This is the first of many views I hope to bring you of Riverford Keep, the home of the main characters (played by my friends) in my current AD&D campaign. This view is my final draft (for now, hehe) of the main grounds as seen from the front gate. On the path directly ahead, you can see a wooden bridge spanning a moat, which then leads to the front door of the keep. The two towers you see flanking the front door contain the twin staircases of the entrance hall.

It looks like a simple view, but looks really are deceiving here. I could not decide initially on a viewing angle for the shot, so I ended up having to plan and build the external features for the WHOLE keep, including the outer walls surround the main grounds, towers, and the various service buildings contained on the main grounds!

Nearly all the architecture you see was done using primitives and boolean operations. I then mixed together a variety of textures and applied them to the surfaces as appropriate. Though you cannot see the detail from here, all the stonework textures on the walls line up with each other, making the walls look like they had been constructed stone by stone.

For the grounds, I had to start by creating a terrain that would vary in slope and height like a real terrain, but would also line up properly with the ground floor of the keep. I did this by using a mask image of the keep as an elevation greyscale, then blended it with the terrain's elevation map.

Creating the dirt paths was a bit trickier. I created a duplicate of the "grass" terrain, setting the duplicate a fraction lower and giving it a dirt texture. Then, using Paint Shop Pro , I altered the grayscale elevation map of the main terrain, lowering the height wherever a path was supposed to be. The "dirt" terrain would then have a slightly higher elevation at those spots, allowing the dirt texture to show through and creating a visual dirt path. No boolean operations required!

Lastly, was the lighting. As anyone who has worked with Bryce knows, Bryce sucks when it comes to outdoor lighting. Any surface not hit by direct sunlight comes out extremely dark or even pitch black, and Bryce's "Sky Dome" light only affects horizontal surfaces. I tried using Bryce's "ambient" feature on the surface textures, but this made objects in shadow look flat and unrealistic. Finally, I created a set of lights to encircle the entire scene from a distance, set at an altitude of 30 degrees from the center of the scene. I set the lights to "No Falloff" and "Disable Cast Shadows", then adjusted their brightness to simulate the ambient lighting. The results were a bit closer to how real-life ambient (diffuse) light works.