Oops, I missed that box! Sorry, and thanks for posting the link for me.

Thanks Agent Smith, I uploaded the links with no problem! I hope some folks will find them and try the robot tute to see just how GREAT Bryce 5 is. The robot model (he's so retro!) is fun to build, and Bryce 5 does some very cool things in the process. This was a fun project for me (the robot model), and I hope it will be for others.

Forbidden Planet has inspired a lot of people. It's a cult sci-fi classic and I believe the first sci-fi movie to win an Oscar. It was way ahead of its time and I think it was also the first movie to ever have an entirely electronic music (I use the term loosely) sound track. The intro to my tutorial has some history of Robby and also a link to a Web site, Fred Barton Productions, where you'll learn more about Robby, the movie, and how they made the robot work. Fred was kind enough to allow me to use some images from his site for my inspiration. But the tutorial isn't really about Robby or Forbidden Planet, it's about Bryce 5 and how to use Bryce 5 to solve some very complex modeling problems easily. I wrote it for the community of Bryce 5 users. I hope some of you will try it out and let me know what you think of the techniques I developed and that they gave you some good tips.

You must place the camera inside an object to use the refraction effect I am talking about. The interior of the object will display refraction effects. External objects are obviously not affected because they are outside the refracting object. Try it. Make a large cube (say 200 units on all sides, with the bottom level with the ground plane) and place the camera inside it, about half way up-down. Put the camera at one end of the cube so you can see as much of the cube interior as possible. Pop in a spherical light. (so you can see what you are doing!) You can leave it at the default setting. Place it in the center of the cube. Put any object inside the cube so the camera can see it. I like the red sphere. Put it on the floor of the cube under the light so it is illuminated. Turn off atmospheric effects in the Sky Lab. Set the refraction for the CUBE's material to something higher than air (100). Render and see what it looks like. Try different refraction settings and see the results, also try ranged light falloffs (usually set about 80). Move the sphere into coreners and so on and watch how the refraction affects it. I use this technique all the time and it works fine.

To draculaz and rickymaveety, I am interested in your comments. How about, I put up the tutorial (give me a week to prepare it) and then you could tell me your ideas on how to "mangle it"! I find I can manage some projects using gray scale and the terrain editor, but others elude me. Bryce is wonderful, but because it is so "clean" anything one makes using primatives is also "clean", yet reality is often very imperfect. So finding ways to make Bryce more like reality and imperfect (actually, that sounds kind of dumb, doesn't it?-- don't we strive for perfection-- no wait, that was my 6th grade teacher--) would be very interesting. Thanks for the comments!

To All, especially Gog CAI and MadMax, The tip of rendering BIGGER and then shrinking for use in a VERY GOOD TIP, especially in a VR movie! I tried it, and saw a marked improvement in image quality (although the final file size of the VR was increased as well, but within tolerable limits.) Here's a tip I discovered using Bryce (after years of using Bryce, wouldn't you know it dawns on me NOW what the feature meant! ;>) When you go to Document Set-Up, you can set your workspace to any size you like. Down near the bottom of the window, you get choices for rendering "resolution", which really is the rendered image size. This has nothing to do with DPI (which as we NOW know, means nothing to monitors anyway). You can pick a very large rendering size, but still have your workspace in the preferred size that you like using. For example, if you choose the "standard" document size, your workspace will be 640 x 480. But you can choose any rendering size, and your workspace will remain 640 x 480. When you render, however, the image will be at the much larger size. So this makes it easy to do the "really big image" thing. What I found for a cubic VR (one that let's you pan 360 degrees) is to do this: You need six SQUARE images: four sides, a top and a bottom. You get these by positioning the angle of the camera. Render each image (at the BIG size) and number them 1,2, 3,4,5 and 6. Set the camera's focal view to 112.5 Take the images into Photoshop or any other image editing program. They will be huge, of course. You can sharpen or tweak as desired and re-save or save as a OICT file type (don't JPEG, that will introduce artifacts). Using a cubic VR program (I use Cubic Converter-- but there are others), import the images into the cube and convert it to a VR movie in the program. Last, you can set the compression and final movie size. Here is where I shrink it down to the size I want. Then I export. The resuting VR is much clearer than if I rendered the Bryce stuff at the size I was working with it on. So, THANKS to you all for the tips!

TO All, Thanks for your insights and ideas! The DPI thing apparently is very confusing to many of us, and some of your tips are very interesting to try out! AgentSmith had a very interesting comment: "I think you have the problem we ALL have, and that is we look at our own work WAY too close, and "see" far too many imperfections, lol." Do you all run into this problem when considering your work as well? Do you know of any psychological studies done on this issue? One thing that I don't know how to get around is this: I create an image. I work very hard on it. I get to the point where I like it. I show it to someone else. They see it for the first time, and have the impact it creates because it is unknown. But to me, it can never be a "first time" because I created it. So I miss the impact with my own work that I get when I look at something in the galleries, which I have never seen before. Do you run into this problem, and how do you deal with it. Sort of a philosophical question, I admit. But Bryce is a very philsosphical program isn't it? Anyway, Thanks for ALL your comments and tips! I know I can always count on the Bryce community for wonderful lessons and ideas! Best to all.

Hi All, Thanks for the replies about the resolutions and the flat screens. I knew you'd have interesting comments! Which leads to more questions that have me puzzled. As you know, Web delivery can be slow on a modem, though many are moving to cable and DSL. So, images are usually kept small to compensate (okay, it's the file size not the image size, but overcompression is another issue.) What does this do to those of you viewing at resolutions of 1024 and higher? Do you go crazy because the images are tiny? I like to write Bryce tutorials (I have no idea why, considering the work it takes, but I love discovering things in Bryce and sharing them) and I've put up three Bryce tutorials on my web site: http://www.clydesight.com/bryce.html The sample images look large enough to me at 800 x 600, but now I am thinking you must hate them because they are too small. And, at the high resolution, doesn't it take much longer for Bryce to render an image, thus slowing down your work load? And finally, going to the Web for movie trailers, even the large ones are small on 800 x 600 resolution. So do you see basically a postage stamp if you look at these? What are your experiences? Thanks!

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement! I'll start working on the tutorial and have it up after the holidays. I'm going to make it "printer friendly" (which means Internet ugly) so you can print it out and follow a printed copy while using Bryce--so much easier than running between two programs on a single screen. There will be a model used, but I'll provide that as a download so we can all concentrate on the lighting. The tutorial will use the model shown in my post, which you can also see in the game ClydeMaze CM-1. It doesn't take up a lot of file space. I'll post a notice on the board here to let you know, so expect it in the early days of the New Year! In the meantime, try out the game: ClydeMaze CM-1 and see how the lighting was used to create an atmospheric feeling. http://www.clydesight.com/clmaze/ As a teaser for the tutorial, did you know that the refraction feature in the materials palette won't work on mesh objects? But, of course, I have a work around-- and a simple one at that! Thanks again for the encouragement!

Thanks AgentSmith!

Actually I was talking about the AMIGA, which came out after the Vic 20 and 64 (and the 128). I started on Commodore with the VIC 20. It had a "datasette", cassette storage system. It was much more reliable than a standard tape recorder (as was used at the time by APPLE and ATARI) because it used "pulse code modulation" for storing data. It also "verified" a file save by writing to the tape twice (in case the first pass didn't lock in, the second pass might) Slow as molasses though. There was a floppy drive available, but it cost more than the computer! The VIC 20 made learning BASIC extremely simple (much easier than learning it on the Apple II or ATARI) and Commodore was a very friendly company then. They had some cute little programs, including word processors and a primitive spread sheet on a cartridge. The tech manuals for working these things were really bad though. Mostly, you had to do the programming yourself. They changed their attitude after the Commodore 64 came out (they were then battling ATARI-- no contest there) and were a much less friendly company. Customer service was notorious for answering the phone, putting you on hold and then hanging up! Then came the 128, which by then had a floppy drive (the datasette was long gone) and a whopping 128K of memory! There was something called the 128D that started a lot of problems for Commodore and that's when they dropped the whole thing in favor of the AMIGA. The negative attitude of the company for its customers became legendary, even getting an article in a major magazine asking "Why are people loyal to Commodore"? when it treated customers so badly (i.e. raising prices unexpectedly, dropping models without warning, offering no tech support, etc.) The AMIGA was kind of DOS based (used AMIGA DOS), yet had a GUI like MAC (when PCs only had MS-DOS). AMIGAS were marketed badly, only sold in specialty AMIGA stores which were few and far between. It had a programmable stereo synthesizer music chip, color display (16 colors?) and multiple hard drives. It also used multitasking. There was a seperate processor for CPU, Video and I/O function. It had a lot of promise. But it was slower than molasses. I never owned one but had a friend who did. It took about five minutes for the machine to boot up and it was also rather noisy and bulky. They weren't going for looks. The desktop looked rather cheezy (MAC had much better graphics, even though they had not achieved color yet) and no attempt at postscript for type. It took ten minutes to display a fancy color picture that today we expect in less than a second. If there was ever a drive problem you had to fix it with complex programming, no utilities that I recall. But it was a popular machine with some folks. By then, I was into MAC (the LC) and so it goes. The last I heard, years ago, was that a company in Japan had bought the rights and specs from Commodore and was planning to reintroduce the AMIGA with a number of improvements to make it rival MAC and Windows. But that never came about. End of Computer Memory Lane 101

Thanks for the tips. Ummm, this is going back a ways, but does anyone remember the old Commodore Amiga? I remember (and this is many years ago) an image that was often used to show off the machine's graphics capabilities. It was a silver ball floating in the sky. It was highly reflective, but very sharp and detailed. (Or has my human memory improved the image with time?) I think I have seen similar images on the Internet, but again it was years ago and I don't know what platform or app was used. Anyone know what I am talking about, and can Bryce do something like that? I tried it using different silver materials and the tips above, which provide interesting results, but often my silver ball looks more like it's made of glass! I do make sure that fog and mist are turned off and have sky shadows up pretty high. I don;t know, something seems to be missing. The pictures I am talking about look like a shiny silver "pinball" floating in the sky. Anyway, thanks for the tips! RayRaz, how did you make those strange objects in your images? They are wild! Best to all... Does anyone remember the Amiga?

Rayraz, To use plugins in Bryce (I can only use sharpen and blur, but others might work), go into the materials lab and set the material for an object to a picture or image texture. Then go into the picture selector (see the Bryce manual if you aren't sure how to do all this). The picture selector will show three large boxes with the picture, the mask, and the result. Each has a down arrow next to it. Click on the down arrow and you'll see a list of plug-in's that Bryce found, and/or the option to point to a plug-ins folder. You can point it to Photoshop's plug-ins folder and press the select button. Now all those plug-ins will be available. However, many only work from within Photoshop and some crash Bryce, so proceed with caution. So far, I can only use the sharpen and blur filters.

Hey Pakled, I checked Flaming Pear! Thanks for the tip, they've got lot's of good stuff cheap (well, relatively, considering the price of software packages these days). The good news it works on Mac and Windows; the bad news is the products appear to be Photoshop Plug-Ins. However, Bryce can use Photoshop Plug-Ins, some of them. I have found access in the Materials Lab when a photo texture is used. For Bryce to use these, I don't know if one has to have Photoshop installed, or if Bryce can find a folder with the plug-ins by itself. Unfortunately, I've found that most of the plug in's just crash Bryce when I have tried to use them. Bryce can be highly tempermental at times. Lunar Cell would not be of much use in Bryce except in post processing of an image (I guess one would superimpose a lunar image over the Brycian one, and then somehow deal with shadows and glows and such.) Anyway, though your info doesn't directly resolve the issue of moons in Bryce, it is wonderful because of all the OTHER stuff that Flaming Pear has to offer! Anyone who has used KTP 5 effects would love the things Flaming Pear has available. For us Photoshop Plug-In junkies (can one ever have enough add-ons?), it's a great resource. Thanks for the tip!

Clay, Really nice image! Can you explain a bit more about the RGB perspective? Do you mean the RBG controls in the Sky Lab? I tried those but didn't get very far, in fact, I didn't see any difference. In your image, the moon is a grey-blue color. This is what I keep getting. But in the real night sky, the moon is yellow and sometimes orange, as Robnobs says of Arizona. Got any clues about the color? Again, really nice image and evocative. Can some of the shadows you are getting be a part of the water's reflect material Setting? If so, what about none reflective surfaces, such as grass or concrete? Thanks!