Oooooops! I did it again! Do Dragons blow out their Birthday candles??? Too late for the March challenge but I just about got Bryce 5 and here's my first creation in it! "Draco the dragon". It took me about 40 hours (cumulative) to model it. The complete scene made entirely of Metaballs and spheres (for the clouds, eyeballs and claws) except for the two layers of the choclate cake and the base done in rounded cylinders. By the way, those of you who were planning to make that trip to Mars, but couldn't make it due to lack of time...well setting a metaball scene to render in Bryce5, is the perfect time to undertake that trip! Not only can you go through the 0-gravity acclimatization program, make the round trip to Mars and stop over at the moon base, for a coffee, and still have time to spare to see the final bit of rendering take place on your comp! For those who are interested, the final pic is [ **here**](%20http%3A//www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=humorix).

You are far more patient than I am. Well done.

WOW! I hope I can get my seadragon to look as good!

Hey man, that is brillian work... Great modelling skills... :)

can we see it without the wireframe overlay? BT

Hey Avi! Thanks for giving us a wireframe view too! This is almost a tutorial by itself. It shows what the new metaball system in Bryce is capable of. Now that I've seen the poten tial I'll have to upgrade to Bryce 5 too! Now if they could just give me a "humorix imagination & patience" plug-in upgrade I'd have it made!

It's truly wonderful, Avi. I love the final rendering and, like danamo, greatly appreciate seeing the wireframe view. (Brycetech, there's a link to the final image in his gallery at the bottom of Avi's post.)

Hi Folks! Thanx for the comments! Here are few things about metaballs that you all might find useful. Metaballs don't boolean! :-(. Not even if you were to group them. They generally act as stand alone! How ever I found an easter egg in Susan Kitchen's site! Shift clicking when you click on the metaball icon creates a negetive metaball and you can use this to sculpt the positive metaballs! (I created the nostrils and the mouth in this manner!) I wish the metaballs could boolean, the surface tension or the sphere of attraction of the metaballs could be adjusted, there were meta-primitives (sphere, cuboid, cones etc) and people in Bryce PLEASE GIVE A MIRRORING device! 80% of the time goes mirroring/creating the other side of the body! assigning two different textures (or even setting different values of the same texture) creates interesting effects! But rendering such an effect is a different story!!!! I had a much more interesting texture done but couldn't use it as it was a killer render!! Possibly will a little later down the line! Also, by now my image has been trolled! Sigh! I guess it takes all kinds to make the world, but somehow the community renderosity, or should I say the spirit of the community, is the casualty of such acts!

Hey again humorix! About that trip to Mars, maybe if we upgrade our engines to bambam131's new ion engines we can get TWO trips to Mars and back during that render!

Umm there's an easier way around that Dan! Set the render to absolute Premium art with 256 rays per pixel, all the relevant box clicked (in Premium and optics) and set it to render.... 2 Trips to Mars???? You could go, catch Voyager, spank it for being such a naughty boy and bring it back home (Stop on Mars and discuss why they have so much problems with Venus), Count Saturn's Moons...come back to find that Men now move around on maglev devices, people use spaceshuttle to go to office, Microsoft Windows still shuts down on you and blames you with an illegal operation sign...and your image has finished 67%render! :-P

that is absolutely incredible, the detail and textures ... and with meta balls. I am new to Bryce 5 and am learning the ropes .... think there could be a mini tute in the future on how to do something like this ??? thanks and regards, bob

Yes I agree I just got Bryce 5 and I am in the process of checking it out and I must say it does import my bryce4 models way faster then Bryce4 ever did,and this meta ball modeling is wicked I definitely want to get to know this modeling system better and a tut by a meta master would be nice....

Hey guys! Lemme put up a mini tutorial here. Though am in the process of writing a detailed tutorial on modelling in Bryce for Renderosity magazine!

ahhh right.... TOO COOL.... humorix YOU DA MAN !! lol seriously ... many thanks, I for one will appreciate it regards, bob btw, I just subscribed to Renderosity mag so I'll be looking forward to the detailed tut