hey everyone, im new to bryce and have taught myself the basics but there is something that i am trying to do and ai cant figure out how to it and it is getting on my nerves. how in the hell do you 1 make a lens flare??? or 2 make a bolt of lightning which looks realistic and glows. please help me as i am pulling my hair out!!! :P

1: post effects check april/may archives under Stephen Ray. 2: make a lense.check may 2002 archives under Vile.

oops lightning: check recent archives under lightning. there was something on that in the last couple of weeks.

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Aldaron was very helpfull in my request for an all Bryce solution to the lightning issue. I've since decided to do it post-pro with Photoshop as I have the program and it's much easier to do so. This is likely the same with lens flare.

Two post-pro solutions... The lensflares on the right are from Universe by diardsoftware.com. They are only rendered as single point bright lights, but this is a very economical solution as it is a stand alone program that you can import jpegs into and add the effects on top of them. The lensflare on the left is the Photoshop default. Photoshop 6 or less can be had on eBay for a pretty good price. Photoshop can also be used for the lightning issue.

Lightning post-pro... I did this in Photoshop. It's still a rough image, but I think you can see what it ought to be. I rendered the lightning bolt (download from Brycetech. Thanks!) as an object mask and then cut them out and pasted them over the final image. Layer/Effects/Outer Glow. Turned the intesity all the way up and changed it to the color I wanted. Now I just need to tweak it a bit.

re Post-pro solutions: You can see that the one on the right is photoshop. The one on the left is universe. PSP does a pretty good lense effect too. You can see a pattern that repeats pict after pict after pict with premade lense effects . . . try not to use them too much. (Used to pay hundreds of bucks to get better quality lenses that didn't show lense flare so easily. now its a "photographic effect". go figure.)

Aye, doing it all in post is fun but it will never give you the correct optics... One way to do it, and Vile may have written a Tutorial on it, I'm not sure, is to make an actual Lens. Take a two spheres, intersect them with Boolean grouping, and you have a "real" fake lens. Track it to the camera and position it, and set it's material to a glassy one. Now you can control the amount of wash in the image with the Material Lab in Bryce, and it will look much more realistic. Haven't done any lightning, yet, but you could theoretically pull it off with volumetrics. This lens example is a great way to keep it all in Bryce, remember, lense flare is something camera photographers are trying to avoid, the fact that we work TOWARDS it speaks volumes about our idiocy.

Yeah, that Image I did in response to "Vile's Telescope" showed a solar reflection. I haven't tried it either but it should be possable - I think that you would need multible lenses to pull it off, and as Vile noted, you would lose light through each lens - due to reflection/refaction and ambience/whatever.

The following link has a free plugin for photoshop that will create forked lightning in photoshop or psp http://www.hirsch-design.de/plugin/al.zip heres a thought i will try it in bryce's terrain editor and see what happens hope the plugin helps Cheers pigat