I figured I'd ask this of the masters here. I have a DOF render going in Bryce, and so far it looks fairly decent. Except, that is, for the estimated render time it is showing me. Three and half freaking days?! Um, I think not. Now I believe I heard it is possible to use a distance mask to simulate depth of field in post? The question is: how? What do I do? Oh, and in my scene it is raining. What's a good way to make a wet sidewalk? I have tried the 'duplicate flat surfaces, raise a bit, apply bumpy glass mat' trick, but I'm not too thrilled with the results, even after tweaking the material. Is there a better way? Its somewhat of a close-up shot, so it needs to look convincing.

Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks! :)

in terms of dof, there's three ways: 1. for complex scenes (like flak's skeleton battles), you'd be crazy to apply DOF in Bryce. It's easier to layer render towards the camera (first the background that's gonna be blurred and then the foreground). blurr. 2. Object masks. again, bg and fg. 3. PS plugins for camera blur or whatever. As for wet sidewalks, it depends how you're gonna do it. I mean the hardest, but best way, would be to model it in wings or whatever, and simply apply some sort of waves to the material, and define which parts are going to be underwater and so on. Otherwise, it's all in the reflection maps. off the top of my head, i've never really looked too much into either technique, i'm sure others will be able to help out more :) drac

Use a distance mask to simulate depth of field in post; http://brycetech.daz3d.com/tutor/bryce/mask3.html Wet sidewalk; All depends on the scene. I sometimes use the duplicate surface with a glass mat on it, but Bryce's glass is almost always reflective no matter what! (which sometimes I don't want, its too much) I'll take a material, and start increasing the reflection and sepularity on it to simulate wetness. Now, you will have to also increase metalicity (a lot) and decrease diffusion and ambience to balance it out. AS

"Oh, and in my scene it is raining. What's a good way to make a wet sidewalk? I have tried the 'duplicate flat surfaces, raise a bit, apply bumpy glass mat' trick, but I'm not too thrilled with the results, even after tweaking the material." This is exactly the type of scene I just avoid using Bryce for. Instead, I'd use an app that has a good particle system (for realistic rain and splashes), and multi-layer or composite materials and fresnel reflections for the wet sidewalk. The wet effect shouldn't be too hard to achieve in Bryce, however... There's some good suggestions above. As for the rain, what's your plan of attack for that? Trans-mapped planes/terrains or post?

there's a bryce raincube that i have from some freebie site somewhere, leave me an IM if you want it :)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1511432

The only problem I have with meathods like that for rain is that they're not practical for animation. How would one take into account the small splashes that occur on the wet surface of a sidewalk (for example) when rain hits it? In animated situations, I don't think postwork would be an option for such things, but I suppose metaballs can be used there. However, that would still be too impractical considering the system resources they crunch (you'd proabably need hundreds of thousands of metaballs in a larger scene to simulate the effect). Without a particle system, I dont' think Bryce is capable of such a simulation, or is it? Anyone have any ideas?

Must admit for animation I always stick to Max, I just enjoy using Bryce for some strange reason. With Max it's dead easy to use a particle system and Blur's rain material modifier to create the impact rings on the water surface. I don't think it would be at all easy to do in Bryce. I had kind of figured that this was for a still....

Yeah, Blur's rain material is good, but I was thinking more along the lines of the small splashes that happen on impact when rain hits a wet surface, and water is bounced back upwards momentarily. ParticleFlow in Max makes such an effect rather simple to do by "spawning" particles into smaller ones when they impact a deflector (or in this case the ground). Add some gravity and Blur's material, and you have some damn realistic animated rain effects. Something like that would be quite difficult (if not completely impossible) to duplicate believably in Bryce I'm affraid. :-(

Attached Link: http://www.kerlinsoftworks.com/software/ripplerain.htm

Thanks for all the suggestions and links. I will be sure to show you all what I come up with. :)