i dont really get the “camera projection” maps thing you are looking for - could you please send a pic/url with a sample, to explain your goals to sillyme?
TIA
edit: you might be interested to see what southern came up with some time ago:
southern z-terrain in bryce
I’m afraid that I can’t answer your perspective question very well, but for the terrain I would recommend using a Plane3D just like the Alpha Century tutorial calls for. After all, a Bryce terrain is nothing but a plane that has been displaced along the Z axis. It simply has fewer polygons than the Alpha Century tutorial calls for, and doesn’t have any subdivision in action.
You can export the plane object as an OBJ or DXF to use in any program.
Thank you Juandel and Aurick very much. Now I think we are really talking. I’m still a little foggy with using a different “brush” profile in modeling mode (edit mode). I’ve tried a few of the built in shapes, and don’t notice any different behaviour when attempting to mold a primitive shape. I’ll carefully go through the Alpha Century script and study it. No machine tips?
I don’t have an example of camera projection mapping that would communicate accurately the problems faced when implimenting them. In analogy form, a camera projection map is like any other form of mapping (cylindrical, spherical, etc), but it is like a slide projector which projects, always from a camera’s point of view - moving or not, accurately onto an assigned piece of “crude” geometry. Have you ever been to Disneyland and seen those animated statues in the “haunted mansion” attraction. To create that illusion of life, the technicians built heads with very unspecific features in the area of the face. When this relatively featureless face receives an actual film footage of an actor projection onto its surface, it appears to be moving itself, regardless of the angle it is viewed from. This process is merely being approximated by the 3d software to the same end. The reason for “cheating” in this fashion is really all economic. It takes less time to film an actor singing a song and then project that footage on an inanimate sculpture than to create an audioanimatronic character with a perhaps less-than-real performance. Same goes for the use of this technique in CG - it is faster to create a realistic or stylistic painting and then project it onto crude geometry, than to create detailed geometry that appears real or stylistic and render it along with synthetic props and characters. Not only do the render times skyrocket in the last case, but the amount of work multiplies exponentially. We all want to tell a few stories while we are alive, and the only stumblingblock laid in front of most of us is lack of time. I really think it is worth pursuing this line of questioning because the payoff will be huge if we discover the way to seamlessly integrate Zbrush into the practices of established animators using other software for producing their animations. Just wait and see.
Greg Smith