On the subject of lighting in Bryce, there are many different ways obviously. I have found the dome lighting method to be the best. I have tried the "fake global illumination" with the white spheres, but that only seems to work with glass (transparent) materials and as many of you have seen, all the examples use glass!!!. The fake "hdri" stuff also looks good, but still better with a few lights, unless you are using perfectly reflective items. It is important to note that in real life, you have neither global illumination OR point source lighting. Even on the sunniest clear days, shadows have detail in them. And true global illumination only occurs in carefully setup photo lighting. Have you ever noticed how crummy most people's photographs look?? Its because they are shot outside using the sun. The ONLY, O.N.L.Y., reason that professional photographers photographs look so good is because of the carefully setup lighting, and this is a fact. Soft shadows only occur on cloudy days, and in photography studios. But like those setup photography sets, Bryce images look best with careful lighting setups. As in real life, when we try to use diffuse or global lighting in Bryce, we lose texture and bump mapping. You need direct light at an angle to see the bumps clearly. So what is the best solution? Hell if I know! I have read everyones posts on Bryce lighting and I thank you all for your tips. I have done a simple lighting test describing the many methods of Bryce lighting tricks and tips. The first image is this simple image of 3 spheres and the normal default Bryce sky and sun. Its not too bad, and its not so great either. I did have to use soft shadows because the normal shadows are just too unrealistic.

Next is the same thing, but with 20 reflection on all objects. This at least fakes some radiosity and gets rid of the black shadow area on the objects

Next is dome lights plus regular sun and default sky. a bit better. long rendering time. The problem is the bright spot you get on the "ground". Needed to up the materials ambience so the spot wouldnt look "burned" in.

Next is the ambience sphere, or HDRI sphere. I am using just a white sphere here as I do not have any proper HDRI images, but I believe you can use any photograph even if not properly compensated. This one has no reflection, which is NECESSARY for this to work right. Just pretend the hdri image is a white wall!!

Now we add some reflection to the materials, and wallah! Oh by the way, in this image and the previous ambience sphere, there are NO lights, no sun, no atmosphere!

Now we crank up the ambience all the way. 100 percent on the objects, as well as the sky dome and shadow ambience which were up in the first two ambience spheres. The image looks like 2D photoshop garbage. If god had wanted our images to look like this, he would not have created Bryce.

also, no lights at all in the previous image, atmosphere off. Now my favorite, and it cannot always be used. Its the simple light dome. No sun, atmosphere off, sky off, all ambience off on all objects. It looks the most real to me. Those stupid spheres suddenly look pretty cool, don't they?

Last is the fake hdri, fake total global Illumination setup. A white sphere around the whole scene, no lights or atmosphere, or sun. Shadow Ambience turned to white, sky dome white. Objects made 100% TRANPARENT. It only works this way which is why it is so limited. But the scene actually looks cool, and real. Why? Because the white haze fools us into thinking its properly globally lit AND is getting total radiosity from the surroundings. But, bump textures will never show and there are all sorts of limitations. Oh well.

WHOA!!! Thanks! This is very informative. Cool! I shall have to save this!

complete and well explained! thank you!

I see that little bit of information I gave you is paying off, nice work... I really like the last one, it looks awsome, I gotta play around some more. I've been rendering one for 36 hours, and it's still going, I'm rendering huge though, 2800x2100 pixels. Great work man!

Yes, KAOM, thanks for your help. Now lets figure out how to do it without translucency, or with something other than white!!

There are a few light setups represented here, Funco. The Global Reflection (HDRI) technique works wonderfully in many instances, try a web search for 360-degree imagery and you'll find all kinds of stuff. Several methods you are leaving out are the Bryce 5 advanced render techniques. Foremost is true Ambience, which wonderfully lights a scene but at the cost of horrible (un-animatable) render times. This method is radically close to true Radiosity. Also, the Blurry Reflections/Blurry Transmission methods. Try your last scene, with a 360-degree image map, and with Blurry Reflections on (at 64RPP it's tolerable), then you determine the blurriness through a particular materials specularity level. Good luck!

Attached Link: http://claygraphics.phase2.net/Ball.html

My thoughts? you all use to many lights to do one simple thing LOL using a basic 3 light set up and Bryce's just simple backgrounds. http://claygraphics.phase2.net/Ball.html

Shadowdragonlord: Agreed, with blurry reflections and transmissions, the see through quality of the objects will be more masked. Ill try some maps soon. Clay: I love all your images, and you may well be right. Im checking the link now. I actually do not know what your "basic 3 light setup" is. Will try it immediately. Thanks

Attached Link: http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html

Here's a tutorial someone posted in here on the 3-light set up. It's basically the same thing that professional photographers use, except that they bounce their flashes off some other object to make the light more diffuse, rather than lighting directly like in the tutorial. I suppose you could point the spotlights away from your subject in bryce toward cut open spheres or something that bounce light back onto the subject when you turn true ambience on, but I suspect that direct lighting with soft shadows would accomplish the same results with much lower rendertimes.

3 point lighting is great, but what about reflections? I'm not using any lights in my scenes, just global illuminaiton from the sphere. I'm not quite understanding you.

A simple 3-light setup is wonderful for simple scenes, or when one is trying to take a "model" image of an object or scene. But, alas, it is far too simple for the complex scenes that many of us create these days. Especially for scenes where there IS sunlight and other visible light sources. In this scene, so far I have a 4 radials and 2 spotlights. One radial each for the candles, with Soft Shadows set to 30 on the small, purple candles, and all of them set to Squared falloff instead of linear. One spotlight outside the window, set very light (30) and also to squared falloff. And one "key" spotlight, illuminating the front of the desk and whatnot, this one alone set to linear, but also very soft (20). The main focal point, the sword Thorn, isn't lit properly at all yet. The lighting isn't conducive to really viewing the sword, or to drawing the eyes to it. Also, I'm working at the sword's materials and I just modeled a new display stand for the sword, but haven't textured or inserted it yet. This scene is still a WIP, but I thought it would better illustrate a more realistic use of multiple lghts WITHOUT a light dome or GI or True Ambience or any of that stuff. Render time just over an hour, due to the Soft Shadows on the smaller candles. It's less than 20 minutes with the SS set to 0. Note that, again, the only lights with SoftShadows on at all are the two small candles. Thanks for looking.

Also, I know the candle-flames aren't really up to par, and plan on fixing them before I finish this image...

Shadowdragonlord! Are you trying to hurt my feelings with that image??!!. LOL. Its a beautiful image, and explaining just how you set up the lights is very helpful. Yes, there are situations where you simply need to carefully light all portions of the scene just right. For instance, if you wanted to light the stuff under the table better (not that you would, I like it where it is) you could turn up the ambience of the objects or of the entire scene, or put more light under the table, but it wouldnt be easy.

Aye, Funco, the under-desk lighting has been an issue throughout. I'm not sure this "shot" calls for the under-desk to even exist, but it makes it SEEM a desk, as opposed to a simple table. Truth is, it's a simple model of my own home PC desk, minus the top shelving (which is atrocious, but I don't have a real window behind my desk yet in real life). I played with the reflection and ambience values, and I daresay that the two simple, older props I made (the crate, the wooden box) aren't really up to snuff. Most of the lighting in this scene is how I envisioned it. Now, I just keep adding and tweaking props until I hit my RAM limit. I think the window frame's material sucks, but the desk turned out better than I anticipated. Wood textures are from Mayang, and the wall texture is Doublecrash's? C4D wall texture. Thanks for the compliments, I actually started this image after I read your thread, not to prove a point but to challenge myself a bit. Something I learned from it : if a light's shadow's aren't interfering with the realism, leave them alone, or turn them off completely. IN this scene, the main visible light sources are the candles and the (fake, spotlight) sun. With Softshadows set to 0, the small candle's produced an unrealistic perfect round shadow, instead of the subtler fade you see here. But I agree with Clay, in that oftentimes you don't really need hundreds of lights in a complex and render-instensive scene. Optimization is the key, remember, although we are doing still-frames a lot right now, as 'puters get faster all of our scenes will be more readily animatable. So, in my opinion, it's best to approach every scene that way. What if I DID want to animate it? Even a simple camera flythrough? It's much, much easier to create a scene with this in mind than it is to go back and try to re-compose a scene to make it animatable.... I'll post a new thread for this image as it nears completions, but Funco I hope to see more of your stuff and more of your ideas in the future! Don't ever hesitate to "feel stupid" or whatever, we are only here to learn more stuff, and advance in the areas where each artist overlaps...