I am attempting in Bryce 5 to do a scene in a library and I wish to show the corner of a room with the shelves full of books. As I added books to the shelves the computer slowed to a snails pace and looking at the br5 file size it was almost 500Meg. At this rate my two walls alone will perhaps be three times that size ! What suggestions can you give me to allow me to continue with this project ? Bob

Depends how focal the books are to the scene but you could render them out with the same lighting setup as you are using for the final scene and them MAT the images to 2D planes. That would give you less size and less polys, but it depends greatly on the situation whether it works or not.

think you might achieve a better result if you just made elongated cubes with cylinders on the side. no reason to go high-tech on so many that will be on a corner somewhere.

Do a distance render on the front of the bookshelves and use it as a heightmap on a terrain + texture it from a regular render on the shelves. That way you can alays decrease the resolution of the bookshelves that are further away.

I forgot... Make the renders to be used for height map /texture from a top or front view. NOT with any perspective in it or it will look really awkward

Where you got those book textures? I nearly bashed out my brains trying to figure out how to do them...

MM Book Textures...Drew one book and replicated it along the shelf length. I then selected any cover at random and applied any texture that I could find in Bryce, terrains, metals etc. Wooden planks were good because the lines looked like book titles. Some of the individual books I had chosen I also altered their height to get rid of their sameness. Bob

Attached Link: http://uqconnect.net/wasteland/siege.html

Build one shelf of books. Render it in the scene where it will be. Do another render with the books and shelf selected and object mask turned on. Use leonardo to create a proportional 2d plane of the shelf render. Add the object mask to the second window of the parametric texture to create a transparency. Add this 2d plane to your working image. Move the bookshelf forward and shuffle the books around. Do another image and object mask render of the shelf in the new position Create another 2d plane etc.. until you have enough shelves. Check out flak's making of the siege tutorial It tells how to make 3d objects into 2d to cut render size.

. Dio Bookmark

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/tut.ez?Form.ViewPages=195

You should also read using alpha planes in bryce. It explains the basics that flak doesn't cover. for example, You want to apply a white clear atmosphere so your background books don't pick up a double dose of your final atmosphere and come out dark. One thing none of them mention is if you have an object casting a shadow on one of your shelves in the scene you should put it in for the render. Once you make the shelf flat any shadow will fall flat across it. Thats about it.

Thanks, briggsbob! I'll try that out when next I have some time. :)

Kylara's solution would get rid of the shadow casting problem, to save time you could just paint the heightmap in your favourite painting package. (Painting HFs can be a pain, but it's handy to get used to modding them, also do a search in renderosity on tif 2 pgm a handy util to give you more resolution for HF painting.)