well done jade,a worthy winner :)

Seems a strange one Liftan,when you put your new video card in did you set the desktop to true color 32 bit? only thing I can think of is maybe the desktop is set to a lower setting.

I have a 64 mb Voodoo 5500 in my athlon 900 and it makes no difference in render speed I,m afraid.You need a fast CPU with a strong floating point calcultation and fast memory bus speed (133 mhz) to really improve your render times on the same scene.

Congrats ,will check it out Fozzi

Thanx jade:)I achieved the look by making a large cube and giving it a water texture,all the underwater objects are actually placed inside this cube including the camera as this is how it actually is in real life,never used a water plane at all.Think ill just leave it as it is then Hawk as getting the lighting right was the hardest part of the picture,actually needed four lights in the scene to get it right so better not muck around with them hehe.

Thanx for the kind words Hawkfyr,thought long and hard about my setting before I started as I figured the standard was so high I needed to do something original to try an stand out from the crowd:) might try that patch render option you mentioned in an earlier post to dull the sun (never even new it existed,thanx)as I dont fancy a full re-render,have a 1000 thunderbird an it still took 4 hours!

Good work,looking good.Couple of suggestions if you don't mind,try setting your material for the propellers to blur instead of normal in the material editor(click the little downward pointing arrow near middle top of the page in the editor page) and there is quite a bit of banding on the main fuselage (dont know if its intentional but if not) you need to smooth your mesh by selecting the mesh and clicking the small E symbol to edit the mesh and select smooth.

Wow,great job,very trippy feel to it with some subtle blur in the background :)

Very nice work Jade,well done:)

While we are talking about our wish list for version 5 please please let them improve the modeling tools too.

Some beautiful texturing work there Dave ,will be looking forward to the final render:) .... p.s brass telescope on stand would be a nice touch

Attached Link: http://www.3dplants.com/

Duh! yep I forgot to add the .com,and I'll check the two links out,thanx for the feedback warewullf :)

Very ,very, nice so far FastTraxx,background building is superb,suggestions to improve van even more would be,(probably suck,but here goes) 1.Add window wipers,dirty licence plate and a hint of shocker behind front tyre, sorry I'm a detail freak :) 2.The hood texture is awesome,scaling on the side texture maybe a tiny bit large? making it a bit blurry ,bump mapping would be nice too. 3.Lines to show where the side door is.

Wow,15 poser figures,no wonder it it taking ages to render thats gonna be a huge file to work with.I have a 900 athlon with 256 meg of ram and find if my file size goes much above 70 meg it grinds to halt much like yours is doing. Your video card wont make much difference(I have a Voodoo 5500 and it still slows)its all to do with processor speed and ram,if you are paging to hard disk then that will really kill your speed and need to buy more RAM,also avoid volume materials amd lights in your scene as these are killers also. One trick I use alot to reduce my load is to use picture objects rather than actual Poser meshes particularly for the distant figures.Just pose your figure in Poser how you would like it to appear in the scene (adjust lighting angle to same as your scene),render it with no ground or background and save the image as a .tif file.Load picture into photoshop and create a mask(black background,white figure).Now create the figure in Bryce as a picture object,it will render almost instantly and take up a tiny amount of room.