Looking good. The sphere you have in the background has a bit of an oval shape to it. If that's what you want, great, if not there's a way to change that. The oval shape comes from camera distortion. Assuming you want the camera the way it is, you can take the sphere and elongate it, then rotate it so that starts to look round in the view. Nice thing about the Bryce view is you can see the oval distortion in the wireframe without rendering. Love the colors. Its the materials that take so long. the more transparent materials and glasses you use, the longer it takes. One way to cut down the render time is to make sure your glass texture objects don't overlap (unless you intend that in which case, render overnight).

Thanks for the info about the sun shape. I didn't realize why it was oval or how to fix it. My daughter totally disliked the picture because of it (and its too pink for here taste). But I was thinking about trying to do the fix up work in PSP because of the render time only I'm just a beginner at that too so I don't have a whole lot of ideas on how to fix it up. I think I'll try your suggestion. There are still a few weeks left, hence more nights to render during. I had a lot of fun doing this, got to make more stuff. I used Peter Sharpe's tut for the gems. And the dragon flies were the closest I could make to fairies using Bryce. I love the glassy materials which makes rendering take forever. This is my fantasy land, warm and smooth with lots of pretty gems just waiting to be picked up off the ground. :) Thanks again for the tip!

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Plop render is your friend..... If you have most of an image the way you want but need to make a change after your final render. Do your change, then in the rendered display render, draw a marquee just around what needs to be re-rendered. Don't have to redo the whole thing for a small change... And if you need to change aa for just a limited area - can do that - change the render settings, draw a marquee as above - and plop render... Also useful to test positioning, textures, etc. best, hewsan

Thanks hewsan, I used the plop render a lot to check textures and positions of the gems etc. Even that was taking a long time in my mind. Well, you know how times seems to drag when you're waiting for something. I'm sure it wasn't really a long time. So I know this will be a dumb question but when you do that plop render after a change, how do you make it part of the whole as a finished render? Do you do it in another app like PSP or PS or is there a way it does it in Bryce? Thanks again. I'm sure this will come in handy. Ang

When the plop render is finished... and you save your file, the bmp that is saved with the file will be the one with the plop render...and the rest of the render... just as you see on your monitor. Or you can just play safe.... and export image in whatever format you prefer. Like to use ps so it's not compressed any, but that's up to you. And forgot to mention in previous post, but i like your sense of colour. Best, and look forward to seeing more, hewsan