Has anyone got any tips for a really good silver material in Bryce? I've used the chrome, but it has a lot of blue in it, and when I shift that to black, it often doesn't look very realistic. I've tried some of the other "silvers" in the Materials but they seem to lack "punch" (I'm sorry, that's the best word I can think of!) Any ideas? Thanks!

Use the brushed silver texture. The only blue on that one blue comes from the reflection of the sky. To eliminate getting all those colors from the relfection on your object you can set the metalicity of the object. Basically the higher the metalicity setting, the less the reflection takes over the color of the surrounding and the more the color stays the same as the actual texture.

Thanks for the tips. Ummm, this is going back a ways, but does anyone remember the old Commodore Amiga? I remember (and this is many years ago) an image that was often used to show off the machine's graphics capabilities. It was a silver ball floating in the sky. It was highly reflective, but very sharp and detailed. (Or has my human memory improved the image with time?) I think I have seen similar images on the Internet, but again it was years ago and I don't know what platform or app was used. Anyone know what I am talking about, and can Bryce do something like that? I tried it using different silver materials and the tips above, which provide interesting results, but often my silver ball looks more like it's made of glass! I do make sure that fog and mist are turned off and have sky shadows up pretty high. I don;t know, something seems to be missing. The pictures I am talking about look like a shiny silver "pinball" floating in the sky. Anyway, thanks for the tips! RayRaz, how did you make those strange objects in your images? They are wild! Best to all... Does anyone remember the Amiga?

Commodore 64? I've used those 3 hours of my life. Haven't seen that image though I think. I've also used an old Atari once. Fun little thing an OS like win 3.1, but way before win 3.1 was made. I could program on it a little. I made the objects in Amapi. I made a cilinder and made some small ring shaped extrusions at the sides. I then did a bezier smooth and bended the object. I understand you basically want a reflective sphere floating in the sky reflecting it's surroundings? That's the first thing most of us make in bryce. We call it 'the (reflective) sphere floating over water' concept.

[ot] I used to render fractals with my Commodore 64. Took two days for one simple image. But I loved that machine. 64 k ram... wow... ;-) [/ot]

I had a commodore vic 20, which really can't be called a computer although at the time it was sort of, but I didn't have any of the periphials that were needed like a tape deck. Therefore, all I ever did with it was plug it into the tv and play some text games with it. No monitor, no hd, no floppies yet. Very primative. My next step up was a Tandy (still no hd) but had a monitor and a 5 1/4 floppy drive. :-D the good ole days!

I remember my grandfather told me he build his own tape-unit for his very first computer. He was one of the first people to have a comp. Everytime you started it you had to program everything you wanted to do, so he took a tape unit that's usually used to play music and made it write his programs on the tapes. It wasn't the best way to save things, most of the time tapes got corrupted, but it was way better then nothing. I also know that my father (he repairs mainframes and other big computer systems) once got to a customer to build in a new disk and the customer told him he had a color monitor. So the customer showed him the brand new very expensive color screen (3 or 4 colors or something) and when he switched the thing on it said poof and some smoke came out at the top of the screen. Those days color screens where really new and my father thought colors wheren't neccesary for anything so he was somewhat amused by it. want more stories about old computers? I know one or two more.

Actually I was talking about the AMIGA, which came out after the Vic 20 and 64 (and the 128). I started on Commodore with the VIC 20. It had a "datasette", cassette storage system. It was much more reliable than a standard tape recorder (as was used at the time by APPLE and ATARI) because it used "pulse code modulation" for storing data. It also "verified" a file save by writing to the tape twice (in case the first pass didn't lock in, the second pass might) Slow as molasses though. There was a floppy drive available, but it cost more than the computer! The VIC 20 made learning BASIC extremely simple (much easier than learning it on the Apple II or ATARI) and Commodore was a very friendly company then. They had some cute little programs, including word processors and a primitive spread sheet on a cartridge. The tech manuals for working these things were really bad though. Mostly, you had to do the programming yourself. They changed their attitude after the Commodore 64 came out (they were then battling ATARI-- no contest there) and were a much less friendly company. Customer service was notorious for answering the phone, putting you on hold and then hanging up! Then came the 128, which by then had a floppy drive (the datasette was long gone) and a whopping 128K of memory! There was something called the 128D that started a lot of problems for Commodore and that's when they dropped the whole thing in favor of the AMIGA. The negative attitude of the company for its customers became legendary, even getting an article in a major magazine asking "Why are people loyal to Commodore"? when it treated customers so badly (i.e. raising prices unexpectedly, dropping models without warning, offering no tech support, etc.) The AMIGA was kind of DOS based (used AMIGA DOS), yet had a GUI like MAC (when PCs only had MS-DOS). AMIGAS were marketed badly, only sold in specialty AMIGA stores which were few and far between. It had a programmable stereo synthesizer music chip, color display (16 colors?) and multiple hard drives. It also used multitasking. There was a seperate processor for CPU, Video and I/O function. It had a lot of promise. But it was slower than molasses. I never owned one but had a friend who did. It took about five minutes for the machine to boot up and it was also rather noisy and bulky. They weren't going for looks. The desktop looked rather cheezy (MAC had much better graphics, even though they had not achieved color yet) and no attempt at postscript for type. It took ten minutes to display a fancy color picture that today we expect in less than a second. If there was ever a drive problem you had to fix it with complex programming, no utilities that I recall. But it was a popular machine with some folks. By then, I was into MAC (the LC) and so it goes. The last I heard, years ago, was that a company in Japan had bought the rights and specs from Commodore and was planning to reintroduce the AMIGA with a number of improvements to make it rival MAC and Windows. But that never came about. End of Computer Memory Lane 101

Amiga was the next step up after the 64. (Still have them both, BTW, but haven't fired them up in years, so I don't know if they're still operational.) Considering that most of the people buying those type of computers were geeky teen guys (points at self and says, "Guilty!") someone was really astute at naming it Amiga (Girlfriend). :^)

wasn't there a link in this thread earlier to a good silver texture? i think by agent smith. i didn't download it earlier because i was logging in from my laptop. now it isn't here. or was i dreaming? :-(

No, AS started a new thread for that. It's not in this one.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=107&Form.ShowMessage=1388289

thanks for the link.