I would like to have your comments on this one. I'm beginning on Bryce and it's my first project good enough to share with you. It's 100% Bryce. I created all textures myself (except the water). The plants and flowers are from 3dplants.com and the bird is made with metaballs and latices. Thank you for your comments/advices/suggestions etc.

I think you achieved a very good Depth of Field.Lillies could be a better texture,or play around in the terrain editor.Try random setting.Water looks good.Very good on a first post.Loking forward to more. Now let's hear from the real Bryce pro's.

I think a real Bryce pro just spoke. It's pretty cool. Much better than my early Bryce stuff. The lighting is a litle boring. You've lit it just with the sun? Maybe lower the sun and get some more extreme shadow? The bird model is very good for metaballs. Maybe some blurred reeds in the foreground?

What you need is a bit better textures: apply one of the leaf presets, but then take a photo and (if you have an image editor) pick various shades of green from it. Then just apply them in the Deep Source Editor. Modelling is great, but you also need a bit of postwork. Blur the transition between the wings and the body. Also, you'd need to put the wings (or the whole bird) on a new layer and apply motion blur, so it looks like it's flying, not hanging midair. Finally, lower the water-lily leaves lower into the water. But, all in all, very good. I especially like the coloristic difference which puts the accent on the bird and flowers.

Good first work.That blur thing that Erlik mentions can sometimes be done in Bryce...Duplicate the object and move it,say a wing on an up beat,then in the materials lab there is an option for fuzzy.This is in the dropdown menu top right.

Lots of good suggestions up there ^^^^. My first thought was that you could try playing with blurring the wings a bit to suggest the really high speeds those things beat at. I remember seeing these birds in a David Attenborough DVD and all they were was a body with this whirring blur either side of them where their wings should've been.

Thank you for your very good suggestions! For the blurr of the wings I tried a lot of different way to do it (fuzzy mat, using DOF, using almost transparent mat, moving camera, etc). I haven't found a the right method but I think I'll have to try a photo editor. It's difficult to have the same blurr effect on both wings and still have an interesting backbround to watch. For the textures you are right, specially for the plants. I'll rebuild them from scratch. What I dont understand is why the outer lilly petals are black! They are supposed to be all pink. Finally, I didn't play much with lighting and sky yet. It's lit only by the sun (very low and at 7 o'clock). Maybe I'll add a tree behind the camera to cast some shadows. We'll see. Well thank you again!

This is fantastic for a first posting and even though I don't know how much of the bird is metas and how much lattices you've put them together brilliantly. I do agree about the textures though, but as has been said, take bits of images with the appropriate colors and use them to make textures. You can also download many picture textures from the net that could help. Another thing you could do is play about with the different skies and lighting which can dramatically change the feel of your images. I'm certainly looking forward to what you come up with next. 8) Catlin

Hmm, for the outer lilly petals, I'm guessing your ambient colour channel for the lilly petal mat is set at too low a value as the underside of the outermost lilly petals are probably in shadow.