All of these four images use NO lights and NO sunlight, they were 10 minute renders each and are completely lit by the surrounding environment, given that yes they would look better with a light or two, this is just an example of how HDRI can be used in bryce to create lighting for a scene. Again these scenes only consist of what you can see, the hdri sphere, and the 3 objects, that's all. Without radiosity, these would be solid grey as there is also NO ambiance, as that would be cheating as it's "fake". Anyway, just an example of what bryce is capable of. And haven't seen this done before with bryce so figured I'd try it out.

Thanks for clearing this up.

Nice tests!

Wow, neat. I didn't realize you could do this without lights. Can you explain briefly how you did this? Materials settings and such Thanks

Cool. But sorry, there is at least one light here. See the shadow under the ball?

Or, you have used blurry reflections i think. That explains a lot.

I'm also kinda curious how you got anything with no lights, no sun and no ambience, blurry reflections won't have anything to do with it.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=251269&Start=1&Artist=AgentSmith&ByArtist=Yes

I've done pics with no lights, but I had to use the "True Ambience" render setting, and my materials needed an ambience setting of around 15. Lesse if Ornlu gives up the goods or just hints...;o) These are GREAT tests, btw... AS

Set Speculat halo to true white, set difusion to white and turn it to 100, turn reflection to 40-60 crank on blurry reflections place it inside a dome and bam. As I thought, specular halo is the radius of the sample rays it takes to average, true white would be 180 degrees, these blur beyond looking reflective and take on the lighting of the environmental colors. Hope this helps.

Does it matter what material you start out with? (for your objects/mesh) Does it matter what sky preset you are using? I know to disable the sun, but with the way I had done it before, I had to use the White sky setting, and then disable the sun. (for some reason) It's kinda working, looks really washed out though. And, unless I crank the ambience on my dome, it renders like its a negative. Strange and interesting. AS

Well, I gotta hit the hay, but I'll keep playing with my settings later. The only way I could get this render was to crank the dome ambience to 100, and in the render settings use True Ambience along with Blurry Reflections. Ah, well. (and here I didn't believe the blurry reflection thing...) Thanks Ornlu. AS

Sky preset doesn't matter, dome ambience yes should be 100. Wish it could go higher. True ambience imo messes up how it "should" look.

You do use ambience, okied doke. I have got a way to have a usable render with no "Render Option-True Ambience" now. With the dome material, I have to also set it (the dome) to a 60% reflection, AND under Texture Mapping Mode I have to turn on "Decal Colors". I get the same render as above but in tones seemingly of grey/green, rather than the blue/green. I'll have to try various light probes, see if different probes will directly affect the light on the mesh like in your top renders. Thanks! AgentSmith

http://bsmooth.de/BSolutions/#Radiosity Klaus Busse posted his tips about blurry reflection / fake radiosity ages ago. I'd seen people mention blurry reflection here before and assumed the only reason they weren't using it much is because of the render times. It's a very powerful technique and is probably as close as Bryce5 can come to simulating radiosity. Unfortunately, the reflections aren't really 'blurry' enough (check out unnatural 'shadow' under AgentSmith's orb), and colours are reflected too strongly (a blue sky will cause the ground and objects to be absurdly blue). In the basic tests above the only 'light' is the Bryce sun, and there are no ambient settings at all. The rest of the illumination on the objects comes from reflective interaction with the sky, ground and other objects. I have some other images here somewhere; I'll post later.

The shadow is actually fairly natural, it would make sense if you could see the light probe. I guess just a plain white dome could be used. Right on about the sky color!, I had to make sure I used a white sky setting and turn all the clouds and everything off or to zero and especially make sure the "Background Hue was set to white, instaed of the brilliant blue it seems to default to. Otherwise, you do blue tones and not the color of the light probe. This is a cool technique overall, but I still would use my old technique and not use blurry reflections, only because I myself would want realistic relections. (see link in post #8) But, I think this cool radiosity technique might work great for a layer in a muti-pass technique. AgentSmith

yep I was just experimenting and got that result, thought I'd post it that's all. heh.

Well, I have to take one point back. I tried this with a plain white dome, same shadow appears, probably not a shadow but the reflection of the model on the ground plane.(?) AS

Exactly right, AgentSmith; I just rendered the above to illustrate. There's only a white sky dome in this; no sun, no lights at all. The ball actually has a 100% level of red diffusion, but it's irrelevant because there's no lights. The only illumination 'on' the sphere and the ground plane is their blurry reflection of the sky dome above and around. The 'shadow' under the sphere isn't a shadow at all; it's just a blurry reflection of the underside of the sphere. It's the same shape as in yours (slightly different angle of view). The problem is that the reflection isn't blurry enough - it's still a discernable sphere.

Glad you did post, this technique of yours looks a lot like radiosity renders by higher end programs. (IMHO)

The more varied the textures used in an image are, the more realistic the technique looks. Rough surfaces and mottled colour lessen the problems. This one is just the Bryce sun (soft shadows) and the sky dome. It makes for a fairly good gloomy yard corner.

Oops, image.

very nice, subtle pic

For this one i used blurry reflections. Remember AgentSmith, you could use this method in the vase scene and still get the sharp reflections. Make the specular halo value almost black for the vase material. This will tell the render engine to blur the relfections almost none for that vase. For the above example, the specular halo valuse of the mirrored ball was made to be almost black so it wouldn;t be blurred.

But then I don't get any specular hits, but I understand what you're saying, I (obviously) haven't messed around with the blurry reflection aspect much. I'll have to try this with the vase pic or similar, see how I can get it to come out.

Well if you use an environmen with visble light points (like the windows you have) then those fake the specular highlights. So as long as there is some visible source of light, it will look like a highlight on the surface. The glass ball in the above cornell box pic also have almost no specularity....it's just reflecting and refracting the bright visible light surce at the top.

WHoa guys.. Agent said: "This is a cool technique overall, but I still would use my old technique and not use blurry reflections, only because I myself would want realistic relections. (see link in post #8)" You CAN control reflections and transparency EVEN when using blurry transmissions (transparency, like glass) and blurry reflections. All you have to do is set the SPECULAR HUE from either pure black (Renders that materials reflection without any blur) or to pure white (renders that materials reflections or transparency blurry) Any hue in between is a mix. The more black you go the clearer the reflection or transparency will be and the whiter you go the blurrier it will be! The really cool thing about that is for each object you can set the apparent blurr or clearness without worrying about blurred transmissions or reflections screwing up say a car window :)

Sorry I meant SPECULAR HALO's Color, not Specular Hue

Sorry Madmax, I see you already posted that enough... DOH! GOt too excited about helping ;)