I am producing a short animated film in Bryce 3. I have PIII 733, a bucket load of ram and high speed HD. Problem: Most clips are 10 to 20 seconds in length. While some come out almost photorealistic others have this damm twinkling. I did a render of a craft approaching a city. Itlooks good until the city is reveiled and the whole thing twinkles and looks terrible. I realise the moving clouds could be the culprit. But how do I maintain the atmosphere without the damm clouds moving. If you have the answers for me, I would be very greatful. Marty

I've also been doing a lot of animating in Bryce 3D, and I think I may know what you're talking about. It sounds to me like it's probably not the clouds causing the problem in the example you mentioned, but more likely the material used on the city (I'm assuming the "twinkling" only happens on the city-object). I've found that, in the Materials Lab, setting the "Bump Height" value of the offending object's material to a very low value, or even to 0, will usually make a great improvement. It's also possible to make finer adjustments in the Deep Texture Editor with the individual component(s) driving the bump channel. Maybe you could try a test plop-render animation of the city with it's bump height set to 0 to see if that helps. Also, you should always use anti-aliasing when rendering animations, or things can get real messy (I'm assuming you are). -jakeh

The above is good advice. As far as the clouds moving, there is a "static cloudplane" (or something like that in the skylab (at least in my Mac version). Try that. Make certain you set it before you set any keyframes or you might find yourself having to untangle a small mess.