Ok.. Well I made up the basic design for the june challenge, I am new to bryce so bear with me.. heh. This is a rendition of my drawers desk top, It exists in my room and looks just like this, one difference, it needs a cord for the light, final render will have volume, need more realistic wood, and need the glass to look older.. This is where I keep my Leopard gecko, he is 12 years old tomorow, lol.

Go to www.3dcafe.com and get some fish for that tank. You might even find a kitty cat to swim in there with them. Good job so far.

But, it has a screen top see, that's how it looks, it's not a big ole fish tank or anything. However It is cracked on one side and is a little dirty, how would I go about making it dirtier? And my cat does not bother it, she's aftaid of it lol.

I want to do it all on my own, everything in this picture was made in bryce, I thought that was part of the contest. The tank is just a bolean thing, screen is a shrunken cage map on a flat surface, books are multi replicated terrains with 3 lattices for the cover. brass on the bureau is just terrain and some multi repped spheres for the handles. The plant is just a duplicated randomized bryce weed, and the stump is obviously just a bryce tree with no brances, the sand is a terrain and the dish has water in it, it's just a boolean object. It's all bryce so far, I would not want to taint it with anything from the outside.

Your job may have gotten easier --unless you don't want it to be. This month's challenge has no restrictions on imports, so if you wish, you can import models... like a gecko (if you can find one)! I'm still learning about custom textures, so maybe someone else can help more, but I'm thinking you could whip up a custom texture in an image-editing program that has a little smudge and grime to it, then apply it to a stretched cube with almost the same properties as glass (only not quite as transparent, so you can still see the smudges). 3DCafe might also be a good resource for textures for your scene. Good luck!

Ok, I will try that smudge thing, as for imports, imho i think anything that is a challenge should be 100% your work.. seems a little dumb to Dl some stuff, smack it down in a scene and say Look what I have created!. Plus, I want to learn how to use bryce for modeling. Anyone know how to make a metaball negative, whenever I do it doesn't effect the model... Even when I make all others positive,etc.

Metaballs only affect other metaballs not primitives. To make a negative metaball just hold shift while clicking on the create metaball icon. Also metaballs will only affect other metaballs within a group (if you have no groups then all metaballs will be affected). The influence a metaball has is determined by it's bounding box. As for dirty glass, the above example is a glass preset. Went into the material editor and under diffusion in the value section I put a "marble" in the A channel. Then clicking on the upper right triangle (texture library) seleceted basic/black and white. Changed the diffuse color to light grey (was too bright as white) and played with the texture scale and noise/filter in the DTE.

Thanks, I know they do not affect prims. I just didn't know about the shift thing, Thanks.!