Is it possible that Bryce just has a lower end render engine or I just suck? I noticed that its brutally difficult to get Bryce to properly model and render anything with realism (compared to 3DSM and Maya and LW and really anything but vue for that matter). Everything looks a little cartoonish if you will. I know its up to the artist, but I noticed a little trend. Any tips from ppl on how to be more realistic with bryce?

it's slow let's hope that Corel gives in and sell Bryce to Mojo.

lighting is very important. Most shadows in the real world are soft to some degree.

Frankly, you can't compare Bryce to LW and Maya and SoftImage and such... it costs 15 times less! And I saw some very realistic images rendered in Bryce. It has very powerful ligthing, IMHO, you just have to use it properly. As for the render engine, alas, you're right. It's slow like hell... Stefano

Bryce has its own 'look' just as Vue, Max, Maya and Lightwave do. Some like it, some don't. It is an art package after all, not a camera substitute, and while I concede that Max renders (at least in the latest release) are realistic, I personally find them a bit boring. Anyone trying for a photorealistic render in Bryce is going to come up with a hundred complaints, but I can think of a hundred complaints about Max that I would't apply to Bryce. Most of those who buy and use Bryce presumably like, or even love, it for what it is, not just use it because they can't afford one of the high-end tools. I wouldn't call Bryce's output cartoonish - although cartoons are a pretty sophisticated art-form, and demand a lot of talent from the artist - I would call it distinctive and impressionistic. Bryce also gives a lot of scope for individuality in artwork; not only can you tell a Bryce render but you can immediately identify the work of any artist you're familiar with. The same isn't true of the high-end packages, which tend to impose themselves more on the art (or perhaps it's because all their users are trying so hard to disguise their art as photographs?) If you want to get the most realistic results from Bryce I would advise using it for outdoor scenes, which it's best at, use custom skies, use soft shadows, use haze, don't choose your textures until you've decided on the lighting, and use plenty of your own textures rather than presets.

Cartoonishness usually results from setting the ambient values too high in the texture editor. Also, as the others in this post have said, lighting is very important. Too much light can wash out the image, too little light can make everything look flat. It takes a lot of experimenting, but look through the galleries, and especially check out Dryfly's work, among others that post mostly Bryce images. And, some artists are trying to make cartoonish images on purpose, so you may want to keep that in mind, as well.

Ill second Doublecrash on this one! The most important is the lighting and textures! Used properly, you can create the same amount of realism as in any "high end" app!

Try searching for 'radiosity', 'true ambience' or 'GI'. There where a lot of posts on that not long ago and there's lots of information in there about realistic lighting techniques. Bryce has it's own special feel and it's sometimes a little hard to get the lighing realistic, but bryce does have a very nice render engine when you get to grips with the lights and textures.

A lot of the realistic lighting has to be faked. (ie.radiosity, GI, etc) Look in AgentSmith's gallery for some excellent usage of faked HDRI, very realisti IMO.

Yep, I've spent a while studying how to trick bryce into looking a certain way. That is why bryce is so powerful, you can basically do anything you want with it, if you have enough patience. Cartoonish looks result from poor material properties and lighting rigs. Remember to look at bump and dif/amb settings. Soft shadows create more realism. Bryce can be molded into whatever you want. You just have to want it enough.

I may be a little dumb, but I think photorealism is not a goal in itself. Manet and Monet, Van Gogh discovered it in their time when photography started to be practical. The feeling behind a picture needs more than soft shadows and motion blur, and I like Bryce vibrant colors and deep "feeling" (I'm afraid I'm not very clear here)... And even then I add a little more in Photoshop. By the way, a lot of siple trick used in "up-end" applications can straightily be used in Bryce but you simply need patience to set everything before rendering (there's an excellent book about lighting : Digital lighting and Rendering, by Jeremy BIRN, published by CampusPress, where you'll see the rendering engine is nothing comparing to the logic behind the lighting). :)

The modeling part of Bryce is difficult. A lot of people prefer to build a model in another software package and then import it to Bryce. Also, what you can't make a model do, you might be able to fake with the right kind of texture(s). 'Painting' a model properly has as much to do with the cartoon v photo look as the model itself and the lighting. I personally like the look of Bryce, but then I'm not one of those people who want to use computers to make photo-real pictures/film. Lin

I may be wrong, but I thought the book "Digital lighting and Rendering, by Jeremy BIRN" was published by New Riders and not CampusPress. Either way, it was a fantastic book! It has pictures on every page that show how to place objects, map textures, light them, use color, etc. I have a review I started writing up that I can print here if someone wants it.

Globalator: New users to Bryce often getstuck with the idea that Bryce renders "look" a certain way because they haven't experimented much past the default settings. as others have said above, look through the galleries: you will see some amazing images. Some things to help: never rely only on the sun, experiment with placing positive and negative radial lights in key places throughout your scene, in general lower ambience, make sure to adjust haze for the scale of your scene.

oops... *Globator

Hartwichr : Sorry for the mistake about Birn's book. I actually use a French translation. :)