***"I even wondered if the entire scene could be rendered with a terrain or plane turned vertical between the camera and scene that was matted with a sand texture and transparency turned up."***.

You're along a useful track there, skiwillgee. 

You can place a 2D Face (or Disk) Vertical; or a flattened cube, in front of the camera. Make it entirely transparent but with a little refraction, and apply a noise at high frequency to the bump channel. After a bit of fiddling you'll have a satisfactory grain effect that will scale reasonably well with render size (will likely need a bit more fiddling). If you want more "art" you can use a softly undulating terrain object instead of a flat one - with the same material applied, you'll get low frequency distortion along with the grain. You can also do this noise-grain thing with a reflective object, if you don't mind things being backwards. Bryce5 brought along blurry transmissions/reflections, which is another avenue worth exploring.

Obviously these will all put the render time up, but not horrendously so on a modern computer. And it's better than all this non-Bryce editing sacrilege.

In the immortal words of Val, here's one I prepared earlier. So much earlier, in fact, that it's a Bryce3D render from the previous millennium. This is all Bryce except for the Poser3 dog. I could even do trees back then, before Bryce5 came along. Beer and general decrepitude has made me forget how, and I can't even remember if the file still exists or on what disk (or where).

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