anyone have any shortcuts or ideas how to make a crowd scene? Like for a parade or a stadium or stuff like that. I can't see importing 8000 poser people and trying to render all that out. But just pasting a crowd scene to a plane doesn't seem workable either. Anyone have any ideas?

Well... I'm no Bryce expert at all. But You can bring in a few (grouped all together) and multi-replicate them and place them randomly about. render just a fraction of the crowd and put THAT render on a plane, and then multi-replicate that. With several crowd planes, it should come out okay. How far in the distance will they be? If they are up close, you might be sol. -Darth

well, I'm thinking looking from across the street at a parade

OH my. -Darth Logice, who shudders at the work involved

Hmmm, have you considered doing the parade and stands as seperate works, then using a 2D paint program to add crowds to the stands and composite the scene? Otherwise, maybe you could make a texture of a crowd scene from a photo and apply it to a custom mesh...

What I would do is try to figure out your basic lighting. Render 3-5 at a time in front of a horrid green (or whatever colior that is not in the figures) background in poser. Use the horrid green to make a mask and transparancy. Take them into Bryce as a picture. Repeat and then place a few actual poser people in front of the whole shebang. You might also render in sections and merge file and delete as needed .. good luck

Bone, I got excellent results by shooting first in bryce and then in poser, as you can endlessly overlap the renders in poser to get depth of field. If you are posing a marching band pose your first figure and render it against the background and then from drop down choose paste to background, move figure and repeat. You can do this against a bryce pic and it really looks cool.

Be sure if you are importing any Distant Poser people ,to use the poser 2 lo res. models. Lotsa good Ideas mentioned here. Hawkfyr

Bone, although I didn't I could've used 3 or more models in that crowd pic and shot it with shadows, etc. For slower rendering machines 3 would still be ok. During this process you'll probably need to shoot and resize and drag the poser screen all over the place. Just be careful to shoot each layer at the same size you want the pic to be, or it over-pixelates the shot. One helpful tip is to get your poses ready and save them so that all you have to do is push/pull using the directional guide tool. But man, you could get the whole marching band and crowd in the pic. I lost most of my files recently, but I had a mayan temple scene where each step of the pyramid had warriors priests and sacrificial victims on it. I think it worked very well and I know I could'nt have done it in bryce. There were 44 figures in it!

Well, I need to do this in Bryce. I sort of challenged myself. What I want to do is to focus the picture on a kind of Rose Parade sorta float, but I need people on the other side of the street for the background, you know

Then certainly Ghostofmacbeth's suggestion above is the way to go: using masking on 2d plane and put figures together with it.