Both dragon and sorceress look wonderful, aside from compositional issues, you've got a great start...!

I think that i like the POV better in the second one, but since we're not working backwards... The dragon should be bigger. Unless you intend for it to be an adolescent, which the Millenium Dragon is not really a teenager. It would create a more dramatic sense of scale... Honestly, aside from what ICM said, I think the image would be more appealing if you just flipped it. Horizontally, you know? Mirror it, and take a look... It draws your eyes along it's elements in a much smoother way.

Aye, I think that if you're going to use another person's model at all, you might as well tweak it to your hearts content. You're already doing that, anyway! The only thing I can think of, aside from lights or engine flares, would be compositional. There are three elements to this image, the trees, the ships, and the sky. Perhaps adding a few more elements would make it a more interesting picture, such as small clouds of a different style, or some birds, or something like that...?

Zescanner, if you change the Ray Depth, or rather if you increase it, you will merely get MORE reflections of your characters... It's cool stuff!

Thanks for the wonderful textures, Monsoon!

Aye, give us a screenshot or two, and I'll bet we can figure it out...

Blasphemy. Leave me alone, you heretics! (Oh yeah, where's the plants? Trees? Ha!)

A few things for optimization purposes... 1. Depth-of-Field - With Bryce's current optimization techniques, the Premium DOF settings are useless. Try the same scene WITHOUT DOF on and you'll see a dramatic, nearly real-time in comparison difference. Nobody in their right mind would ever use Bryce 5.01's DOF setting for animation. Postworking it in After-Effects would take you minutes instead of hours... For stills, nearly any image editor will let you use the "distance mask" option from Bryce to create a more realistic DOF, at a mere fraction of the time... 2. Lighting - I can't see anything in your scene that requires a volumetric lighting setup. No sun-rays, at least not at this point in your render. Turn the volumetrics off if you're not using them... If you're doing volumetric lighting, you should only have one single volume light in the scene. Any other lights will interfere and cast their gels and colors onto the volumetric rays, even if you don't have any gels applied. It's part of Bryce 5's light-gel-bug. 3. Materials - If you really NEED to use volumetrics on this scene, go into the Light Lab for your light. Set volume to "On" before you go into the Gel (Material Lab) setting, as every time you turn Volume Visible to "Off" it will reset your gel material. Brycean volumetric lighting is ALL gel-based, so once into your volume light's Material Lab, you can adjust the volumtric "Quality/Speed" setting to optimize your render. It really never needs to be over 50, I've got a demo of the differences if you're uncertain about it. And if you're test-rendering, and aren't worried about artifacts for the moment, set it to 15 and save yourself some time... 4. Objects - It appears as if you're using many non-Bryce-native objects. Are they imported? Did you model them? Either way, you can cut down on memory and processor load by reducing their polygon counts in a modeler or in a program like PolyTrans. I'm certain there are free programs around that will help you with this, I mostly just stick to PolyTrans and Rhinoceros, which are certainly not free, but very powerful. Remember that Bryce can do some internal smoothing, and so you don't always need those extra polygons at all. Hope some of this blabbering helps you, good luck! (another note on volume lighting - unless the quality is up very high, Brycean volumetrics will not respond well to alpha-based transparencies...)

Aye, aside from what the others said, remember that we're only being critical to help you out! I think that the color scheme and lighting are the major issues, aside from the texturing afore mentioned. Green skies...? Light sourcing? Also, give soft shadows a whirl, if you ever get a chance to go to sleep and let it render all night, they work pretty good!

Aye, it turned out very nice... I daresay when your machine gets faster you should try it at a higher Ray and TIR depth...? (smiles)

So far... the only forum that's ever been helpful to me, Swade! I didn't even know the difference between a "forum" and a "thread" before I came to renderosity, and I've been doing graphic design since before the 'net even existed...!

I think that rankings are silly. That's all. Tell me how to make my pictures better, that's what I want to know.

Good stuff Kemal. I suppose Wings just frustrated me, but then again Rhino bugs me pretty bad sometimes too. I'm far from a master at modeling, regardless...

Aye, I find it a pretty satisfying sense of "lost", too...!

Aye, I think it's great... Only thing I'd change would be the crash-terrain's source resolution. It looks blocky... Ther terrain's resolution level is in the Terrain Editor.,, Still, it's an awesome image, and your character turned out much better this time around!