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Photoshop 7 Rock Brush

Building Campfires in Bryce

1. Start with about 12 rocks, and line them up on the ground in a circle or square or whatever shape you'd like to have your campfire ring in It doesn't really matter what size they are, or what shape they are. The variation in both will make the ring of rocks look more realistic.

2. Once you have your ring of rocks, select them all, raise them a bit above the ground, and then drop them to the ground (the down arrow button when they're all selected). This makes the ring even and level, or even with whatever terrain you might be working on. Group them together for ease of manueverability later, and go to the materials dialogue. For this one, I used the Desert Rock texture in the base Planes & Terrains, and then modified it. So, first, select Desert Rock, and then hit that little checkbox.

3. To get the modifications (which make it look more realistic) first change the bump height to 100. This gives it more texture, deeper crevaces, and more shadows. Make sure the dimple beside the Bump Height is on the correct texture selection. Now, to change the scaling of the texture, click the little round button in the upper left corner of the texture box, the one right beside the down-pointing arrow. Change the top (circled in red) section of coordinates to 100%. This makes the texture repeat more which makes it even more realistic and nearly doubles your render time. Sorry!

4. Okay, now we're ready to do the logs. Create a cylinder, and squish it down so that x and z are about 5 and y is about 15. Rotate it on the x and z axis about 122 degrees each, and duplicate it three times. Lean the four of them together so that they're touching at the top and spread apart at the bottom. Drop them to the ground plane, group them together, and put them in the center of your rock circle.

6. Once you've lined them up the way you want them, go to the materials pallette again. Change the texture type to parametric, and use the tree bark texture available from 3DCafe for free, here. Set the following dimples to refer to the texture you just gave it: Diffuse, Ambient, Diffusion, Ambience, Bump Height. Set the Diffusion, Ambience and Bump Height sliders to 100, or play around with them till you like them. In the Edit Texture dialogue, set the scaling to 1%.

7. Now, create a sphere and place it in the center of your rock circle, on the ground plane.

8. In the materials dialogue, under Volume, select Voluminous Fire. This will give the bottom of the campfire a glowing effect that will also make your computer take twice as long to render this.

9. Now, create another sphere, put it in the same place as the first one, and make it a lot skinnier and about three times taller than your logs.

10. In the Materials Pallette, apply the Complex FX --> Fire material.

11. Duplicate this sphere (control D) and then convert it to a spherical light souce by clicking the double arrow at the top of the screen and then the yellow round ball.

12. Your duped sphere will change it's wire frame to be bright yellow. Click on the E to go to the Light Lab.

13. Since this was a quick and fast effect, I just gave it an intensity of about 109 and left all the rest of the settings at the default.

14. Now, start the render and go get some coffee or take a bathroom break or something.

Your finished result should look something like this:

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you, Please feel free to email me with comments.