Mojotech (not only) for Bryce Users: Tutorial

First Steps

You don't read manuals? Do yourself a favour and at least skim through pages 108 to 115 and from 119 to the top of 123. Just that you know what all those terms and icons mean, and to spare me having to say things like "click on the brown-ish little circle under the mountain icon with the T in it" (rather than "Open the Terrain Texture Editor")

OK, into the Deep End! Create a new document (File > New...). If you use version 1.1, you'll find yourself near the Equator and near the Date Line at Noon, 200 meters above the featureless surface.
In mojoworld, there's a whole Planet beyond your framed scene. Locations are arbitrary. At any time, feel free to move about and adjust the camera as it suits you. Don't expect to see exactly what you see in my screen shots. You can select any of many thousands of possible scenes to look at, from any height above Ground or Sea Level, or from Outer Space. If you create a Terrain which would bury the camera, it moves up to 1 meter above Ground Level. If you press the "b" key, the camera levels out and moves to a convenient altitude of 10 km.

Let us take a few easy steps first to prepare the setting. Never mind what things mean right now, we'll get back to this later. This is only to create an easy-on-the-eye environment for our Terrain.
Open the Sky Editor, select "Simple Sky" from the Menu where it says "None" (in version 1.1), click on the arrow to the left of the Menu to expand the controls - if the colour dot you see isn't black already, click on it and set it to black. You may find it hard to believe, but skies are black.
Still in the Sky Editor, ensure that "Cloudy Fog" or "Cloudy Atmosphere" are chosen - I've seen both in different versions, but they really are the same thing.
Open the Water/Ocean Editor. On the very top, there's a little Menu Icon. Click and choose "Create Ocean" and set the figure for the Sea Level to 700 (meters above the Planet's radius, before Terrains are created). Click on the "m" next to the word "Material" to open the Ocean Material Editor, choose "New Material" from the little Menu on the very top and click on the "M" next to the Menu where it says "Displacement Material". A new Popup Menu appears below it, also saying "Displacement Material". Set this one to "Water Material". Finally, change the name in the rounded text box near the top of the Editor to "Water Material Node". That's all for now.

Almost everything in MojoWorld is made from a Texture. Textures can be either Noise, Fractals or Pictures. Just like in Bryce, and many other programs.
Open the Texture Editor for the Terrain now. We need a Texture to create the Terrain Height for our World, and we use a Fractal. Why? Because Fractals are mathematical functions which can be used to draw graphics with unlimited small detail, and the closer we look at our Planet, the more detail we want to see. The texture we create is a grey scale image. White represents the highest peaks, black translates into the deepest valleys and trenches. The empty Terrain Texture Editor looks like this (the field which says "no texture assigned" might be blank):

1) This Menu lets you create, delete, import or save textures (you'll see me mention "Drop Down List Boxes" or "DDLBs" throughout my tutorials - they are yet another kind of menu, contained in a pair of rounded brackets...)
2) The preview for the Texture you are working on will be displayed here. Notice the buttons to zoom in and out. The default is from 100km up - that's convenient for a good overview.
3) You can combine textures, and the preview of the combination will be displayed here.

All this works just like in Bryce, but it doesn't show the exact Terrain. The Mojoworld Terrain is wrapped around a huge sphere. The preview gives you a general idea of what kind of a Terrain will cover the World.

In the empty Terrain Texture Editor, choose "New Texture" from the DDLB. "No Texture Assigned" will now read "Main Texture Node". The text is editable - change it to "The Terrain Node".
A little "t" icon is now visible - click on it to "create a texture leaf". The name "Texture Leaf" pops up in a DDLB to the right of the "t", and the "Leaf" becomes connected to the "Tree" to the left. A new, unconnected leaf also appears below the one we just connected, we'll use it later. The DDLB will contain the names of all leaves you create (so you can re-use them throughout your Planet) and a generic one. You should name them, otherwise they'll all be called "Texture Leaf". To name a Leaf, click on the "t" again, and a widget appears in the top right of the Editor where you can edit the name. Call it "Terrain 1". This widget will later on become the top of the "Control Stack" for the Texture we are about to create.
Another widget called the "Kickstand" for the leaf has also appeared. We'll get to it in a moment. Don't worry about learning overload. All of this works the same way for all Textures, and pretty much everything in MojoWorld is made from Textures. The layout of the Editor should now look like this:

I look at Texture Leaves in MojoWorld as the equivalent of the three Texture Components in Bryce's DTE. But there can be up to four of them, and they can be grouped in pairs of two. And there's one blend option which Bryce doesn't have, for building textures which would require up to seven DTE components. Since I wrote the first version of this, Textures can also be blended according to Geographical Latitude, fopr climate Zones... and then there's also the Pro UI, where your ability to keep track of everything is the only limit to the complexity of textures you create.

On the top, we have the Output Control. It does the job of some of the Texture Filters in the DTE. Below that, there's a list (DDLB) of available Fractals, and we can also select Noise or import pictures for Colour and Displacement from here. Displacement looks a little like Bump in Bryce, but while Bump is painted onto a surface, Displacement actually deforms an object.
Fractals, visually speaking, grab a shape and repeat variations of it at different scales throughout the Planet, with unlimited small detail. Noise is similar, but without the Fractal detail.
Next, a similar list, to choose a Fractal, Noise or a Picture for "Domain Distortion". I look at it as the equivalent of Bryce's "Phase". Finally, there is a DDLB of spaces in which MojoWorld calculates the Texture - like Bryce's Object Space, World Space, etc.
When you see the layout in the picture above for the first time after you create a new Leaf, "MonoFractal" will probably be selected as the Fractal to drive the Leaf Texture. Different Fractals distribute the shape they grab in different ways. Change "MonoFractal" to "Mountain Fractal", make sure Distortion is set to "None" and the Texture Space is "WorldPosition". The Editor now reveals the Control Stack for the Mountain Fractal. It should look like this:

The values in the text fields are editable. Here is how and why I changed them from the default to what you see above:
I changed the name to Mountain Fractal 1. That's convenient for identifying it if I was to work on this Planet in the Pro UI. Notice that the name in the Kickstand hasn't changed. MojoWorld has created an instance of the Fractal for us.
Largest Feature Size: The size, in meters of the largest instances of the shape repeated by the Fractal. You can look at it as the size of the largest mountains, or the distance between the highest peaks. Set it to 40000, that's about 25 miles.
Leave the Smallest Feature Size at 0 - this way you'll see more detail the closer you look.
Result Scale: Generally, the maximum output value of the function which creates the Terrain is 1. This would make the highest mountains just one meter tall. The output multiplied by the Result Scale determines the Terrain height for any point on the Planet. Entering 5000 means I've asked MojoWorld to create Mountains up to 5000 meters tall.
You can look up page 198 to 200 in the manual to learn what the other values mean. There are some listed which you can't see in the Editor. They are only available in the Pro UI. But one of those you can see in the Editor deserves special attention.
It's the Basis Function. It creates the shape which gets distributed by the Fractal throughout the World to determine the look of your land. It appears everywhere in different variations, at different scales. If you use the Curve Editor (more about this later) to filter the output of the Terrain calculation, it affects each instance of the basis function, and the modified shape will be distributed all over the World. Try different functions from the DDLB after setting the other Parameters as shown, and watch the little preview window. Note that for some of the functions there are options available if you click on the arrow symbol to the left of the name (and since version 1.1 a separate Curve Editor for each Basis Fuction). When you are finished, set it to Gradient Perlin.

Something was pointed out to me (thanks, John...), and I thought I might slot it in here, as a general point. Bryce uses it's own measuring system. That's Bryce Units. It's up to the user to decide how many Bryce Units should equal a meter or a foot or a mile. MojoWorld uses the Metric System. All sizes are specified in meters. 1609 meters are about a mile, 10000 meters, or 10 kilometers are about 33000 feet, and between 10000 and 11000 meters above Sea Level is the average cruising altitude of a jet liner. Sea Level is generally a fair bit above the actual Planet surface, as specified in the Ocean Editor. To get the hight of a mountain above sea level (using a Marker Flag, page 94 in the Manual), you must subtract the sea level from the mountain height.

Getting started is the hardest part of doing Mojoworld. Count your blessings, we've got that out of the way. However, if you look at the planet, you'll see the typical hills and lakes all-over Terrain. That's exactly not what we want. In the next page, I'll show you how to change the shape of the land to cliffs, and after that we'll see what we can do about the distribution. We also need some materials....