I was cleaning all the junk out of the Bryce folder and came upon a stray scenefile labeled 'cloudtips' and decided to see what it was, once I got it rendered I started messing with the clouds, adding more cumulus, a cloud slab(just to see what they look like) and it started to look pretty good, so I gave the terrains a mat and rendered. Now, how do you keep the clouds from getting those weird edges, the ones that happen when 2 cloud spheres touch or actually overlap? I don't mind the shadows they cast on each other real clouds cast shadows too, but the edges are driving me nuts....can anyone help on this?

Zhann, As far as I know, there isn't anything that you can do. Sometimes even moving the cloud objects so that they don't actually touch doesn't help. I usually play around with the edge hardness and fuzziness to try and minimize the effect. And make sure that whatever object you use for the clouds doesn't actually touch any other cloud object. If someone does know how to get around this, I can't wait to find out how to do it! HTH Mike BTW, nice landscape you've got going there!

Iwas afraid someone would say that, now to see if I can come up with a work around, anyone else have any suggestions....:(

I guess I'm blind because I can't see any odd edges. Or my monitor is worse than I thought. But, I know what you're talking about. In the images that I've done with clouds like that, I've found that as long as the bounding boxes don't touch, I don't get strangeness. I've found that it's all a matter of perspective then. Some of my clouds in the Uncontrollable Forces challenge picture are very close, some are very far in reality but with sizing, they look like they're close together. I love what you've done this these clouds. I'm going to have to keep trying because I've not been able to get anything this good looking yet. Great work!

eelie's right. Ya just have to make it look like they're next to eachother.

This looks like the shores of Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand. And that's a compliment!

It really does look like New Zealand! Nice terrains and atmosphere!

You could try grouping the cloud objects together. Sometimes that works.

Forgot to mention make the objects positive before grouping.

I remember reading somewhere online about what Aldaron said, 'cos I was having this problem with volumeric clouds and this method sorted it out. Catlin

If Aldarons method doesn't work you could try some clonebrushing in Photoshop or a similar program to get rid of those edges. It doesn't really work if there's lots of artifacts, but if you only have a few you should be able to get reasonably good results.

Cool,,, I'll have to try that myself... thanks guys! brholte

I don't se any artifacts on this image though, but that could be because I'm currently viewing the image at an old laptop with a screen that messes up the colors and brightness. The image looks very nice to me though.

The cloud upper right in the corner, I couldn't get it to render properly it's got graininess towards the front(where it meets the fog over the mtns sphere) and the one center to the right on the right hand side of the cloud it has graininess too, and looks like it ran up against a barrier, probably the sphere that holds the fog.Fromm the top in wireframe I can't tell which spheres actually touch and those that don't, guess I'll start assigning colors to the spheres based on altitude jsut to keep them straight. New Zealand you say, always wanted to visit there...:)My hubby's people are from New Zealand originally, (god knows why they moved to California). There's a castle that goes on the left foreground, I modeled from the Conway Castle, on the estuary of the Conway River...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=66445&Start=1&Sectionid=0&filter_genre_id=0&Form.Sea

As Aldaron said, make them positive and group. Grouping for itself doesnt solve all the problems. Experiment also with Fuzzy Factor & Quality. I discussed this subject in 3DCommune Bryces forum a long time ago, is sequence to my pic "The Monastery" (see link).

Fernando

Whoaa, Fernando, you did those clouds in Bryce!? You wouldn't happen to have a tutorial lurking somewhere do you? Those are the clouds I need for an image I'm doing about wild fires in Colorado....tut? please,please,please?

Sorry Zhann, I never got the time to do a full tut, although many people asked me for it after that pic. Its all Bryce 3D Clouds. There's no other tricks for doing that, except the ones I mentioned above, and LOTS of patience. Try a Bryce's forum search under my aka in 3DCommune, to see if my minitutorial about cloud artifacts is still there. I am returning to 3D after a long time away and trying to remember how to work with Bryce again. I hope to be posting soon. Fernando

Greetings nandus, the picture you linked to is absolutely stunning. I'm going to be keeping an eye out for any images you post. 8) Catlin

Thanks Catlin! I was to post a pic today, but Bryce5 keeps shutting down in the middle of a disk render, without any error message. I cant figure why, because I have plenty of swap file, 1Gb of RAM, and the Bryces file is just a bit over 100Mb. Im going to enable DrWatson and try to figure this out. Any ideas? Fernando

Well, I'm not watson, but I've had the exact same problem on my latest render (wich I will upload later this evening). In my case my CPU got too hot. Normally the air in the room is about 20 degrees, but now with all the hot wather the temperature can rise to 40 degrees in my room, that means it's a lot harder to keep the CPU-temp down. With this hot weather my CPU is about 66 degrees celcius (about 150 F) when it's doing nothing and that's far to high, so I opened the side of my case and pointed a big fan at it. The resulting increased airflow solved the heat problem for me.

My partner has had to up the fans in his system to 5 because of the hot weather, me I've only got 3. We were considering Doublecrash's suggestion of opening up the box and facing the main room fan at it, to cool it even further, but then we'd probably crash with overheating. 8) Catlin

I'm going to get a couple of new fans too. This external blower makes so much noise that my parents and brother and sister can't sleep, so I can't render at night.

Both my Mobo and CPU temps seem to be well inside limits during render. Problem is that it always happens during the night when I'm not around to check, but I'm sure that only Bryce shuts down, without any error messages logged in the Event Viewer. I changed Bryce's priority to Above Normal to see what happens. As a last resort I will render only winter scenes to keep my cpu cool :-) Fernando

Make sure you don't have any power saving schemes running or even screen savers. bryce doesn't like those.