Back when I was doing art more regularly on Bryce, I'd come up with a technique to create very believable coniferous forests at a distance.  I've been experimenting on improving the methods of doing it through basic textures and terrains.  Does anyone else have any good tricks for doing that?

With something I learned watching some tutorials, I'm going to see about improving the technique with the DTE and some new textures if I can get it to work. 

I think Clay or foleypro was doing something like this as well.

If you have Bryce 7 you can use instancing, also Foley has a "2D" tree pack on Daz's site which puts tree images on 2D planes then you can instance them and not really bog down render times.

I've tried to use Instancing, but I must not get it, or am doing something wrong because it crashes my system every time so far.  And God help me if I try to use "Multi-Replicate".  Is there a patch out there I should be aware of?

Mboncher,

You are not searching in the right places for information. First, there is no patch, everything works fine so there is no need. If you were to spend some time at Daz3d Bryce forum you would see there is a lot of information available to you, much much much more than you can find here on Renderosity, but hopefully that too will change. Here is a link to a basic tutorial I wrote to get anyone going properly with the Instance Lab.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/3381/

Always, best bet is to get involved in the community over at Daz3d to keep relevant. Renderosity forum is not as active and up to date as it used to be. Hoping that will change soon.

Here is a link to my Renderosity Gallery as well so you can see how much work I do with the Instance Lab and why I believei it is worth the learning curve. I dont use any postwork so what you see is real. I also dont use 2d billboards because they require Blend Transparency mode to render and for some reason Blend Transparency is extremely slow to render when using good lighting. Good lighting requires more than just the default sun and some ambience glow from materials, good lighting often requires Light Domes or IBL (which is also just a light dome in theory). Bryce gets deadly slow when calculating all those rays traveling through blend transparent surfaces espcially when they are stacked. Stacked means that there are lots of blend transprent models along the trjectory a ray is traveling meaning it must traverse multiple generations before it is absorbed. In complex scenes wtih lots of instances, rays wil indeed end up traveling through multiple models which leads to deadly render times. Turns out 3d geometry is much faster rendering even though it requires much more resources in memory.

The IL does have problems, just nothing that we cant overcome once we know what to do.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=496780

Best of luck!!!

Thanks for the help Rashad.  I'll be checking all this out.

Depending on how far in the distance you're going all you might need is a terrain with some noise. That's how I made all the 'forrest' in this image beyond the 1st visible ridge: 
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=266155 

It's literally a terrain with some noise. Probably I added noise, blurred it, added a little more noise, etc. a couple times. The texture was quite noisy also. Due to the haze there wasn't much need for detail so the main thing to make things look believable was picking the same colors as the trees closer to the camera.

This particular trick definitely doesn't work for every case but it does render very quickly.