Simple, effective... One thing, not as a 3D artist but as a professional marketer : Your site is your ad. YOUR ad! Clients will definitely shy away from pop-ups and banners and all that stuff... It's like a presentation, for YOU! Keep working on it, you'll be fine.

Aye, Rayraz... I use a color correction software called Colorific, it came with my PCI graphics card. It does exactly what it says it will, makes my printer look identical to my screen image! It's quite powerful, and easily plugs right into Photoshop (which coincidentally I NEVER use for printing!). But the silliness about TFT's vs. CRT's is just that... Your eyes don't operate in 24-bit color, as humans we only see 3 colors and our brains do all the "postwork". I love LCD panels as much as the next geek, but I've never seen one that could touch my Sony 420... If only I could find another one to match it for a dual-monitor setup! As for the Mac vs. PC debate, it's like Affleck says, "The internet has given America a voice and apprently everyone's using that voice to bitch about movies." We are, we create. That is all!

Aye, I think one thing that is key to the Bryce Purist philosophy is, "Can you animate it?", and the sad truth is that for some silly reason, you can't animate the Trees! (i.e., no wind or physics or gravity) So does that make the Treelab truly native Bryce? Fuzzy logic, but it's something I think Corel should have thought of when making the Tree Lab. But there's a million things one can pull into Bryce and still keep it a Bryce render, like lens flares and lightning effects! Would those effects count as postwork or prework? I'll do it all, it's not like I have a monogamous relationship with a silly (but totally awesome) program!

Aye, I'm with rollmop, it's all about the final image. I love flexingBryce capabilities and have produced some amazing effects but sometimes I run Photoshop to add a finalized look to an image, and I use Colorific so I have to prep any image in Photoshop before I can print anyway... Still, sometimes using native effects alone makes you feel like a million bucks, like you're on the cuttingedge of something amazing!

Attached Link: http://calyxa.pandromeda.com/benchmark.html

It's really a pointless comparison, and has been ever since Trident stepped up to 16-bit graphics back in the late eighties. Apples are good, maybe even phenomenal for ease-of use. They are proprietary, though, and because of this will never advance as fast as the hundreds of companies building parts for modular "PCs". Heck, my graphics card by itself is faster than a G3! Not an argument, just the facts, and when I had my Imac running next to my Pentium 2, it was quite evident that it would be the last Apple I ever owned. I'm no nuclear physicist, but I can handle simple equations quite well and there's not any way in hell a G4 can keep up with a P4, or an AMD chip... The only thing that DOES run the same speed between them is possibly older RAM, pre-PC2700 or ramdac... Here's some benchmarks that Calyxa posts, not for Bryce but for Mojoworld, which hits processors in a very similar way (for the most part). You can do the math, obviously the guys at Apple cannot. (cackles)

Hey Lore, I suggest posting images HERE for us to see! No offense, I welcome all new users as kin, but this site is to share images and not just to advertise... It's fairly quick and painless, too!

Cujoe, one thing that's helped me evolve in the terrain editor is using photoshop filters, and especiall KPT 3, but even pathetic filters are pretty cool for coming up with decent effects... So try making a terrain, then running some math on it, it produces some wild effects....! Here's a little image I was working on, made mostly from the Spheroid designer from my old KPT 3 filters for Photoshop...!

Shonner, shonner. Bryce does NOT need a fast graphics card "like an ATI Radeon" to rotate around a scene... I use a pathetic Cirrus Logic NOT EVEN AGP card on my work computer, a Pentium 2/266 MHz, and it easily keeps up with all of the Radeons, GeForces, and even the Oxygen Labs cards I've used at home. My point is that at no time did the Bryce programmers even bother to access what gamers consider every day as true hardware acceleration. Even kids on their (now defunct) Nintendo 64's get this as a STANDARD. Perfect Dark looked better than Bryce in any preview mode, Open GL or DX8, on any graphics card. Period. No offense to anyone actually interested, but those pathetic sceenshots ATI has posted don't do a thing for helping me position grass and effects, when THEY DON'T EVEN SUPPORT TEXTURES, in any way! Pathetic. I'm done whining now. (bows)

Cimerone, I understand that rendering Poser figures in Bryce can be a worthwhile cause, but did you try just rendering a screen-size image first? "This better be good" implies you're not sure, not to be critical but seriously you DO NOT want to wait five days for a possibly shitty rendering. That's like four days downtime, minimum... Is it for print? That's the only reason to render so high, and honestly rendering to disk on such an image may not make it any faster for you. What kind of machine are you using? Specs might make things easier for us to analyze the "sitch", and also, have you tried Lightning? It's free, if you have Bryce 5 I highly recommend it... Still, post a screenshot or a smaller image and maybe we can cut your render times down...

Right on, thanks for the comments and input! All I used for this mini-tut was Bryce 4, Photoshop 5, and Hypersnap DX-4 for the screenshots. I'm still learning how to use and deal with layers in Photoshop, and trying to get a grip on other features, like the silly little arrows. Nu-be, no, this is not one screen in Bryce (what a dream!), but cut-and-paste work from several screenshots. I would have liked to use more transparency, since that is what 32-bit graphics is all about, but alas...! (only 10 commas in THIS post bikermouse! Fossilize it and frame it up...)

Right on, joke... I'm curious, though, how much Processor power it actually takes to poll such screen/power saving functions, and I'm wondering if it's a difference of seconds or minutes? I suppose a few seconds per frame adds up when dealing with animations, I'm just curious if you everbenchmarked the difference? Let me know, I have a bunch of machines at home running Lightning and anything to save time kicks ass...

That's awesome, AgentSmith! I'm glad you asked it, I would've felt stupid or stupid-er, anyway... Isn't Renderosity great!

Hmm, I assume you are using Windows 98? If so, perhaps it's not Bryce you should re-direct, but Windows itself. I ran into a similar deal a LONG time ago in Bryce 3D (It Moves!), but realized my c: drive was significantly slower (5400rpm) than my d: drive (7200rpm), not to mention my d: was UDMA66! So I set Windows to run it's swap files off of the d: drive and boom, Bryce 3D (It Moves!) actually started moving again! Hope this helps...

I've got an idea for ya, tiptup! Make your own textures! It's really easy and Bryce is disgustingly powerful if you know how to play with the DTE. Jump into it and start messing around...! Here's a little mini-tut I posted a while back, it might help you or at least help to open your mind up a bit...

Sure, Vasquez, I'll put up a tut tomorrow... it's tedious, but the actual render time was jack since the image is so small. The first take actually had more detail, 'cause I turned AA off completely. But I liked the slightly softer look better (imagine that!). And, Groin, now that I think about it what happened was that I made the scene at work, on my Pentium 2/266/64MB machine, in Bryce 4. Slapped it on my little Smartcard (which by a twist of fate also is 64 MB!), brought it home where I only have Bryce 5 now and let it run on my home network... It seems to be the way of things these days, as I'm more creative in my spare time at work than at home, drunk, and distracted... (smirks)