WOW!!!!! That was a LOT of votes! According to brycetech it was the largest turnout for voting EVER!! I want to thank Vile for the great idea of a Metaball/Boolean Character Challenge, amazing modeling came out of it from all of you. I myself was in awe of the models created, they are great examples to inspire others, and not just Bryce'ers. Out of 15 entries and 48 total votes - March 2002's Bryce Forum Challenge award goes to....... ...humorix!!!! Congratulations humorix on a fine job of not only modeling but on a clever work of art. The award banner below is yours to use next to your entry. (Time to make a homepage) March's monthly challenge was delayed somewhat with the retirement of our esteemed Moderator Ken, but even with 20 days left in this month, April's challenge will no problem, I'm sure. Trust me....;o) Well humorix....it's your spotlight. What will be April's Challenge?

Award!

Contragtulations Humorix....

Heheh - love the illustration, AgentSmith. Congrats, Humorix. Wear that award in good health!

Congratulations humorix!!! And great job everyone! I can't wait to see what's next!

LOL @ AgentSmith's image! Too funny! :-D

Just wanted to add my congrats to Humorix as well. It was a tough competition this time around, so go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back for producing an awesome render!

Great job AgentSmith! Congratulations Humorix! Long may you render!

Congratulations Humorix. You've done great work!

Congrats Humorix on a really clever picture, expertly made.

Contratulations Humorix on a great image.

Well done, Humorix! I'm eager to see what your imagination comes up with for our next challenge!

Heyyyy Guys thanx! Just got to know!!! (my machine is tied up rendering :-( and I accessed the net from a public connection!) Well I guess I need a days time to think a topic up? But can I make the choice of topic a collaborative one? I was interested in a 100% Bryce image (Completely created, modeled and rendered in Bryce! no imports, no posts! etc) and I'm open to a choice of theme here. HOw about Agentsmith, rayrez, alleycat...helping me choose a theme for that? Anything which will excite more people to participate, have fun doing and stretch Byce's capability!

And Agentsmith great image! :D

Congrats Humorix, great image! A 100% Bryce image sounds cool. Since we already did cityscapes, what do you think about doing a small rustic village? Kind of like "The Shire" from "Lord of The Rings". I would give people a chance to use the landscape ability of Bryce combined with boolean objects and groups. Just a thought.

Congrats to Humorix and all the other great artists!

I like alley cats idea :)

Figures Cat my landscapes suck...

hey it was just a suggestion ;-)

Topic for APRIL CHALLENGE and a few suggestions! Firstly thanks everyone! Not just for the votes, 'cos I do appreciate them, but more for pumping in such a lot of enthusiasm into the Bryce Forum! I got to know a lot of great folks thanks to this last challenge!! :-) Guess this will be an April/ May challenge! Well The challenge is to create an image COMPLETELY IN BRYCE. That is 100% Bryce!! NO imports of meshes, DXF models, Poser models et. al or putting in an image as a model (say a picture of R2D2 placed within the scene as a picture!) One of the theme suggested was "Shire" or a LOTR based theme. The theme which comes to my mind is..." A Duel". The interpretation of a duel is left to the challengers! It might be a joust, a wild west draw, a duel in the sky, a space fight, a duel of wits, a fight of music, a clash of colors, Gandalf v/s Balrog...!!!! Whatever, as long as it shows a contest between two entities ( of near equal strature, it can't be a fight against Nature, if you know what I mean) and done TOTALLY in Bryce!. The image might be abstract, medivial, futuristic, fantastic...whatever! No limits to your imagination! So come ye all and let's joust in the Brycian arena and may the best Fun Win!! I also have some suggestion towards voting. I feel that a number of us felt like being thrust into the deep end of a pool, when it came to voting! Not knowing on what basis to score. Well can I make some suggestions here? I suggest all of us who come to vote use a score card of sorts for all contestants, on the basis of which, the one scoring highest gets the vote. In case its a tie, well do let the moderator know and let each contestant get have a point between them (I would liked to have voted for two images if I could in this contest!) The final points then being tallied. For this contest I have the following suggestion: Let each entry be marked on the basis of 25% for interpretation of the idea, 35% for over all aesthetic appeal and 45% for the technical ability (in this case stretching Bryce's limits) i.e. a entry might be marked as 10/25, 23/35, 25/45. Total the score and the entry getting the highest score gets your vote. This, I feel, makes it fairest to all entries (also gives a better feed back to all entries if you put in your scores as well) Would this be too complicated? Secondly, for people putting in early entries, with the feedback they get, they might want to change (or they might get a better idea), but our system doesn't allow them to put in a second image. Yet we benefit so much due to the comments of our peers. So why can't we post our images marked as "for ....month challenge" and take in interaction. And say 2-3 days before the voting begins Agentsmith or any of the moderators starts a thread with Place your image here for challenge) and we upload it. This definitely brings down the work load on the moderator and allows us to place our best image. What say you folks? Do let me know so that we can post a topic by tomorrow latest!!

Doing a joust, a wild west draw, or Gandalf and Balrog without any imported meshes would be a challenge indeed. Unless you fancy putting together Gandalf from metaballs ... which was last month's challenge. I think I'll sit this one out.

:-O :-( Heyy wait!! This is a suggestion not the challenge! Am still open to a theme for a challenge! :-) Anything which will excite more of us to participate! And more over the theme I suggsted was "duel" and gave them as examples of interpratation!

Thank you. I got an idea for a duel day before yesterday* and have already started working on it, but I'll have to import a couple of characters from Poser. No, they would't take 3/4ths of the image, but one is pretty important in it. Everything else in the picture (and there's quite a lot of time-consuming stuff) is/will be done in Bryce. * Er, no, I'm not in cahoots with Humorix. It's purely accidental.

I like the scoring consept Humorix, and the idea of contestant driven admin of the challenge, suits me to a tee. The scoring takes the Monthly Bryce Challenge to a new level, but I fear that asking contestants to arrange their own submissions for voting may disadvantage more casual forum members. Not being able or inclined to make regular visits here shouldn't prevent an entry, all are welcome after all. Oh, and a duel sounds great, leaves a lot to interpretation and should get plenty of entries.

Strange that you would suggest such a challenge as I have started on something similar just to challenge myself to see what Bryce could do without any imports (was planning on some Poser characters but they wouldn't have been the center of attention). Now this may be a bit more challenging to create my characters without Poser......hmmmm I may just enter this one.

I guess the "No Imports" rule would mean no imported greyscale images to create custom terrains or symetrical lattices as well?

The whole Idea is to see how much we can push Bryce's capability to model in different and unusual ways. As the terrain modeller is one of the most important mean of modelling in Bryce, sure one can import grey scale image, work upon gray scale images in external editors etc. The idea of not allowing imports is to restrict short cuts towards creating an image (i.e. premade models and pict objects!) So import of greyscale is definitely allowed!!! Infact those of you who have Mac (I'm not one of the lucky ones :-(! ), there's a program called b-smooth (or something similiar) which helps you creat smooth greyscale terrains. I'll scour the web and put up as many modelling sites on Bryce as I can, over here! One of the best place to visit is of course brycetech's site. To model with the terrain editor, a very good site, I found, was www.deeptextures.deamon.co.uk. Will let you all know in case I find others!!

Now here's another one. What about imported textures and Pict textures? Do all textures have to be Bryce native? Just getting these things out there up front. ;-)

This is in reply to sdnoble. I agree with you that irregular visitors shouldn't be left out. But I also feel people who submit early might feel a little disadvantaged! For while they will have time and want to improve their image (specially after interaction with other Brycians) the rule of allowing only one post limits their ability to improve their image/skills. Also I'm sure it's quite a task for the moderator to go around the whole forum looking for the images. Therefore all I'm suggesting is that all those who want can post their image earlier, but they can improve upon or decide on another image later AS LONG AS THEY SUBMIT THE FINAL IMAGE on the prescribed date. The date should be preannounced and there should be a 3 day Window. So let's say if this challenge is to begin on the 15th of this month, the final image should be uploaded between the 9th and 12th of May (leaving 13th-14th-15th for voting) to a thread created by the moderator (as agentsmith did this time). In case you have trouble uploading or have already decided that the image submitted earlier by you is the final image, just send the link it across to the moderator to upload to the thread. Do you think this might still be unfair to some?

Lol Alley! Ok I guess 100% Bryce referred to the modelling in Bryce! So textures, effects (for eg. foley pro's effects) brought in is ok (As long as THEY ARE NOT THE PRIMARY ELEMENT of composition) Lets say you are showing to Gladiators fighting it out and you need a crowd of thousands! Well in that case you can either make an intelligent composition where there's a suggestion of a large crowd! Or you might import in pict objects to fill in the distant crowd! AS LONG AS THE GLADIATORS are done Completely in bryce and occupy a major portion of the composition and/or are the center of attraction! I'll also clarify here: Compositing is allowed! As long as its elements done within the same scene or for effects like depth of field, blur, motion blur, highlight, lens flare etc etc We know that Bryce can be glacially slow when you are rendering! So if you go around this by compositing then that isn't a prob. But you can't render a particular sky and composite in another object. Also neither will an image done in Bryce and worked upon extensively in Photoshop (clothes, hair, texture etc) be allowed. Look the whole idea is to challenge ourselves to as stretch Byce's capability as much as we can!!!! You are of course free to rework and redo the image as you please to bring it as close to what you imagined it to be and put that image up in your gallery. But for the sake of the challenge, please try and stretch Bryce's limits! Hope that clarifies alley. Thanx for bringing out the leaks in the barrel! :-P Ummmmm would you be a lawyer by any chance? ;-)

"Ummmmm would you be a lawyer by any chance? ;-) " No, but my father was. ;-)

To AlleyCat --- Ok! So now you blame it on the genes! ;-) Lol! Well folks do I post this as the Monthly Challenge then?

Well done humorix! I, of course, am new to this forum as you can all tell by the unfamiliarity of my name, danamo, but I feel at home here. I love the comraderie and support, the helpful suggestions, and the democratic(in the true sense of the word) negotiation and interplay. I am extremely im- pressed by the artistic skill apparent in the renders you guys post here. I have already learned things(and nicked some great ideas)just by visiting and perusing your gallery. I feel that I am amoung friends and kindred spirits, and hopefully by learning from your excellent examples I will advance my skills to the point where my renders approach the level of expertise I see here. Thank you all!

Welcome, danamo! You are among friends. Humorix, can I restate the challenge as I understand it to make sure us dummies have the simplest explanation possible? :) The way I read it, the challenge is: create an image depicting some kind of duel with no imported models and as little postwork as possible. 2D picts can be imported as long as they are not central to the scene. Is that right? Sounds like a good one to me.

Lol aj! It sounds like a perfect interpretation! ;-) Hope Alleycat doesn't start finding leaks in the description! I'm going to copy your description of the challenge and paste it in the challenge thread, hope you don't mind! And would you be a copywriter? :=P I also extend my welcome to danamo! :-) He's a great person to know!