Hi. I made a small stone lantern thing in wings. It imports into bryce fine. I selected one of the default Bryce textures and rendered out a test image. It rendered fine. Turned on the premium settings and true ambience and when I hit render, it rendered with a whole lot of black speckles everywhere. Any ideas on how to render it in true ambiece without the speckles? Thanks. David

Increase the rays per pixel setting.

I set it to max 256 rpp and I am still having the problem :( Thanks for the suggestion though. David

Try reducing the bump%

Can you post a pic - let us see it?

another possibility, try using the 'world cubic' setting in Bryce mats, which seems to work better on Wings models (why..I dunno..;)

Quite a lot of the imported meshes I've tried under True Ambience do not render properly - either completely black or partly black.

Just a guess, but if the black 'speckles' correspond to individual polygons then there's a possibility of "reversed normals". I don't really know what a "reversed normal" is but I do know I've seen blacked out polygons in other renderers that have been attributed to reversed normals.

If Wings has a feature to correct reversed normals (I've seen similar on the export options of some modellers) then you could try that.

Bear in mind that your model will look facetted (non smooth) under TA anyway, so it might be easier to try another render method.

Yeah, if I remeber correctly, it's a known issue with Bryce. I used to get it a lot with glass textures.

Well its not a problem with the model because the ground plane is also affected.

Peter - reversed normal; It just means the information held for the polygon is facing the opposite direction. Imagine a single sided polygon; it'll render one side but not the other. You'd think that if this was the case then why does the polygon render black? Why does it render at all? That's something I don't get yet. I do know that once, I played with .obj meshes in a text editor and tried stripping varius information from models exported in different formats. It made a difference to some, not to others. I could never find a universal fix. @David God knows what that is - I certainly don't, sorry :-/

Crickey, in all my time messing with True Ambience (a lot) I have never seen that render effect/error.

Can you take out the model (delete from scene) and replace it with a Bryce sphere with the same texture - then render again? That should tell us if this is something induced by the model or inherent to your Bryce setup.

Which version are you running?

Thanks for the info, Len. I'd guessed it was something like that but had never followed the hunch with research.

Its not the Model. Maybe a Map applied to Light or sun in the scene like in the shadow settings....Under the Object there is NO disturbence so that might mean the Shadows...?

Nothing to do with the "render as solid" setting?

pumeco-- I believe that Bryce automatically adds backfacing polygons to your model (at least, if you render within an imported model, the backfacing polys are there, and Bryce does roughly double the poly count of any imported model). If so, this should explain why reversed normals are rendered properly in Bryce (but at the great expense of massively increased poly count--a poor trade-off in my opinion).

@shinyary2
Aaaaaaaaah, that explains why it still renders a polygon then. I wondered why it doesn't create a hole effect when the normal was reversed.

I'm thinking Bryce is only giving material properties to the original normals, but not the ones it adds to the model, as it were.

The effect on the ground is the interesting bit. Must be reflective based on the fact that there is nothing "under" the model.
Wings has an "auto-smooth" function which solves a number of problems...it might also align normals correctly for you...either that or "cleanup"

Message edited on: 03/18/2006 16:33

Hi all. Thanks for all your support. While I cannot say what the problem was (since I don't know), I can say that I found a very easy work around. Basically I open a default bryce scene and clicked the daz studio button. On DS opened I imported my object, then sent it through Daz Studio back into Bryce. Whatever Daz studio did it took care of my problem. Yay Daz Studio! Of course by this time I had thought up a better idea for my scene. Anybody know of some sword making tutorials for wings? Picture is 50 % done, with 20 trees a spot light and a moss covered tree stump. All that's left is the sword Gram, and to tweak the lighting, oh and the 2 week long render :p Thanks. David

Now THAT'S interesting. If it's powerful enough to sort that out, I wonder if it would stop the facetting on figures imported through Studio?

Maybe...I've never imported Poser people into Bryce before.... David

"...I wonder if it would stop the facetting on figures imported through Studio?" No chance.

"Picture is 50 % done, with 20 trees..." I guess this means there was a solution to your render time problem.

Oh, the render time is going to be horrible. I mean that image is 50...well 65 % created in wireframe. I still have to model and texture a sword and tweak the spotlights before I do a complete render with TA and DOF at 64 RPP. I will probably do a smaller render first to post, before I do the print size ones. If my mac could hate me, it would hate me with the passion of a thousand burning suns :) David