Such a classic title Rochr,I had to play through. ;) Off in the distance Rosco hears "don't you touch my ball"!! Rosco is all meta balls except for his eyes, I've been inspired by all these great meta-ball creations, and yesterday while looking through a shopping flyer, there was some metal hounds for the yard. There ya go. Special thanks to Rochr for that great Meta-character.

Funny! :) And very well done!

I wish you guys stop with the punning! I'm starting to experience a painful twinge and can't help but grit my teeth. This is way cool ICM! How long did it take you to model him?

Modeling was about an hour and a half, sphere back drop with nature photo mat,115 lights in a 1/4 sphere set of radiosty light. I went to sleep, and when I woke it was done rendering 5 1/2 hours.

LOL, way cool! :) Those darn radials can really be a pain when it comes to rendering time, but they sure give nice results! Still trying different shapes and settings to use as few as possible without loosing to much effect...

With these radials, do you keep them all at the default setting? If you change the intensity, etc., do all of the other radials stay at the same setting?

You must set the radials to 1, or youll get a nice sun tan in a matter of seconds. :) And also give them a dark color and disable the sunlight! As long as all the radials are selected, you change the settings on every one at the same time.

I had picked up a few pre-fabs of 1/4 sphere radiosity light sets( I think it was here in free stuff). They are grouped, in order to change them(which I almost always do) you need to un-group them in order to change their settings as a group. However if you do not re-group them and you select something else in your scene, you now have from 0-? single free floating radiosty lights. At this point you can CTRL-Z(undo) and step back to when they were grouped.(hoping you haven't overdone the undos). It takes a bit of getting used to, but there are tricks like setting them up off to the side and removing a few by CTRL-selecting in the group, or choosing different settings & colors. What I havent tried yet is: starting at the top and reducing or inreasing their intensity or color. There are so many combinations to try yet only so many days. :) Hope this helps

When you ungroup they will still be selected, you can hit the "E" to edit them all at once.

ICM... I believe if you select them using the icons at the bottom of the screen (whatever that's called, looks like a miniature 'create' pallette), you can 'select all of type' or whichever ones you wish to select, without having to ungroup them. The 'select all of type' option will select all of that type of item without selecting any group they are in. Of course... I may be wrong about this one, too. :)

LOL, I keep learning new stuff here, forgetting it sometimes and re-learning. Thanks FWTempest I'll try that. 2 1/2 years...hmmm, I don't feel green.

oh and... very cool doggie... :D Rochr, all of the times I tried to do anything with light domes, I always just lowered the intensity, and things would still tend to get washed out. I never once thought to darken the color of the lights. It makes sense, now that you say it, though... thanks for the tip.

Setting the color on those lights you can use ALT-select on the color swatch(like the rest of bryce) and really pinpoint what you want.

Nice hound - I want one! Tip for radial lights - if you're looking just to light the foreground use ranged lights instead of linear or squared or whatever. Bryce won't calculate beyond that range and if you've got a complex background it can speed up rendering by 5 or 10X, and much more if you've got fog or glass in the background. To see how far the range extends, just up the intensity to 100 (or some large value) and check out where the white boundary is, then set the intensity back to whatever level you're working with.

Lol. Great image. I love the dog.

Great looking metahound.

These meta animals and characters are just right to animate, anyone up to it?

Not at this time. Too short an attention span. Mine. :)