The first time I joined in on the Bryce Forum Chat, I talked about how I'd made my image of an old iron gate out of clip art. It was suggested that this information would make a good tutorial for beginners and could be a surprising new source of inspiration to intermediate and advanced Bryce users.

Note that while this tutorial does construct an old iron gate, it is not about "how to make an old iron gate." The real point of this tutorial is using clipart as sources for Bryce objects.

I knew I wanted to make a fancy scrolling top for my gate and I knew a lattice object would be the way to do it, but my scribblings in the terrain editor were quite disappointing. I'm not sure how I was inspired to check through my clip art collection, but that's what made it all happen.

I leafed through the pages of the user manual which showed small versions of much of the clip art in the collection. I was quickly rewarded in the Borders section, a little piece named 'Corner 087' seemed to be just the thing.

Before I could use that in the terrain editor to create a lattice object, I inverted the image and then applied some Gaussian Blur. I did that with Photoshop, but it occurs to me that Bryce's own terrain editor should be enough to handle this, it has an 'invert' control and 'smoothing' is essentially blurring.

Since I was working with an image larger than 128x128, I increased the grid size in the terrain editor to 256 for my newly-created lattice object. The default clipping for a lattice object worked great.

After that, I made the gate bars and cross-pieces out of Bryce primitives then stretched the lattice object that I made out of the clip art so that it fit the width I wanted the gate to be.

Once I had one gate door, I grouped it and made a copy to make the final image.

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