Hi AgentSmith, I understand that the 24 bit format you mentioned above is the usual 3 channel x 8 bits RGB format adopted in many files like those with BMP extension. That format may be used by some programs to extract 16 bit height information (red + green channels). Bryce doesn't do that - it converts the map to 8 bit, resulting in only 256 height increments. If the terrain has a high relation height to base and the camera cames close, the effect is annoying. If you want to see the staircase effect, try this: copy a terrain from the Terrain Canvas, or from the picture editor, and paste it on a new PhotoShop file, RGB or Grayscale mode. You'll see that the grayscale channel has identical 8 bit info as all the RGB channels. When you render imported RGB map files in Bryce through copy/paste, or both types though Picture Editor Load, you get steps resulting from the internal conversion from 8 to 16 bits (256 to 65536) filling the info blanks. Compare a zoomed-in native map render with the same map exported/imported from PShop (without any Bryce smoothing). The staircase effect is much more visible when you render an imported black-to-white PShop gradient map. Although PhotoShop works with 16 bit grayscale mode, all the important painting tools and filters are disabled, so there is no point in using that mode. There are other formats like the PGM - Portable Grayscale Map - that use up to 16 bit gray info in one single channel. PGM is the only format available in Bryce for import/export it's 16 bit native resolution (there is one RayShade format that I don't know about). So far, the only program I found that edits and imports/exports PGM to Bryce is Leveller, with the big advantage of rendering the map in a 3D window. I hope this helps - it took me a long time to understand the effect. Fernando