Actually, I've seen some Mike figures with realistic body hair, rendered in Bryce. FFabris has some freebie transparency maps in freestuff here that are used for this. It takes 2 Mikes for each figure - the actual figure and a second one, just a tiny bit larger, which is transparent except for the hair. Of course having to use 2 full meshes for each figures really eats RAM, but it results in very real looking body hair. (I have no idea how it could be done within Poser.) As far as veins are concerned, I've seen a number of Mike textures with those too, mostly on pics posted over at 'rotica.

Well it won't let me log in properly. I logged in, and see my name listed as "online" at the top right, but below that it STILL says "you are an anonymous user" and the link at the left never comes up, even though my name is listed among those "online". What's different? The exact same login procedure got me in last week. Did the programmers over there implement one of those IE-only things designed to keep netscape users out or what? (Don't tell me to use IE, I will NOT use that piece of crap, period.)

Yarp - who did the great "Poser Explorer" wanted to do a similar utility for Bryce. I understand he tried to contact Corel several times to get info on file formats, and they never contacted him back at all. I guess they are very into "proprietary". It's a shame because Bryce could really use a utility like that which would enable you to do reference sheets of all your goodies.

Well, I use imported models, and/or sections of them. My latest Bryce pic took a couple months of work and had to be split into 4 separate scene files, which were composited in the last Bryce file using mask renders. If I had tried to completely model everything in the scene from scratch in Bryce, the picture would not be finished for at least another year or TWO - and since booleans are so very memory hungry, the total file size would have been over 1Gb instead of only 260Mb. It's just not realistic for me to stick to the "ideal" of doing everything, absolutely everything, in Bryce. That said, I almost never use an imported object, or material,without making SOME changes in it - sometimes lots of changes. I frequently "kit-bash" (something I did constantly with plastic models as a kid) and use a part of this and a part of that and something created from scratch to get what I really want. Also, where feasible I try to build my own meshes in DesignCad - though I can't do the really complex-curved ones. I always try to keep postwork to an absolute minimum, preferably just to fix some render artifacts such as a bad seam in a Poser figure mesh. Even when it might be much easier to do an effect in Photoshop, I'll try first, and damned hard, to get it in Bryce. I'm always most pleased with a work if I can say "All Bryce, no postwork but signature." It doesn't HAVE to be that way, but that's the way I'd rather go. On the other hand, if it I can't get what I want in Bryce, then I have no qualms at all about fixing it in postwork.

Haven't seen anything like that anywhere. Maybe Kennect can be persuaded to create some more items like this.

Attached Link: http://arachnoid.com/boycott/index.html

Look in the freestuff under contributor's name "ffabris". He has six white-on-black "hair transparency maps" for use on Mike figures in Bryce. This approach is costly in memory terms, you need to have 2 Mike meshes, one for the regular texture and one - slightly larger - for the hair transparency. Looks VERY real when rendered, but eats RAM like crazy. I took one and inverted it so the hair would be black, then just took that part and layered it on another texture of Mike to custom make a hairier tex I needed. This is the best way to go if you want "free". If you're willing to part with some $ for higher quality, go for one/some of Quimabella's Mike character/textures in the store - definitely high quality. I recently bought his "Carlos Forte" - not particularly hairy, but a great character and damn goodlooking.

[[And how do i make the clothing sit on the posers?]] Read the manual, it's in there.

snicker

[[ Dave-So, Netscape 4.78 I tried IE and Netscape 6. Hated them both, so I went back to my old 4.78, never to upgrade again.]] The problem with 4.78 is that you are shut out of a lot of websites that have features 4.78 can't handle. I upgraded to NS6, got disgusted and went back to 4.7 (6.0 sucked - BIGTIME), but now have upgraded to NS6.2 and it works quite well, AND I can get into all those sites I used to get shut out of, like 'rotica. Eventually, it'll get to the point where 4.7 won't access anything at all, because things keep changing and new features keep getting added to websites.

I use the Fine Art setting only in plop-render, to get a slightly crisper texture on a small area - for example, I was able to get a more realistic plume of smoke rising from an incense burner by just re-rendering that small area with Fine Art AA. Sometimes I'll use it on a figure face too. Don't see any use for it on a whole scene.

[[ I notice that a lot of people that use 3D Studio Max to render stuff...]] I've also noticed a number of people who render in Bryce and post in the Bryce gallery, who list MAX as their modeling app. - both here and elsewhere.

Great - thanks, I had no idea UVmapper could do that too. Definitely time to upgrade from classic to pro in any case. Thengkew, Thengkew, Thengkew!

Sorry, but to me a landscape with NO plants, NO buildings, NO anything but mountain shapes and water, is anything BUT realistic - regardless of how good the textures are. Granted, Terragen does very good mountain shapes, and has good textures, but even old Vistapro was very good at doing mountains, even though it was very limited in textures. I have Terragen and have played around with it a few times, but I prefer to use Vistapro and my paint program to sculpt terrains for use in Bryce - results in much finer control over details in the terrain. When they are close to what I want, I then import to Bryce for final shaping (erosion, mainly) and texturing. As far as what can be done in Bryce, I have yet to hear of ANY 'type' of scene that can't be done in Bryce.