I'm having some trouble creating believable terrains in Bryce 5. I'm trying to create mountain ranges seen from far and short distances but mine always come out looking like mountains of melting ice cream. Are there any tutorials out there anywhere on creating great backgrounds like so many post here? Thanks for any help.

Attached Link: http://www.brycetech.com/

One of the things I do is create many mountains for the distance then stretch them and slightly overlay them in a panorama effect. You can select all the mountains and texture in one shot. Your texture selection makes a big difference to so try a bunch of them. Reduce the ambiance if you can too. Also play with the fog and haze controls in the skylab. You'll find that they effect how the mountains look as well.

In Bryce, if you load the extra mountain objects into the Create Library, there are some really nice mountain ranges in there!! (at least with bryce 4.. I don't have 5) Lyne

Lyne, they're the same on B5. No significant change in the content disk.

When you create a terrain to use as a mountain. Go into the Terrain editor - start at the default grid size of 128 and click a couple of times on the "slope noise" button, and a couple of times on the "erode" button above. Then change the grid size to 256 and repeat (hit the "smooth" button ONCE at this point), then adjust the grid to 512 and repeat the slope noise and erode process again. If your mountains are relatively close (scene-wise), or you want really good detail, change the grid size to the max of 1024 and do it one more time. This is the basic way to get realistic mountains - play around with it and experiment (more noise, less erode, vice versa, etc.), and soon you'll be able to do realistic mountains. When done, don't forget to raise the bottom 'cut off' a little so you don't have a square base to your mountain. The other important thing to mention is do NOT make your mountains small and close to the camera. Make them BIG and far away (Very big and Very far)- they'll look much more real. Check my gallery for examples of what I've been able to get with this technique - especially my recent pics like 'Wu Tien Shan' and 'Lungmen Jia'.

Thanks for all the great tips. I hope it wont be too long before my ice cream mounds start looking more like mountains. Again thanks everyone.