Hi there, Worked on my first Bryce picture for the whole weekend and it's improving. Did a little blur to make the picture look mor real, but no other postwork. I'm not satisfied yet with the tree barks, ground and stones, but it's hard to get good free textures. What else could be done. What would you improve? Besides, I do not understand how the texture scale slider in the material room works. Just pull it out and it snaps back again? Didn't find anything helpful in the manual either :-(

Nice. You could increase the transparency of the water and make ripples/waves smaller.

Uh clothes! LOL

Hmmm, yes clothes would be nice...not too many people run around the woods bare a**d, lets see, poison ivy/oak, jiggers, flies, bees, stinging nettles, rocks, mosquitoes, brairs, sunburn, blisters, ticks,....:c)

I have no idea what the slider does either. It's something to do with noise, but I can't imagine what. It was one of only 3 things I've ever used the manual for, and, like the other 2, it wasn't really mentioned. My advice is forget about downloading textures and make your own. It takes time (I can change a texture 100 times before I'm happy with it) but at the end of the day you'll get a result tailored for exactly what you want and... it'll be all your own work. Try using an altitude dependant mat on the trees, so there's green, slimey moss at the bottom, graduating to more bumpy, darker bark further up. I've just used this method on a wall in a render that's working away ATM and it works well. You need to reduce the reflection on the water too, it looks like mercury. Try a bit of transparency. If you've got CPU to spare, try using 4 or 5 identical water planes with 100% transparency and 110-ish diffusion, stacked one just underneath the other, so the water seems to get murkier the deeper it gets, whilst at the top it's still transparent. It's hard to do, but you can get amazing results (and render times too!)

I meant refraction, not diffusion.

Aye, Tintifax, this picture's fine but for the materials! The little sliders in the Materials Lab, at the top, are merely for scale or "noise", although they don't really affect the actual noise of any given channel. I'd say spend some time in the Deep Texture Editor, and try Tuttle's idea for the water, it should be great! If you don't get anywhere further on the materials, keep this project and come back to it later when you either have better materials or you feel more comfy making your own. Some people run around naked.

Thanks for all the hints. I try to find clothes for Vicky, but I didn't find the right ones yet. This is a picture from a fantasy story I'm working on and the girl should be a simple citizen of a nearby village. So a simple cloth with maybe a rope round the waste would fit here. As I wanted to work on the look of the skin a undressed girl was fine for the start. The skin looks okay to me now, maybe softer shadow could improve the image. I like the idea of multiple water planes, but I work on an 350MHz Pentium III with 192 MByte RAM. So theres not much power left for complex images. Scaling of texture: As I understood I have to increase the frequency of the texture to get a good looking object when I make close-ups. I thought this slider would help, hmmm. I'll try the hint with the water. Used a predefined Bryce5 texture. I will try some tweaking about it. Thanks and further hints are welcome...

Yes dragonlord, especially when they are sunbathing, at least here in Europe. But also in this case clothing should lie around. She didn't leave the village naked and she won't come back naked either, LOL. But it seems she distracts the attention from other details in the picture...

pulling up on the think at the top is the same as opening the edit texture - only slower

Thanks for the hint air. Ah, wish I had good tutorials on making textures, so their outcome would be more predictable when experimenting.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=827246

Aye, Tintifax, here's a link to a quick layout tutorial for the Deep Texture Editor, maybe it will help! Good luck...!

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

Brycetech, has a 14 page tutorial on the materials lab, I just downloaded it, covers almost everything you could want...

Thanks a lot shadow, Zhann. Very helpful tutorials. Have a lot to read and to test now. I'm not very satisfied with the trees of Bryce5 (especially the trunk). Onyxtree looks nice, but it's very expensive. Maybe I do the mesh for the trunk myself...