I dunno why, but for some reason it evokes something in my thoughts toward the Hitchhiker's series... "So long, and thanks for all the fish." just happened to pop into my head right when I saw this. Dunno if that was your intent. :) But whatever the inspiration, I know that I enjoyed looking at it. L8R!

The answer to question 1 is: only rocks and terrain lattice objects made in Bryce are exportable. Perhaps this is because they are meshes. Imported objects in Bryce are also meshes. Thus you may combine Bryce terrain/lattice/rocks with imports for exporting later. I think that's the way to explain it. On item 2 of the question, it seems that it's possible for the groove to be an artifact caused by refraction. I know somethings come out funny when I play with refraction on various glass objects. Regardless of your going for the smooth look, I like the way the texture turned out. On item 3, I have a guess. Try selecting the tori (or is that toroids?) on an individual basis. Then on the rotate tool go to the pull down and select "object space". Then try rotating with all the individual toroids (or is that tori?) selected. This probably will not work if you have them selected as a group, it has to be selected as many individuals. It seems the woven look is achieved by rotating on the y-axis while multireplicating a tilted torus. So by changing either the x or z rotation, you should affect the pattern, and perhaps its shape. Also try shifting them positionally in object space as well. I think experimentation is the key to seeing how this works.

Heh... Leave it to me to guess at something, but I think it wasn't necessarily the heightmap image in your earlier attempts that caused the problem - it was the type of compression you used. I'm willing to bet that if you were to zoom in, that your blocky flaws in your earlier posts are 8x8 pixels in size. Why is this? Because you were using a .jpg for your heightmap. These blocks are a characteristic of .jpg compression. JPEG format is great 98% of the time for color images, but in a greyscale used for this application - it's flaws are much more noticable. For use in heightmaps, greyscales saved in .gif (if you need compression) or .bmp (no compression) format are a lot better. Try another project the same way, but with this advice in mind and let me know what the results are. ;) L8R!

Sure you didn't accidentally select the other objects? Dunno why they'd be funny otherwise. Were they locked in their respective attributes windows before you moved the river? Hmmm...

I have a method almost like tuttle's, except I make the path on the original terrain (slightly lower) and then make the second terrain for the path by cropping off anything besides the path. That way I can have a slight embankment/curb on the side of the path. As for adjusting height, you can do it the numeric way - or do it manually by holding the alt-key and using the move object tool. Holding the alt with it allows you to move just a smidgen rather than the bigger default increments.

LOL... Uh no, maybe when I get some $... Most models say my wallet's to skinny (like I've even had a chance with Sophia to begin with.) Oh-- you mean graphics models... No character stuff yet. I've still gotta get my Poser skills together and get another computer with some actual room on the hard drive.

Heh... Dunno if it would work for you, but in Bryce (what I use) you can project lights thru gels. A gel can be any common image file, and behaves as a projector slide. So by placing the light source as if it were coming from the prizm... I think you could figure it out from there. Just my $.02 L8R

Bryce has me mostly happy for the main part. All I think it needs is a decent polygon editor or one of those spline based NURBs deals... You know, so you don't have to do 100 booleans/metaballs just to get the contour you want on what should be an otherwise simple object. Right now, the other option to boolean craftsmanship is hunting down another program for modeling.

As for terrains not being seamless enough... Perhaps they should come up with another control for material blending across objects. It would make some things look more natural.

I couldn't complain about the skies too much either. Theres an option for planar or spherical. And if that's not fancy enough, then you can always throw your volume clouds in, etc.

The materials control could be better. It would be nice to have a way to paint stuff right onto an object. Right now it's a luck of the draw kinda thing in some aspects. If you don't have the texture map for an import to look at and modify with a 2D program, then you're pretty much SOL.

One last thing to ask for I suppose would be rewriting the code a bit to allow graphics cards to take care of lighting, volumetrics, and anti-aliasing (heck-- that's what they were invented for, right?) Something like that should improve render time greatly if it's possible to implement.

P.S. I hope the next version is affordable. (that means it should cost less than any major hardware item.)

I'm not the most keen on quantum mechanics, but if I could get my hands on an orbital photon modulator and make a non gravitational singularity-- Anyhow... Art... Computer Architecture... Does it matter? I'm not one to care how relevent my hobby is, as long as I'm having fun... And for the mention of StarRaiders - Wooohooo... That was fun back in the 8-bit days. I remember that on my 130XE quite fondly (130 XE being the model between the older 8-bit 800's and the 16-bit ST's.) Then there was Mig Alley Ace... And speaking of old 3-D games (real old, as in 8-bit), anyone remember LucasArt's Ballblazer? It had quite catchy theme music and an early form of ray-tracing. Speaking of software... Heh... I remember taking my time and manually dithering/antialiasing (yes, pixel by pixel using the magnifier tool) while using RemBrandt on my ol' Atari... And some would say that 10yr olds (which I was at the time) didn't have any patience. Then a couple years later it was on to the Amiga 500 and playing with Photon Paint. 4096 colors was a cool concept at the time, but I remember the fustration at getting pixels to remain the correct color when making .HAM images. Well at least I was good with getting my .IFF images to look cool. So, even though I do agree that Bryce could always be better in some aspects. I can't complain considering where I've been computer wise. L8R!

Whoa that's a lot, compared to what I usually do on my humble Presario 1690 AMD K6II computer (And I thought billions were big numbers.) But when it comes to stats on images like that, it makes you wonder what they are for the "big boys" who actually make movies,etc. with entire networked render farms... I bet I'm not the only one who would be curious about Pixar's or Silicon Graphics' stats here. Your render time was 8 hrs too... I usually don't try for much more than 4 on a render if I can help it (I'm not quite patient enough, and then there's games to play.) Probably explains why most of my stuff is relatively simple. LOL...

Me, I just let my trusty PSP 6 do the "smart size" thing and not worry about which method... But sometimes the process softens up things a bit. So I add a touch of sharpening after the image is made smaller. Other than that, I like adding my name to the thumb and/or some goofy visual effect... I suppose it's to make the person wandering the pages curious as to what the pic is exactly. Regardless of how you make 'em, thumbnail images usually help; it seems the pictures with 'em get more views.

LOL... I like the disembodied head in a bubble. What better way would there be for someone to get the POINT of the message on the sign. I guess that one guy had to be made an example of for the others that follow. Well, I enjoyed it... L8R!

Agent smith: Anyways, this is kinda what I'm talking about, but now I want to take a spinning object into an .avi, mov, etc. It's not too hard to do... I know Animation Shop Pro does a nice job of converting animated .gifs to .avi and vice versa. It's should be with PSP 6, provided that you have that program. I don't know if it does .mov though, may need to use a video editing program for that one. P.S. That structure isn't too hard to make at all. Positive sphere and negative cube grouped together. When you get more familiar with Bryce, that's easy to recognize. L8R!

Yep, 100% Bryce 4 cars... Unless you count the fact that I made a 512X512 .gif heightmap in PSP6 (sometime's its easier to do things there then in terrain editor.) Wheels are also terrains using heightmaps made in PSP. I've got the side profile and wheel .gif files somewhere if anyone wants to play with 'em. I'm still not quite as good as some people with the boolean stuff yet (I've seen the quality of some stuff here and am quite blown away.) It's probably a matter of finding time, etc.

Cool pic. I like this mech. Add a bit of surface stuff like Luke27 said, and include a hydraulic fluid leak or two near the joints (what military hardware doesn't leak fluid of some sort?) Also a few wisps of windblown sand would look cool. Perhaps some postwork showing a bit of heatwaves shimmering as well to indicate that the powerplants are going and the mech's being driven hard. Also it couldn't hurt to show that this thing's had some recent action by emptying a few missile tubes and adding the appropriate scorch marks on the launcher. Using a green light to fill in the one side would work real good, as it would appear to come from the laser. And since you added the tank wreckage, may as well have it appear to be smoldering. Great work!