Yeah Mike I will deifinitely try the variable hilights too. So far the other suggestions are working great - the shininess hilight is really making it look wet. Yeah for some reason the download version to 4.05 on the Mac doesn't really fix things (it caused me to lose all volumetric effects in skies) but the CD version of the same update works fine. Must be something they are still trying to get right in the downloadables. This place ROCKS! thanks, Scott

A Weeping Willow will definitely be in my next series of trees for sale in the store in my B5 Tree Farm. The next series is The Broadleaves of Bryce. Right now the Pines of Bryce are starting to trickle into the store - have a look! I am hoping Corel fixes the tree bulge before I finish the next series. Here's hoping.

Great ideas guys and thanks for your encouragement and suggestions. I also started experimenting with variable reflection and it works pretty cool for reflection maps. It looks lilke white is pure refl and black is null in Vue, but thank God I was hoping there was an invert filter - I hate making too many trips to Photoshop to invert maps during scene building. This will really come in handy on my function textures too. I will drop the reflection idea for a bit and try Varian's suggestion about tight highlights with bumps and see if that works. I'm also finding there is a whole lot of tweaking to get multi-level materials to blend right. I may stay with procedural materials for the grass stains... We'll see - thanks again. Scott

Thanks Mike and Yves - glad to be here. Yeah the ball is too reflective I know - what I am trying to do is make it look wet. Will toning down the reflection still keep the wet look? I might try and make some reflection maps. When you map reflection is pure black reflection and white zero reflection? That is so cool you can keep adding layers! Bryce only allows 4 layers and then you're done. Different mud will come in the form of a texture map - now that I know what to do - thanks! It is so cool to be able to plant grass in Vue - this is amazing to me. In Bryce there was no way to do this without a bunch of hand-imported grass blades or by using lots of 'alpha planes.' Also I cranked the number of samples in the render to 25 to try and eliminate the noise in the soft focus area, following a suggestion of an older post about depth of field and Vue4. I guess I'll have to take the remaining noise out in post. Awhile back I posted here as tuckersaur with a world of problems on the Mac. Recently E-on sent me the 4.05 CD and that install worked much better than the one from the internet. I am happy - 4.05 - seems to work much better on the Mac now. It is using both processors on my dual 1ghz and that is also something Bryce does not do yet! Great program - and as I said when I first posted - you guys have a real nice community here. Scott

Hogwarden how can the network rendering use the second processor as a slave since it uses IP address to do this. Aren't both processors on the same IP address? I have a dual gig powermac and I would love to be able to do this, but I don't see how. Also everytime I try to use host render with a net render bryce5 crashes. My only successful net renders work with slaves and the host not participating.

Alexants, Which version of bryce are you using? I think 4.0.1 fixed that problem. Also the smooth beach thing can happen just as easy with a texture. Look at her chapter on materials and altitude in the deep texture editor. You can make a mat wth smooth sand down low and rougher things higher up. It's a great book and she covers it well.

Thanks tradivoro. You're right - getting the taper right is what is taking so long. Also - the stupid true metaballs don't play well with the ones generated on the tree - if the old trunk touches the new one the two textures don't smooth with each other. Leave it to Corel to create some kind of hybrid metaball for the trees - LOL. This forces me to make a kind of metaball tube (condom - LOL) around the original trunk and it is even more work to do this, but it blends seamlessly. Also, I'm keeping the roots, because it is nice to have them slightly exposed for older gnarlier trees and you can always bury them if you want. The trees I sell will only be for Bryce5 users and they will be in .obp format - which forces me to sell them one tree at a time, because the set is too large to be downloaded at Renderosity. Again - if Corel would have made the parameter files exportable (DUH) I could have sold them as a pack as I originally intended. Yeah- I've been noticing that the shorter trunk trees get around the bulge problem - I think it has to do with the length and girth of the trunk. Oh well back to the getting the tapers right - they are getting close now. Nice tree.

Tradivoro, it's funny you should mention that way to fix it - I came up with the same fix myself. I was originally about to ship my b5 trees and then I noticed this problem. My eye for quality told me I wouldn't ship my trees in the store until I found a fix and I did. Enclosed are before and after images showing the fix on one of my pine trees - the Giant Sequoia. The trees should be available for purchase in the Renderosity store within the week. I've been working on these 10 trees for weeks now and they contain custom DTE textures that match the real tree bark. Unlike the 'presets' that ship with b5, these trees match the real ones for bark, colors, scale, shape, and texture. Let me know what you think.

btw - I also like and use Digarts trees for Painter. They make excellent background trees. B5 trees make excellent trees you can put right up to the camera.