• For distant forested hills and mtns......create your terrain and go into the terrain editor and add alot of  noise...then apply a forest texture.

• creating a 3d mesh from a texture....I do this alot with fencing and brick walls.....take the texture into Photoshop (etc) and turn it into a greyscale where the lighter color is higher....darker lower.....use this pic in the terrain editor to create a terrain...smooth and adjust height to suit, then apply the color texture.

• when doing rivers make a bed layer with the gravel tex or moss tex...whatever you like...then add the water layer above and make it slightly transparent so the bottom shows a bit.

• for emphatic lighting...create a cone...enlarge and stretch it and apply the lit rays texture......go into the mat lab and make it more transparent to suit....slant that ray....looks like soft light......light streaming in a window etc

• If you are working on a complex pic for a long time...because I have read that Bryce uses Ram and doesnt release it...save and reboot.....and render

• for good textures of building materials......do a websearch for the materiasl you need...say brick.....some manufacturers websites have excellent pictures of their materials......take these into bryce and render.

*the sun...play with the sun alot.....when you set up a scene dont just offhand take the sky that you select as is....take the sun in the sun circle and move it around to see what effect it has...sometimes you can get some very nice lighting and shadow.

• clouds...the above mentioned about using greyscale images of textures can work really well in making clouds.

• and when you get freebies and buy meshes remember that if you can ungroup them you can save out the pieces and recombine them with other pieces from other meshes....for example if you have a japanese temple with a really nice tile roof that you can save on its own then you can use it to build your own temples.....

Dimeolas