Is there any way to do this in Bryce so that I don't have to use haze to give a sense of depth and distance? Also, my cloud's move waaay too fast. What should I do? Thanks ahead of time.

I understand you can use a glass sphere around the camera in order to affect it's focus and DOF. I don't know enough about fixing things like clouds, but I reckon I've read that you can tweak the time line in the animation lab. I don't know how to do it though.

As for your clouds go into Sky lab under clouds and you have buttons, sliders, etc. that let you adjust things like the movement of the clouds, turbulence etc. As for DOF, what version are you using? Bryce 5 has a render option for DOF.

Haze works well if you use it sparingly. You can also set DOF in the render to keep the distance blurry. Or you can postwork each frame in Photoshop with the blur tool, but that's a pain and likely will result in the image shifting from frame to frame.

Oh, I suppose you can set up a gradient tool and apply that to each frame to avoid the motion jumping, but again, its best to use Bryce DOF. If there's no tut on DOF in Bryce, let me know and I'll put it on my list. I think Brycetech might have one.

Hey, I've just got an Idea for making DOF in Bryce-versions lower than 5 or for scenes that are just to complex/slow rendering to create nice DOF in less that 1 year rendering: You can make a distance render in bryce. That usually doesn't take to long and you could use the resulting grayscale-image to make an automatic blurr-algorithm wich uses the distance-render as a blurr intensity-map. Are there any programmers here who know how to make such a blurr-algorithm? It would be nice if you could make a gradient to change the strength of the blurr. The distance-map in Bryce is lineair with absolute white and absolute black as extreme values, but if you wnat to adjust your post-process DOF then a gradient is handy to tweak the intensity for differend distances. If you know what I mean. So is there anyone who thinks he/she's up to the challenge of making such a distance-map orientated blurr algorithm?

You can use DOF in bryce 5 click the arrow next to the render buttons and go to render quality, select premium render then go to render options and select depth of field and set to current selection. NOTE: you have to select the item you want sharp before you go to the render options

A note to Rayraz : Those precise algorithithms are included in Bryce 5, so as opposed to finding some poor schmoe to write a filter for After-Effects, why not just upgrade and give the creators their due? If you want cool features, the only way to get them is to pay for them. Period. Nobody is in this genre for free, although we are all HERE to learn!

Shadowdragonlord. I have got Bryce 5 and I know that it does DOF, but to use it you have to render on premium-mode. And as we all know Premium-mode is just f*cking slow. I've got scenes wich will take more than a year to render at 1280x960 on 64RPP Premiummode with DOF and/or other Premium-effects. If It's possible to do DOF in post-process and fully automatic it might save at least days of rendering for some people and for those specific 1-year renders, it will almost certainly save me 8 months or more, because I can just render on Normal-mode. The filter I talked about would be 2d-orientated and therefore it would almost certainly a much quicker method, than Raytraced Bryce-DOF.

Aye, I understand where you're coming from, sir, but perhaps turn the RPP down, to like 9 or something managable? You will find that on small renders like 1280x960 that you will notice almost no difference than at 64. The reason is, there just aren't enough pixels to make a visible difference. And I don't know what machine you're using, I use an old Pentium 3 with 256 MB of PC-100 RAM, and it's not cutting-edge, but perhaps you should consider rendering while you sleep? Do you sleep? Do any of us REALLY sleep? Dream forever...!

I sleep as much as possible with my tornado-like fans in my computers directly next to my bed. I've got an 1800+ AthlonXP with 512MB of 266MHz RAM and a 1-day-old stripe with 2 IBM Deskstar 120 GXP 61,4 GB Harddisks. It's very fast, but it makes a lot of noise. I might be a perfectionist, but I think I like 32 RPP a lot better than 9 RPP, but that could also be because I sometimes use a lot of noisy textures.

Aye, good call sir...! I just aquired a couple of 1-GHz AMDS, gonna link them to my P-3 and see just how effective Bryce Lightning really is! Have you considered liquid-cooled solutions for you machine? They almost kill the noise entirely, especially if you sleep with your machines like we do... (likes it when they get noisy!)

I think I'm getting used to sleping next to a jet-engine :) I've been thinking about liquid cooling, but it's expensive (or so I've been told) and I've just emptied my bank-account to buy my new harddisks and 256MB extra RAM. Maybe some time in the future I'll take one of these special towers with a special unit it in that keeps my processor at -40celsius (That way I can safely overclock my processor to make it up to 40% faster! I read about these special towers 2 years ago and the 40% could be not entirely accurate with the newer processors).