any tutorials or comments on how to make water surrounded by land look beneath the land without it going under the world, in which case it disappears? Everything I do with water is at the shore line level. Bryan

Please clairfy your question a bit, The way you make water look like it is lower than the surrounding land is to, create a hole or a depression in your terrain. You position the terrain to be used as the ocean floor higher than the ground plane. And your water is a seperate flat object. siting on to of the ocean floor terrain. You do not use the ground plane as your water. Many delete this and never use it at all. As least I think this is what you wanted to know.

How do I create water in a non-terrain vessel, as in the large bowls of a fountain?

Vessels and fountains ??? Not in Bryce, my friend !!! Better start modeling Your own stuff and You WILL know how!!! Regards.

ummm yes you can do this! Bryce can do almost anything that the big boys can! http://www.brycetech.com/tutor/bryce/liquid.html BT

Thanks brycetech. Nice to hear from someone who knows what he's talking about...

I'm always amazed at how people come out with these blatant statements of "you cannot do this in this or that" when they don't know the program... BT is right, you can do this in Bryce and it's easy once you know how... an even easier way of doing this is to use the flat circle to create a "water surface" within something, say a fountain, or in this case, a backyard pool... So, this is the quick and dirty backyard pool: Get a torus, stretch it out using one of the corner handles to make it big... Go to radius and change it to 128... Give a texture... Give the landplane a texture... Then take the flat circle and in the aerial view, stretch it out so that it fits within the hole in the torus, but is slightly bigger than the hole so that it goes into the torus... Give the flat circle a water texture and tah dah! you got water in a backyard pool... :) I'll also mention that this took me less than 5 minutes in Bryce... Guaranteed, it would take 2 hours in 3D Studio Max and would not look as good... :) Moral of story: use the right tool for the right job... :)

Simply brilliant. Thanks, Trad:)

Anytime Mark... :)

You can also try using a terrain as your water object.The difference between a flat circle with a water texture applied and a "real" bumpy object can make all the difference. There are tutorials on how to do this, but in essence you just need to go into the terrain editor and use a fractal to create your own waves. The advantage of this method is that you can create a water object in any shape you need by painting out (clipping) the outline of your fountain. (You'll need to flatten the terrain on the Y Axis so it's almost flat) Big Tip: Subtlety is the key here. Keep an eye on the scale of the waves you paint! On a personal note: It does get annoying when people dismiss Bryce far too quickly. You only have to take a look at some of the truly inspired images that have been posted here at Renderosity to see that Bryce is capable of almost anything, and that it's rendering quality is better than almost every 3D program out there. So There!

I agree that for some purposes, using terrains works better, like, for creating waves and large bodies of water.. However, for smaller situations, like a fountain, a glass of water, etc, it's easier to edit the texture to get more bumpiness into the overall look of the water... It also takes up less memory, so it renders faster...

Here's a great way to create waves for a water terrain (advanced knowledge of Bryce required!): 1-) Head into the Deep Texture Editor. 2-) In channel 1, use the Waves noise in 2D. Add a couple octaves to it. 3-) Copy it into channel 2, rotate it a bit, set the blend mode to Add. 4-) use a low-contrast Clip filter on each channel to keep everything from clipping (don't want flat wave crests!) 5-) There's a special key combination you can use (I think you can option/alt-click on the texture preview) to rip the texture preview to the whole screen, much like the Terrain Editor Room's "RIP to screen" menu choice. 6-) Take a screenshot, and voila, instant waves terrain! I can't remember the key combo offhand, but you can find it in Real World Bryce 4 (which all serious Brycers should get!!!) -flick

Yeah, this is good news flick... Definitely the texture editor has a lot of possibilities that are not explored cause it's initially somewhat daunting... :)

I don't know the funky key for 'fill texture to screen' but I think you'll like this one, Flick -- in the Terrain Editor, hold down command and option while clicking on the Picture button (not the pictures tab, but the one in the elevation tab which opens a file finder dialog for importing pix). it goes directly into the DTE and uses the result as the terrain in full 16 bit greyscales (you only get 8 bit greyscale if you copy a screenshot and paste it into the terrain editor...) -calyxa

Here's a fountain I did in about 5 mins...the water is a grayscale done in Photoshop. Just remember, terrains and symetrical lattices are your friends!!! Jared

BTW - tradivoro, thanks for the tip about the discs for water! For some reason I never thought of using that. I've just been using booleans! Talk about the hard way!

Anytime... I'm a big fan of doing things the easy way... :)

However, sometimes, the only way to do something in a particular scene is booleans... Just an afterthought... :)

I agree with Jared, terrains and lattices are your friend. This fountain took about 15 minutes to make, using a few terrains,booleans and toruses. (water splash texture by chemicalstudios). As far as increasing file size or rendering time,I feel that extra time spent making a better model and getting a better image is extra time spent very well indeed... :) Big Robot

I definitely agree that sometimes this is good, but when you have a lot of elements in the scene that have a lot of terrains and lattices, it really starts making that file immense...