Good evening fellow Brycers'! After over 10 hours of continuous partial renders, tweaking, and just goin' out of my mind, I finally did what I believe to be a partial success. I know that there are a million mistakes but thanks to Deathbringer, I have a better understanding of this DOF thing!!! I have to say thanks to all of you out there that support the people who need help(me definately being one of them ;-} ) Please comment on this picture. It is kind of a silly scene, but I need the critisism whether it is bad or good! Thanks again to all!!!!

Nice job, but if you want to make it less grainy and coarse, I would increase the Rays per Pixel to something like 32 or 64 and you will get a finer result. Keep playing with it, otherwise good job! kaom

Thanks...Rendering for that will be a while though, right? I am using a Compaq 600mhz laptop with 196 megs of RAM. What about the Ray Depth, and TIR???

What's TIR? The raydepth can drastically affect the oucome oof you render, both in terms of quality and time needed to render. 600mhz and 196 MB of Ram isn't so bad, maybe a little slow but not horrible, my desktop only has an Athlon 600mhz, with 448 MB of Ram, so the difference wouldn't be huge.

Total Internal Reflection.....I have no idea what it is really for.

Attached Link: http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/Marbles.html

TIR is for stuff like diamonds, gems and such, also anything made with a glass or transparent material added to it, on stuff like cut jewels, it gives it that gleam like when you look at a diamond or ruby in a jewelry shop, that sparkle is caused by internal reflections.Also on your depth of field, might as well crank the rays up high if it's a fairly complex scene, will take longer but the results are worth it:-) here is a url to a Depth of Field Done at full premium rendering, done on a network rnder between two machines, took about 14 minutes: http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/Marbles.html

Clay, That's a very nice image! Love the inverted reflection. Guess that's the TIR effect you're talking about. Great example! I get that with some glass studies. Also love the 'floor' in that one. The marble reflections are great. :D

Can anyone give me a hint on what the Depth of Field settings in Bryce actually do?? I'm very familiar with working depth of field through my photography/cinematography backgound so the variables in Bryce 5 just confoooose me... Any ideas? TomD

You are very welcome and thanks for the kind words..

For me, the only sttings I use in Depth of Field are the Set to current selection. Just select the object you want to be in focus and go into render options and click set to selction, it will be in focus only in that area.

::nods:: to kaom Its just perplexing to me because I am used to thinking of depth of field as a zone of focus that you can control (somewhat)... I think the distance setting is the center of the focus point in Bryce Units...and the focal area is the percentage of that distance that's in focus centered on that area?? I don't know... TomD

In an attempt to conceptually understand DOF a little better I ran this test (see image) on something that I was working in. What continue to perplex me is that as lense radius goes *down* Depth of Fiel goes *up* (more focus). In the test image, Lense Radius is set as low as it can go.. 0.01 .. and you can see that she is starting to go soft even before we leave her face... So I apparently can't set the DOF on her eyes and keep her entire face in focus... Call me "Perplexed In Chicago"... TomD

TomD, Great image! It really shows the difference, I have a couple more images that I did, nothing spectacular, I will post in the next couple of days showing differences using the settings for DOF. I haven't imported Poser figures into Bryce 5 yet.....Is it easier than it use to be??hmmmmm..... :-}

Maybe I'm a glutton for punishement, but I don't find importing Poser figures into Bryce difficult at all. Yea, its not automatic, but what is? :-) One thing I do, though, is that once its imported and as I'm about to tweak the texture and material settings I group all the body sections that will share the same material settings into one Color Family so I can just select the whole lot of them and adjust them globally at any point. Looking forward to your images...I'm just about ready to call Corel and find out who's doing their optics and why they've never read a photography book... (Field of View behaves like Focal Length, etc. etc. rant rant whine) ;-) TomD