That's true. When I saw the tiger being re-issued, I really hoped they had fixed the mesh problem, as the tiger's back legs are done wrong (still). What should be the "thigh" and the separate "shin" are one single unbendable "Thigh", what should be labeled "Foot" is labeled "shin" and what should be the "toe" is labeled "foot". THe tiger is great for standing or jumping poses, but can NO WAY be posed sitting or lying down like a sphinx. Actually, I bought DD's "Animal Kingdom" CD a couple of years ago, and that's how they did all the land animals. The feasible poses for each are restricted to a rather few possibilities. Still, they're good for animals in the background in pics. Even close up, if the pose you want is one of the few that they can do, they're pretty good.

[[It is just weird to me that love between people, the human body etc..are things considered taboo, while hatred and violence are allowed.]] Yep, that's one of the strangest things about American society, the whole mindset that love/affection/sex is somehow vile, disgusting, dirty and shameful and NEVER to be discussed, preferably NEVER to be shown (and IF shown, always for the sleaze 'titillation' - NEVER any of the more wholesome side); but selfishness and anger - even rage, and violence are perpetually on display and kids are taught - by constant example both in real life and in everything on tv & in movies - that rage and violence are perfectly acceptable responses when ANYTHING does not go exactly their way. *** Wanna kiss the person next to you? How dare you, you FOUL pervert! Wanna 'blow away' the turkey who just cut you off in traffic. Go For It! Don't just kill him, take out his whole damn irritating family too. It's the American Way. *** And then they shake their heads and wonder, and commission study after study, to try to find out WHY kids are violent. Hell, they are SYSTEMATICALLY TAUGHT to respond with anger and violence to EVERYTHING.

It seems that the tiger still has the major flaw that I found in almost all the animals when I bought the DD Animal Kingdom CD way back - there's NO 'knee' joint. The shin & thigh are run together into one single, non-bendable piece labeled "thigh", what should be the foot is labeled "shin" and what should be the toe is labeled "foot". It's OK for standing or jumping poses, but it's absolutely impossible to make the tiger sit down or do a reclining pose (like the sphinx, for example), and naturally, those are the poses I need now. The remapped texture is great but they really should have fixed that glaring error with the back legs.

If you're gonna BUY, go get the Dragon Factory at 3DMenagerie.com. That little kit will give you the resources to make dozens of different great-looking dragons, even Chinese style ones.

Who is DD? Is that Dedicated Digital or somebody else? You got a link for that, maybe?

I assume you're referring to Bryce 4, as Br5 allows for an unlimited number of libraries. I still use Bryce4, and I use Bryce Librarian from wolfiesden.com. I have about 30 different libraries of objects, and about 20 of mats. The librarian allows me to "swap" them back & forth from the presets folder to their storage folder. When I need to access a different one, I just have the librarian move the one I need into the User, or Tutorial, or even Boolean or Terrains spots inthe presets. Naturally, I have complete copies of the ones that belong there too. It's not as quick & handy as what Br5 has available, but it still works very well.

Well, I frequently work in unity size just to get things to go together, and then resize whatever I'm working on the the scale I'm using. If I'm doing something close, such as an indoor scene, I'll use 1.00 Bryce Unit = 1 inch. For larger, outdoor scenes, I normally use 1 Bryce Unit = 1 foot, or 1 BU = 1 metre. If I import something, such as a poser figure, I can use the windoze calculator to figure out what percentage to resize it by, so it's the height I want. I learned early that keeping things in relative scale from the start makes life a lot easier when the scene starts to get complex.

[[Unfortunately, you still have to do a lot of tweaking because Bryce sets diffusion, ambiance and specularity all to 100%... yuk.]] Actually, those are Poser's settings which are exported. Bryce just imports the settings as recorded in the file. I've had a similar problem with the earrings for the Indian Sari from PoserWorld. Bryce would give me error messages if I tried to import the .obj of the woman wearing the sari. I tried all kinds of things, including exporting everything separately from Poser. I finally found it was the earrings, which after export from Poser all by themselves are an .obj file almost 12Mb in size. Bryce would not import the earrings by themselves either, just wouldn't accept that mesh no matter what. It did import everything else. I finally gave up and put other earrings on the woman in the sari.

Also, if the water textures don't work as well as you'd like, experiment with some of the glass textures. If it's in a swimming pool, that could very well work.

I'd suggest you check out applying the different water materials in the presets to your water plane. Most of those are transparent to varying degrees. There's even once called 'tropical lagoon' or something along those lines. Try them all till you find the one that comes closest to what you want, then tweak that one a bit. The 'lines of light' are done by using a 'gel' on a light source with what's called a 'caustic' pattern. I believe there's at least one somewhere in the texture library inside the materials editor. There are also a number of them available for download, I just can't remember where exactly I got them. I have accumulated about a dozen so far.

Have you tried resizing the terrain grid in the Terrain Editor to 1024x1024 before the copy & paste? IIRC, I did that once, and didn't have to do the resizing step in the paint program.

P.S. If you're going to be posting models you have downloaded, be sure you have actually asked each of the artists concerned for permission to re-distribute their stuff. Otherwise you could be in rather deep doo-doo.

Why not just use a photo of a real swamp? Back in '2000 I posted a picture called "Bayou" - it's still in my gallery. I found the picture I used as the background on a website with free wallpapers. It took a while but I found several that were usable.

Yes, thanks for the heads-up. I am plannning to visit this evening, and would have been a bit 'bent' if access was not available and I didn't know why. Now I'll know to engage the 'patience' gear first. :)

Nicely done. I see the problem with the mountains. You have the sun placed Behind them, but there are shadows on the mountains with light coming from the front left. The entire face of the mountain should be in shadow because the sun is BEHIND the mountain. That's what makes it look a little off in that area. Still, it's very good work.