I've made a few major changes, the water is different, the dragon tail is gone in favor of a pair of adventurers on a cliff, and I re-layered the lighting so that there are no artifacts from the volumetrics. Someone suggested doing the volumetrics in Photoshop, but alas, the lighting wouldn't reflect into and through the wter if I did the light-cone in postwork... SO... Any better? Worse? This is the raw composite of Bryce renders, the base render with the volumetric render layered on top in the, "Lighten", mode. I added a tad of glow to the woman's light sphere and the man's torch. What do you think...?

And here's an (overworked) postwork version. KPT6 Equalizer, smoe Flaming Pear Aetherize, Glare, and Glitterator, and the usual color and contrast balancing through Photoshop 7... I plan on adding a large dragon in the back of the cave. Faint, and subtle, so that your eyes almost miss it at first. Gonna be rough, I'll have to export the terrains into Poser to get the Millenium Dragon to look right, then I'm gonna chop off it's head and use my own head that I modeled in Rhino.... That's the plan, anyway! Thanks for looking...!

Starting to look realllly cool. I liked the first water, it looked like turbulence bubbling up from underneath, but this looks tighter I think. I also kind of agree with the early comments on the eggs being similar scale. My guess is that the trick in hiding the background dragon will be in the texturing...something that looks close to what the cave wall is. Keep us posted...I like where it's going.

project the dragon on the back wall with a spot light or 2 real low numbers and maybe a negative one also.

project the dragon on the back wall with a spot light or 2 real low numbers and maybe a negative one also. this ones is a lot better than the first.To me the water looks better in the second one. my 2 cents

Fan-bloody-tastic. A great image, I wouldn't dare presume to be of a standard where I could offer any helpful suggestion.

This is a super Image, I like the first one. Not sure if it's my monitor but the dragon is invisible except the eyes. A bit of softer light or specularity on his mat to catch some light on his edges. Can you move the explorers just a bit to the left and up a smidge, their presence pulls the viewers eye back to far away from the rest of the scene. Super work. Love story scenes like this.

rescale eggs. glad you took out those shiny jewellry like stones. ..ie..the volumemtrics. I like it..add the dragon..see how it finally turns out..

Aye, thanks for all the support everyone... Draw - Don't be ridiculous, it's just some terrains and crystals and a pair of poser-people, so far! And blowing holes in the ceilings for volume lights is something I've done before with measured success, so I feel kinda cheap in doing more volumetrics. ICM - that's a great idea, if I at least put the people and cliff along the line that the volume light produces, they might serve as less of a distraction and more of an element. Wildman - Do you mean to add the dragon as a light? I merely exported the Millenium Dragon and imported it into Bryce. The problem with the MDragon is that Bryce can't hold more than three of them in a scene, no matter how much RAM you have, but luckliy this scene only calls for one, so far. Claymor, Erosia - Forgot to do the eggs, but they're up next, as soon as I get this damn dragon to actually work...! I've already posed and imported then posed and imported twice...

I really liked the first one better. The tail of the dragon leaving the nest is what really made the picture outstanding, in my opinion. It was like showing a deadly creature briefly slipping away, leaving the glittering eggs shining on their own. Did that sound wierd? Can't explain it, but the first one was my favorite.

yes, sort of, make a gel from a pic of the dragon, cast it on the back wall from the spotlight. lot less expesive than the whole dragon (ram wise)

Well... Awesome Render and the Lighting is superb,The Textures are Perfect... I was reading this and looking at the awesome pic and then I read that Bryce could only handle 3 MilDragons in a scene and I just had to Prove that wrong...I have 6 in the pic I have attached and I am sure that I could do another 6 with no problem and Maybe even more...I am doin a pic right now that has almost 800,000 Poly's alone in just the Grass Blades...Not too mention Two MilBigCats and Numerous Tree's and rocks and Bushes and the Eagle...

Hmmm. If you could combine the volumetric from the first one and the rest from the second... although I can't see the dragon either. BTW, I have a pic with 68 million polygons. The WIP I posted recently, the house, has more than half a million. How big is a MD? Could you use MD LE for a background dragon then?

Excellent scene, sir, I would raise the cliff little bit higher, but it is very good the way it is, already...

Looking forward to see the final image ! :)

@ FoleyPro :)

Bryce can handle as many polys as you want !!!

File DRAGON.DXF 871414 faces ; size 126 Mb
Rendering time 14 hours, material is regular glass, no bump map !

As BryceTech sadly discovered, you cannot have more then 1 milion polys per object, but that's the only limit ! :D

DUH! I've only just realised that those are crystals. Don't really like them, to be honest - the colours are too brash. The new figures are good for establishing scale, but you have to look very closely to see why the man is holding his right arm that funny way lol. And now that it's gone......I miss the dragon's tail :^( Water rock lighting A1!!

And here's a quickie of the Millenium Dragon after hours of posing and importing, then ditching, posing and importing, then ditching... I know, it gets old but oh well.

Aye, Dragons Everywhere! Wildman, I'll keep that in mind, should this fail, but so far so good...! Foleypro - I noticed one difference in your 6-Dragon Triumph... Alas, they're all the same dragon. Same pose, same texture list I assume, too? I don't think it's a RAM problem, there's no shortage of that here. I think it's something to do with Bryce choking on the Image Texture file lists, with more than one different dragon setup. I'm certain you could multi-replicate a hundred or so dragons, if you had enough patience. Kemal - I don't know what Brycetech was doing, but the main, "floor" terrain in this scene has 8,388,608 poly's alone. The Millenium Dragon, as posed, has just under 123,000 polys. Nothing too extreme, like I was saying I think it's Bryce's internal name management (yet again!) that crashes when you have more than three MDragons. It doesn't even really crash, it just freezes and never recovers. This is on an Athlon at 2 GHz with a gig of RAM.... But now that I think about it, perhaps if you export with "Exact Names except Spaces", perhaps Bryce could handle it? I'll try it... So... Crystals suck, tail was cool. Got it... (grins)

Friggin' Awesome improvements SDL... 8) My preference is the first image. Super work mate.

yep... Hmmm time to try and Choke Bryce....

I think BT was talking more about imported models, internal B5 stuff, like terrain, dunno about that, but that was his statement, lol. Me, on the other side, I have never had such problem, my own highest poly model was 500000 polys, and I had, terrains about 2-3 mil polys alone... Anyways, as I said before, awesome work, man !!! :D

Not true in any case. If I'm not wrong. For terrains, definitely wrong, cause the background forest in Heart's Ease Lake is 67 million polys. I THINK I imported an XFrog tree which had 1.5 million polygons, but I have to re-check. But I think that Brycetech spoke about the number of particular object, like a million cylinders and so on. SDL, I also think that grouping plays a role. Now I remember having problems with MD LE in Lazing, cause it would crash Bryce if I checked everything when exporting from Poser. I don't remember what I left unchecked. But I got objects for body, claws front and back, teeth, mouth... I think I left that "exact names" unchecked.

Message edited on: 11/14/2004 16:26

Here's a quick update, I need to relight the scene, and it feels terribly empty down in the bottom left... This is just the volume render, no layering done yet with the (necessary) non-volumetric render. Thanks for your patience and appreciateion, everyone!

Hmmm...In my minds eye I saw the eggs going closer to the scale of the larger one and the dragon helping with the empty bottom left issue roughly covering the sketched area based on the first pic you posted...kind of curling around the "nest" protectively. If you keep the adventurers though they'd probably have to get bigger if your dragon goes this size.

(Sorry for copying your work I just thought it was easier to show than talk through. I've already scrapped the file.)

No need to be sorry, Claymor. Best way to explain what you were thinking... That's more what I was envisioning, as well, although posing and inserting the dragon has been a total bitch so far. I'll try that kind of pose, we'll see how it goes! If it does work, I'll probably keep the people the same size. I like BIG dragons.... you know?

I like Claymors suggestion. The re-position looks great.