Attached Link: Blizzard Hot Shot

I'm back again. :)  Just one of those things, you get the urge to start posting again and get inspired to do artwork. 

Here's my latest work.  Input appreciated.

mdb

Impressive!

Yeah, I'm starting to improve finally.  I was surprised with how well the whipping snow turned out.

Welcome back...well done...something funny about the engine smoke tho, but I'm not skilled enough in Bryce to say what.....still, it's a great render.. ...

I suspect what you're detecting is the combination of a high bump/ small scale to the cloud texture I used.  When I was going through some pictures of engines really "blasting" smoke out of their stacks, it maintained this high contrast and bumpy texture like far off storm clouds for a little ways outside of the stack, and didn't go soft and diffuse for a period longer than I expected.  So I accomplished that by using the afformentioned method to give the illusion of this same effect. 

So, that's possibly some of it.  I didn't use the same effect as much on the snow and steam as it blasted by the wheels, because of how the shockwave of wind has a tendancy to powder larger bits of snow into a very unfocused and low density cloud in comparison.

Yeah it's a resolution deal - might try increasing the rays per pixel or getting a larger image to work with, but smoke always looks wierd up close anyway - in their imagination, people probably don't expect it to be as thick as it really is. 

Cool...thanx for the explanation...never really looked that closely at engine smoke so I'll take your word for it based on your personal observations[the best way to learn]....great image once again.. ...

No prob.  I have a few books with great train pictures and a bunch of O. Winston Link calender's who's a major influence on me for lighting and image composition.  So that's where I noticed what was happening.

BM, you're absolutely right.  One pic I did ("A Good Summer's Day") I did some smoke research and noticed how thick coal smoke was behind the train, often obscuring the scenery and lingering as a pall for much longer than expected.  So I worked that into the picture.

IIRC I did a micro tut in a post a few years ago, after I did "Local Job" for how I created the steam and smoke there.  That's probably my best steam/smoke work to date.

I really like this one mboncher, the wind whipping the snow around is especially convincing.

Thanks Fran.  Now for the scary part.  Other than maybe a color dodge and burn over the pouring steel, and radial blurred sparks, this is all Bryce 5.  The snow is all Bryce, no enhancement, and only a little overall sharpening to get better clarity.  I wish I had Bryce 6

Wow!!! 

Anyone know how to share a procedural texture?  Whipping snow was one of my experiments for heavy driven snows in city street lights, so it's naturally colored orange.  But I just adjusted it towards the periwinkle to get the effect there.  Then used it again as a gel filter in the headlight to give the highly illuminated snow in the beam and changed that to just off white hinting towards yellow.  I was actually surprised at the powerful result.

I created it for "Bridge on a Snowy Night", but never had the same powerful effect.

Wouldn't you just save it as a preset...I'm certain Bryster or ICM could set you straight on that one...seems to me it's come up just recently here but I wasn't paying full attention.. ...

Yup, save as a preset.

If it was me I'd use a blank.mat preset or a blank.brt texture preset, and save the texture in there or the mat with the texture in it, in the .mat one...

Then of course you send it to me so I can have a look at it and play with it... lol!

Do you need more detailed instructions?  cos I could do you a few screen shots if you like.

Oh, if you need blank presets - www.franontheedge.com has them on that front page, just scroll down a bit if they aren't immediately visible.

Ah, I fergot that I already saved it as a mat.  So all I have to do is figure out how to email the file to you.  Personally, I'd love to know how to put it up as a freebie for everyone to use.  Then again, I have a few materials I'd love to do that for.  Was talking about doing that a while back in the forum then got distracted.

If you saved the mat to an empty preset file then you are all ready to go, if you didn't, then it's possible that the preset will be larger than the mat alone could make it, it's not easy to find a blank preset - which is why I put them up on my website - Agent Smith gave them to me, proper empty ones.

Sometimes we save presets to a folder without realising that stuff we deleted earlier will still be in the folder, just the preset thumbnail vanishing making the old mat impossible to see or use, but still lurking there - bulking it out.

mboncher, you probably already know this, so it's just for anyone else reading that didn't realise.

Nope.  didn't know this, so I learn something new today. :)

In that case I recommend getting a set of the empty presets as quickly as you can - the reason being - if you continually delete mats (or objects - or any other preset) from the list of thumbnails - it will (as I just said) only delete the thumbnail, not the object in the preset folder.

The bad thing about that is that after deleleting a lot of thumbnails, Bryce can freeze - and you can loose that entire preset folder.

In order to avoid this, I'd copy individual mats (and do the same with objects and textures if you've done any deleting in there) to new empty presets, that is blank.obj - blank.brt (textures) - blank.mat, and blank.bsk (skies).

No need to worry so much about blank.bto (trees) unless you make, save and delete a lot of trees - there is a tree preset also available on that site (www.franontheedge.com) but it's not empty, since the normal trees will always be in there - it weighs in at 48KB, at the basic level.

Oh by the way, a way to tell if a seemingly empty preset really is empty or not - they come as 3KB if empty.  Most presets in Bryce6 (or 5) do not arrive as empty but come with a few standard presets already in them, so deleting those and using it as your own empty one - won't be as good as starting with a genuine empty one. (User.mat being the exception)

Luckily I heard all the horror stories about loosing vast preset folders full of lots of lovely own made mats (or objects etc) just before I managed to acquire the empty presets from AS - I've never yet had a crash of presets or lost any presets due to this... feature - of Bryce, as I keep up my housekeeping. (More or less)