I don't know how to make a forest look really deep with Bryce 4. I could probably make it deep if I have a lot of trees, but that many trees would take up an ENORMOUS amount of memory. Is there a way of altering the atmosphere or haze to make the forest look deeper? If not, what can be done?

There are some 2D trees about. Try Looking for FOLEYPRO's work/freebies......

Well a few tricks to this. 1. Youcan do things with 2D cutout trees keep and eye on the light and the angle of the tree to the camera this works well. For distant pines you can do this cheap trick. You make a terrain and select the ground color and all. The you make a duplicate terrain and set it just below the original then apply the spikes filter to it and then apply a dark green texture to it. Thsi works quite well for distant trees not for close up trees.

You can also look for royc8's basic forest over at 3dcommune. It's a nice simple terrain with a bunch of 2D trees, you can just duplicate the trees for more depth.

If you want the forest to have consistant lighting, you can do it in stages. Build a 'row' of trees in the distance, render, (with an object mask), then apply to a vertical 2D plane object. Delete the original trees, -or move them closer and be sure to move them around a bit so they don't have apparent 'cloning"-, and repeat the process as needed. Leave your final set of foreground trees in place for your last render.

I usually start with a tree, then copy and rotate and size by random numbers to give the illusion of variety, then put in a 2nd kind of tree, sometimes a 3rd, and do the same thing. Oh, and I usually put the viewpoint close to the ground, looking up, so I don't have to fill in the background..there..I've said it..guilty as charged..;)

Would this work? Making multiple layers of trees and make them smaller and closer together farther away from the camera? It might take more time, but at least the trees wouldn't have to go off to infinity and, in theory, it should look more real.

In case that doesnt work, are there any 360 degree backgrounds that i could wrap onto the inside of a cylinder?

360 degree background; You can map any forest pic to cylinder. The hard part is the transition line fm 2d to 3d and matching colors/and 3d foliage to mimic the 2d pic. I tried this once with mixed results. Just thought of this. Render a tree line against black background/save image/map image to plane or cylinder/make black tranparent. Would that work, anyone? Image textures are also memory hungry.

Actually, the whole point of this project is to create a painting of a forest. The reason I can't simply make a painting is because I'm making a series of pics in the same scene but each one with a different camera angle. Also, I don't know how to paint. The main problem that I'm having is hiding the horizon. As long as the horizon can be seen, the forest does not look deep. Maybe that can help others help me.

How about creating a line of hills with the spike-forest to hide the horizon?

The problems: the spike forest looks best as a conifer forest. It takes a lot of polygons to look really good. Check "Heart's Ease Lake" in my gallery. The background forest had about 67 million polygons.

OTOH, you can download finished Xfrog models from Xfrog public plant repository. Fir or something, and use them for closer work. For more distant trees, you should postion them and create fake masks to create layers. but it will take time.

Or you could download the demos of Xfrog and Xfrog Tune from Greenworks and then create trees with much smaller level of detail in Tune.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=973241&Start=1&Artist=Nukeboy&ByArtist=Yes

I've tried the spike forest terrain and I agree that it works well as a far away forest. Is there a way to extend the forest to the camera? The detail needs to be higher closer to the camera.