Well The challenge is to create an image modeled COMPLETELY IN BRYCE. (That is 100% Bryce!! NO imports of meshes, DXF models, Poser models et. al or putting in a pict object). To give it a bit more focus I suggest a theme based approach. I leave it up to 15th to decide whether challengers would like to take up the challenge complete with a theme or just have a 100% Bryce made image as a challenge! The theme I'd like to reccomend 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 bout of chess, 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) !. 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!! 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, one can import grey scale image, work upon gray scale images in external editors (Illustrator, Photoshop etc). (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 create smooth greyscale terrains. I'll be putting up resources for modelling in Bryce soon. 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 two 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 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. Thanx to alleycat for helping focus the challenge! More information of submission details and other issues to follow.

HI! Here's Ajtooley's description of the challenge (minus all the verbiage! ;-) by ajtooley on 4/13/02 08:19 "Humorix, can I restate the challenge as I understand it ... 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. :-) Thanx Aj, the interpretation is perfect and folks do excuse my verbiage! :-)

Hey, this perfectly fits my newest image I'm working on! Including the duel-theme. Now let's hope I can find the time to finish it in time, I've got so much to do! It might be a duel against time ;-).

Oh, I forgot. Is rendering different part's of the scenes separately and compositing them later to much postwork? I'm thinking of making different layers for diffusion, reflection, specularity and so forth to make it look a bit less 'Brycian'?

Nice to have you thinking along the lines of the theme Ray! ;-) Hope you don't end up pulverising some Clocks!!! :=P

Well I was thinking about making a cowboy-bot(or something like that) fighting a clock-monster.

Nope! As I stated earlier, rendering seperate parts is ok as long as its to get optical effects e.g. depth of field etc. From what you say it seems like you are wanting to stretch Bryce's capabilities in your own way! Well that should be perfectly ok. I guess what is most important is to play this with the spirit of stretching our own Brycian abilities and delving a bit further into the software. So if thats the spirit we play it by, I don't see there being any problems!

Well I think I'll definitely finish the project I was working on to enter it in this one. For a preview you can check out my "Seadragon" post.

Sounds good, I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with.

Hey, that's an interesing challenge, I've just a good idea, and surely I'll win! :-P (don't mind at my presumption). Only a question, may I use the default imported object of Bryce, such as plant or rocks? Good luck to anyone.

Hi Vasquez! Yes. I guess what is in Bryce by default can surely be used! Also there's an extra set of primitives (I think the link is at Brycetech's site) which has rounded cylinder, rounded cubes, rounded cones. Those can be used too. Bringing in primitives and working with them isn't prob as long as you share it with other challengers. But please let's not get into a what is a primitive and what would be a complete imported object. I'm sure all of us know the difference and can act accordingly.

I am very much a newbie... in my humble opinion... if you want the challenge to be total Bryce... make it just that... total Bryce.... no post work at all. That way it will fully challenge the guru's and give those w/o a photo shop type program a "fighting" chance. thanks and regards, bob

I agree That would be the best but I also think everybody can go and get "DOGWAFFLE" which is a freeware program and you can get it from http://www.completelyfreesoftware.com and when you get there go ahead and Browse thru the site you may find many programs that are awesome and free....

This is in response to Unclebob! I agree that it should be 100% Bryce. That's why we have agreed to NO post work in terms of painting in any element (be it hair, clothes, trees etc.) That is put in any element from outside. But Bryce in itself can render depth of field, distance blurring etc. Yet these effects, to render, take a very long time! Also (by my own experience!) in case the scene gets very complex (over 400Megs at times) it becomes, at times, impossible to render on a machine (I've experienced rendering an image of mine for 5 days plus and then have the machine crash on me and have nothing at the end of the day), this if rendered in parts and composited brought down the image creation time to 1 and a half days! (Not all of us have turbo charged machine!) Its to get around this that I have suggested that we use any image compositing software! Of course I'm not delineating in specific terms what would be post in terms of doing a proxy for a Bryce operation and what would be post as in adding to the effects! This, I feel, all contestants can and will be honest enough to decide among themselves! After all we are seeking our peers' opinion about our images and, I guess, none of us would like to be seen short changing in any way whatsoever!!! Also, to harness the power of the terrain editor, while Bryce 5 supports a bigger window etc, you might still need an external image editor to create an unusual model! This I think is allowable! I'll reiterate over here that what is most important is that we enter this with the spirit of pushing the limit of Bryce's image creation capability! And any honest endevour towards this direction will be readily acceptable! The do's and don'ts primarily serve the purpose of a guideline rather then stringent bindingins on us! (Whooof!) Hope AJ is around to simplify this verbiage!;-) :-P

I don't know what the hell you just said ;-/, hehe. BUT, it seems to me that no post work, means no post work and that should include "compositing" in post to create a depth of field effect. What's to stop someone from "touching up" these layers, in fact the act of blurring the background layer should be considered post work in itself. So you don't have Bryce5, too bad. Not everyone rendering in Bryce5 is going to do a depth of field effect, so why give special favor to Bryce4 users? It just seems like we are making too many exceptions because of an upgrade. Importing textures and bump maps into Bryce is not post work, because it happens before the render. Allowing folks to chop up their image into layers is blatant post work. Let's not dilute this challenge too. I don't want to bring up last months challenge again, but we're getting a similar pattern. Last month Bryce5 users submitted all metaball work because that was the main theme of the contest. That theme was amended to allow Bryce4 users to enter with booleans as opposed to metaballs. Apples and Oranges IMHO. No offense or sour grapes intended Humorix, your image was gorgeous, no doubt about it. BUT, had the challenge been booleans for all the results might have been different. Metaballs are still fairly new to us Bryce users, and while many of us are old hands with booleans, Metaballs present a whole different set of challenges to create something presentable. The main challenge being Metaballs, that's what Bryce5 users did, while Bryce4 users got to take the "relatively easy" route with booleans. In that case it's really not a fair contest because you are working with two completely different objects. Which is why we should have had two winners, one for Metaballs and one for Booleans, but that is water under the bridge. I think the rules for this challenge were already defined and redefined. Let's not keep changing them past the 12th hour. No post work means NO POST WORK. Let's not handicap or penalize the Bryce5 users again...please. ;-)

So it's absolutely no postwork? I can live with that. As for the metaball/boolean thing I don't think using Bryce4 booleans have been unfair to Bryce5-users, all the 'metaball-people' have done a great job and the models certainly weren't of less quatility than the boolean-models. And I don't know if everyone else agrees with me, but I didn't find metaball-modelling any harder than boolean-modelling (even though it was my first serious metabell-project).

I don't know what I can offer regarding verbiage simplification, humorix! :) But I do have an opinion or two. First, when I rather presumptuously restated your challenge, I mentioned "as little postwork as possible" because you were keen on 100% Bryce images, or at the least images which really stretch Bryce's capabilities. In this context, I would rule out compositing. Don't get me wrong; I'm a rather recent convert to the amazing Bryce-augmenting wonder that is compositing, and a big fan; but even though, as you correctly point out, this means less spectacular images for those who don't have workhorse computers, the point of a challenge is to do the best you can with what you have. If the scene a challenger envisions falls outside the parameters of a challenge, then it's a scene to do some other time. If the scene isn't complete without serious postwork --compositing, hair painting, blurring, texture additions ("fixing" foliage, etc.)-- then it's not the right scene for this challenge. Heck, I'd probably rule out just about anything except a little motion blur or lens flare. If we really want to stretch ourselves and Bryce, then let's throw away those crutches. For myself, the scene I'm working on will be 100% Bryce, no postwork except to put my name on it.

I think the only allowed in stuff like photoshop or Corel photopaint should be greyscale maps for the terrain editor and texture maps for objects created in Bryce. If you truly want those effects in post work you can acheive them by creating them in Bryce. I haven't tried this but I suppose a depth of field effect could be acheived by using a transparent material with some fine noise mapped onto a sphere placing the object in focus and cammera within the sphere or at least somthing similar, IOW creating filters using objects. This was how my "sunflare test" was acheived if you do a search for it.

I had hoped to enter this challenge, but it's become far too complicated for me. Sigh On the other hand, I do have an image I've already created that might fit the criteria, if I could figure out what they are. Would there be any chance of having a separate beginners challenge sometime?

And what about importing images for textures or for lattices? I mean, the power of Bryce is the terrain editor, I think that if I have to make, for example, a wall it's better for me and my PC to create a lattice with te texture of a wall (and also the alpha channel) instead of creating every single brick and putting them all together. Create a wall brick by brick is useless and offend Bryce. And regarding Sipapu I think that there are no master challenge or beginner challenge in the forums, because the challenge is not with the others but with ourselves, in this case we must do an image only using Bryce, but the image should not be necessarily complicated, it must be only nice.

Imported textures and greyscale images for terrain or lattice ARE allowed, as mentioned before, since that is "Pre-render" work. With regards to Sipapu, don't be discouraged. I recall when I was just starting out EVERYTHING was a challenge. ;-)

Hey guys! Ok no post-work it is!!!!!!! :-P Also this challenge may become a April-May challenge completely! Is the theme of "Duel" then acceptable to all! I think I know what alleycat has in mind! A duel between Boolean and Blobs? :-P But I agree with alleycat that it might not have been a completely even field as some of us might have been accustomed to shaping things with booleans whereas we all would be new to metaballs and so it would be an even starting point!! Well keping this in mind the need for a "theme". I agree that its a race with our own abilities! In that case there's been something that's been on my mind and would like all of your comments on. Its about the voting procedures! Guess I'll put a new message thread for it!

Hi! In my past post I had already posted a message towards a new voting method about asking people who vote to use a scale for all candidates! Thus we, as artists, get invaluable structured feedback from our peers and get to know how they view our art! The other thing, which has been on my mind, is, who should vote? Well, I guess we all know that all it takes is an e-mail id to get a new user-id here! This has been an issue of discussion between me and, a few of my friends, here in renderosity! I remember, during the contest for both Bryce5 as well as New Beginning, I had thought there were a number of good and interesting entries which didnt make it to the last 10 or 15 due to lack of vote and not so interesting ones which did! I guess there are quite a few who have number of ids in renderosity! Well Im not judging them and in case the system allows, I guess people will use loopholes. But as the main intent of the challenge is to get input from our peers, I was wondering if a voting qualifier be in place. I.e. only people with galleries here in renderosity votes! (Its a bit more difficult to set up a gallery then an e-mail account!) That way we truly know that its our peers giving us their opinions not a Troll! What do you all think about it?

Using multiple user-ID's to get some free votes is just nasty. If anyone votes for himself he/she is actually not only beeing unfair to other renderosity-members, but it's not giving these people a good view at their capabilities with the software they are using. If these actions do really happen, then I think there should be taken measures to prevent it from happening again. I don't know how to find out if people are using multiple ID's though. As for using galleries as voting qualifiers; I've got about 60 or 70 images in my gallery, and I've only been active here at renderosity since somewhere at the end of 2001. If I wanted to I could easily have created 60 to 70 '1-image galleries' in this short time. And with 60 or 70 votes anyone is sure to win a monthly challenge. And some people feel they are not able to create images they find worthy of placing in the galleries because they are new to computer-graphics. The fact that these people haven't got a gallery doesn't mean they can't make a good vote, so I think there should be another solution. Does anyone else have a good idea?

Excuse me... the last question. When start the challenge? and where should I put my image? Sorry, I'm a newbie it's my first challenge.

How about only those who enter the challenge can vote? (But not for themselves.) Re my earlier post in this thread. Thanks for the encouragement, vasquex and AlleyCat. Yes, vasquez, I agree with you that the challenge is against myself. But when I spent hours and hours and hours working with metaballs for the first time ever for my entry into the last challenge, I felt pretty discouraged, nonetheless, by the kind of work I saw created by those who were doing Boolean work. (Nothing personal humorix - I really loved your image.) Even so, I recently posted in another forum to someone to look at entering challenges as being like playing tennis. The better your opponent, the more you will learn. I truly believe that. Guess I'm just having a "poor me" moment. Sipapu, the eternal optimist

Hey Sipapu every time I see a work of humorix or agentsmith or roobol or... (my list is neverending) I also have my 5 minutes of "poor, poor me" but after then it begins at least an hour of "I can do it! I can do it!". Remember the first rule of this forum is HAVE FUN! I'm longing to see your image, surely it'll made with sweat and heart (not like the classical poser nude image with the model of X, the texture of Y, the light of Z, and so on...)

Ah, dastardly, thanks. Turns out I had forgotten there was a theme, so my image won't work for this contest anyway, and I doubt I'll have time to start a new one. But I can assure you it was made with sweat and heart. Hmmm. I don't think I've ever seen sweat on a Poser nude, come to think of it. But then, I don't frequent nude beaches or nude forums either - LOL! (Uh oh, hope I don't get flamed for that.) You know, I don't think I was feeling all that discouraged until I saw all the posts about voting. That's when I realize how incredibly important winning a challenge is to many folks around here. And I understand that. Those power users/artists have worked long and hard to get where they are, and they're entitled to their recognition. I guess I'd just kind of like to see some kind of challenge once in a while where I'd be pitted more against my peers than always against the experts. Even so, I'll keep at it, I promise :-)

Ooooooops! I seemed to have opened the veritable Pandora's box about the voting procedures! Well now, on second thoughts, I agree that we needn't police our own community would bring its own set of problems! Also somehow I realize that all this suggestions seem to be making this an "exclusive" contest. Which wasn't the idea at all! The basic premise of the challenge is to challenge oneself to go further as against run a race!!! If that was the premise I guess everything about voting procedure is redundant! I quite like Shin's idea about following the PS forum. It also seems that, some of us are afraid to join 'cos this challenge might be too complicated!!! :-( Well that wasn't the idea at all! I was thinking of creating a peers group whereby we HELP each other out and try and maximise Bryce's potential! My apologies for posting the bit on voting procedures! I was more concerned about our community, and didn't want it to be hijacked by selfish intentions. But this idea about voting seems to have struck at the very spirit of peer interaction as against filter the interaction. To be honest the interaction with you guys by far outweighs coming first, second or whatever! Anyway, my race is always with myself!!! I'm glad though this topic allowed us to do some rethink on what we want our challenge to be! Yet being judged by a peers group and being scored by them lay the basic principles of excellence (case in point: The Oscars)! The challenge might now be small, but it might grow over a period of time! So how can we create a mechanism yet foster a feeling of camaraderie between ourselves?

Thanks for your reply, humorix. It's very heartening to me! Another reason I was feeling discouraged - but had plumb forgotten about until you alluded to it - was that I didn't even understand half of what you guys were talking about for some of the parameters. I mean, sure, I understood about the postprocessing in general, but there was other stuff being mentioned that I haven't even touched on yet. That's reason enough for me to recognize that I'm not yet qualified to "play with the big guys," because I know I still have a lot to learn. And that's very much OK with me. Unfortunately, I just haven't had the kind of focused time lately that I need to spend on Bryce. But if I keep hanging out around here, once I can really dig back into it, I believe that you all will be there to support me. To be honest, I didn't always feel that way, though. I tried to start a thread several weeks ago asking for critiques of my work and didn't get a single response. At that time I hadn't realized that people aren't likely to go to links and would rather look directly at pix in threads. The result was that I've probably been carrying a bit of a chip on my shoulder, thinking that this was pretty much an elitest group. But I still kept hanging around, and am glad I did, because I've learned that that isn't the case at all. But enough about me - LOL! As for the voting, yes, I like Sihn's idea too. She always seems to make good, practical sense with her ideas. Even so, a lot of people might balk at the idea of not having this be a voting challenge. So, maybe you could consider my suggestion of having only the entrants vote. OK. I have other forums to visit and more books to write ;-) Sorry this was so long. And thanks again, humorix.

Hey Anne, don't get too discouraged. Let's "play with the big guys" cause they can help us learn. I don't think these challenges are just technique oriented, if you have an excellent interpretation of the theme, but maybe not the skills of the so called "big guys" that counts for something in my book.

Arleen

LOL - and I just posted to you in the other thread, Arleen. Oh, I do agree with what you're saying. And I didn't mean to leave you out with my suggestion that only the participants should vote, so I herewith officially withdraw that suggestion. :-)

I don't think any of us "big-guys" started of being as big guys. In case anybody is interested...here are my first Bryce images at www.geocities.com/uptoantix (I found "Uptoantix" name taken here when I joined :-(| ) It was coming across www.deeptextures.deamon.co.uk, when I saw how much more the envelope of Bryce could be pushed and have been addicted ever since! Yes, I guess a lot of us are there to assist! I agree with ringbearer (hmmm is he a hobbit? a Troll? a faerie? a wizard? a dwarf?....I wonder???) that there are other factors which will lead to deciding which is a great "image". I had suggested a scoring system in a previous post which I'll re-iterate here: 25% for interpretation of idea/theme/concept, 35% for aesthetic appeal (color, composition, balance etc) and 40% for thechnical abilities. That way not only do we get some idea about how people view our works but also how we fare vis-a-vis others asgainst a simple "I vote for..." :-)

For those interested, Audre has started a thread to discuss a critique forum. The link is: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=652811