I see beautifully lit renders on high-end 3D sites, that just kill me, and those are just the grey shaded models sitting on a floor. I want to make my lights in Bryce 4 match those in higher-end renders. This would involve faking Radiosity, Ambient Light/Global Illumination, and even glare. Radiosity is the trickiest of tricks to fake in Bryce 4, I still have yet to try doing it with some of the tutorials I have found online. What I am attempting here is Global Illumination, and already I can see what I have more to do to make this work. The model in my picture here is surrounded by sixty-six spotlights creating a semi-sphere shape around the model. Spotlights are linked to the model in the middle. Photoshop is used to ramp the effect of soft glow and glare glow. What I believe I need to change...is to have a configuration of about one hundred lights forming two semi-sphere's one inside of the other, with the model inside of that. That configuration along with varying light strengths should be close to what I want...I think. Yes, Bryce 5 has "True Ambience", but I have now seen that in action and to be effective it had to set at 256 rays per pixel to avoid a "splotchy" image, then add in soft shadows and you are looking at an all night render at least, or even way longer depending on your PC and size of render. That being said, I am a control freak in 3D...I would rather use Photoshop to manually tweak my renders for Ambience, softness, d.o.f., etc. Also, faking it in Photoshop not only allows me more control over the pictures attributes, it also means way faster rendering times. Anyway, I'll keep working on this, post results later. Here is a Rederosity artist (nick2k) whose Lightwave renders I really like, he has some very good exaples of radiosity in his gallery. http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=54190&Start=1&Artist=nick2k&ByArtist=Yes AgentSmith

Wouldn't having 100 lights also increase your render times rather, never mind the amount of labour in setting them all up in the first place? I admire your dedication! BTW that's an interesting beastie.

I should think that by a combinaiton of overlapping spotlights (not omnidirectionals) with a fuzzed edging, white ambient light, and a very slight use of haze, one could get the same effect.

100 lights does increase render time but definitely not to the degree of using Bryce 5 with a setting of True Ambience, Soft Shadows, and 256 rays per pixel, which would be necessary to create this effect. Creating these spotlights didn't take long, like 15 minutes, what took a little longer was thinking out the configuration, probably an hour for everything. Yup, overlapping lights...that is what I'm doing with the next test by experimenting with two semi-spheres of spotlight collectives, one inside the other. And, even these spotlights here have fuzzed edging and plain white light. Not sure what you mean by "white AMBIENT light", ambience is one of the attributes I am trying to fake since Bryce 4 does not have a setting for it, and Bryce 5 takes way too long to portray it. Using haze in Bryce does work, but if I DON'T use it in Bryce...I can have a (slightly)faster render time and more control over the haze/glare in Photoshop instead of being stuck with whatever my final render has. If I were animating in Bryce though...I would do as much "in Bryce effects" as possible. But...if I had a render that had distance in it, I would use the haze in Bryce, since that would show a depth that I cannot truly reproduce in Photoshop. Thanks- AgentSmith

White ambient light --> setting the shadow color to white.

Oh, the SHADOWS color, I know what ya mean now. Yeah, it's set to white in the above pic.

You are reading my mind Agent Smith, on global illumination in Bryce. Best of luck in figuring it out! If you do, will you be making a tut? :p TMG

Sure thing, I have it figured out to a point now, I'm just trying to get it below 120 lights...yes, 120. When finished I'll probably upload the scene file to the freestuff for people to mess around with. AgentSmith