The image above was rendered with a sphere with the petrified barnacles texture preset, a spherical light, and the sky/sunlight/etc. disabled. In the area outside the red box the texture was unaltered from the preset, and you can see a sharp line between the lit and shadowed area. When the bump is removed (as in the area inside the red box) the division becomes gradual. Has anyone else encountered this problem and discovered workarounds for it other than removing the bump?

The only thing that is creating the shadow in this render is the 'bump' When you remove the bump all you have is a flat texture, as if it was painted on. Now if you took a ball, and painted barnicals on it, would they cast shadows. The answer is, they would if you painted them on. Bryce does not synthesize shadow if there is no bump map.

I'll assume this is Bryce 4. In Bryce 4 shadows made by the light alone can/will be gradual(soft). Shadows coming off objects, or in this case an objects bumps (from the bump map) will be harsh. This is just the nature of Bryce 4. I don't know of any workaround other than getting Bryce 5 and using soft shadows. Anyone else?

Disabling self shadow on the material will give it a softer shadow from the light source, but not from shadows cast on it from other objects.

Softshadows... uhgh lol.. Thost things kill your processor... If you are making an animation, just forget about it lol, takes about 5-10x as long with soft shadows on.

I was wondering, does Bryce haveany Render nodes like 3dstudio max (bazil, Ray-Render etc) or maya... Because, the default render node is very slow, smooth, but slow... It also oversaturates colors...

I'll let you know when I hear of such a render node for bryce, but as far as I know there aren't any.

No, no render nodes. It is a raytracer, period.

Aye, haloedrain, this isn't a problem with Bryce at all. Bump-mapping is a pretty straightforward principle, although you can use volumetrics in Bryce as well. One thing to keep in mind, though, people... when we hit 256GHz PC's, all of our old Bryce scenes will be called "antique virtual reality". Can't wait! I haven't noticed a direct hit from soft shadows on render time, ever, but for those of you out there still using those Eye-Max, try keeping soft-shadows off in the render options, but instead using the level adjusters in the Light Lab to create the shadowd. I fins this renders slightly faster on my ridiculous machine, and a good deal faster on my still-mak-slaying Pentium at work. If you want to play with toys, get a Magna-Doodle, it retains OS-exx's rendering speed, without all the hassle. (grins)