Hi, wonder if anyone here can help.

I love creating complex metaball surfaces, with positive and negative metaballs contributing to complex surfaces. 

I don't love the Bryce editor for duplicating and placing these, and was hoping that someone could advise me on techniques

I was wondering if I could

• import an .obj and convert it to metaballs?
• Or, manually edit a Bryce document to place metaballs on precise coordinates?

Never tried the first idea, but you can multi-rep MBs. This takes a lot of practise and some math but the results can be fun!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1551181

Quote - Never tried the first idea, but you can multi-rep MBs. This takes a lot of practise and some math but the results can be fun!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1551181

yes, I've done that -- results here:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=729470

Its rather painful to use the multi-replicate function to create something like this, so I was hoping to figure out how to either import spheres and turn them into metaspheres, or how edit a Bryce scene file to numerically place metaballs. Its not hard to figure out the locations where I'd like to distribute metaballs, but it isn't necesarily easy to [i]do[/i] it, which is why numeric control would be a plus.

Are we on the same page here?
Any Bryce object can be accurately placed using the [A] icon and inputting the co-ordinates.

If you just want to change spheres to metaballs, just ungroup and select all the spheres and click the edit tab and with your mouse hold down the arrows and move the mouse along to the metaball icon and that should change all to meta's. However, metaballs are smaller than regular bryce spheres so you will have to re-arrange!

Hope this helps!

Quote -
If you just want to change spheres to metaballs, just ungroup and select all the spheres and click the edit tab and with your mouse hold down the arrows and move the mouse along to the metaball icon and that should change all to meta's. However, metaballs are smaller than regular bryce spheres so you will have to re-arrange!

Thanks, yes, it does. I either had forgotten -- or never knew -- about that "convert" feature.

I should say that I'm not converting Bryce spheres . . . what I'm trying to do is to use the array and layout tools of Lightwave, and then bring the geometries into Bryce (nothing I've ever found does the complex material blending that Bryce metaballs do)

When bringing geometries into Bryce, Bryce seems to default to creating one mesh out many objects, in an imported multi object mesh -- unless you've assigned different materials in the original OBJ. In that case, you can ungroup the objects and then convert them to metaballs. If you convert without ungrouping, you just get one big metaball occupying the bounding box for the group.

Oh, I created a spherical arrangement of objects in Wings3D, assigned separately named materials in Wings, then exported as an .obj - imported that into Bryce and when I click on convert, I get a spherical array of metaballs - even without ungrouping them first.

However, if I simply import the spherical array without first giving each object in that array a separate material - when imported into Bryce, I can't ungroup the objects.