Thanks eyecatcher, the 3dcafe one looks like just what I need!! :) - now for the armour!!...anybody??

PS - the other alternative is to create the scene, populate the audience a s above, render it and then using a scene without the audience, import your 'models' and render that! - halving size so you can re-connect in Photoshop!?

I would increase the size of the catwalk width and length for a start. I agree on the chair model, lovely though it is, have a look on 3dcafe, I am sure there are some much lower poly models there, more modern. Of course you could always lower the perspective a touch more, only placing chairs in the immediate foreground with figures on, and then simply place seated pose figures in the next rows, you may not even see they dont have chairs. i assume that this will be all dark with spotlights anyway!? - so if the light focus is on the catwalk, you could get away with a lot in the audience!? - maybe as you get further away from camera and alongside the catwalk, you could simply have poser heads, shoulders and torso., simply deleting bits of the meshes not visible!?

Well thats all news to me! - the most likely way of re-doing without making a hash of it would be to simply re-render on another machine! - this will all be made a tad easier with Bryce 5 I hear, which has network rendering, and can tile images between several machines, even across the internet!!

Hmmm, I dont know that there is any set way of doing particular scenes viewpoints! - only logical things like, if you want a scene to appear immense and looming, make it big first, and place the camera low to the ground and looking up a bit! - space scenes benefit from finding a viewpoint that shows great scale and distance, creating a feeling of floating or vertigo even, but that depends on where the objects are placed really!! - I always try to go for cinematic effects, might be a good for you to find a book on cinematography as a reference!? - another tip to help you 'find' that perfect viewpoint, use the directors camera! - its far more versatile!

Wierd!! - only thing (as a possibility), could the obp's you have imported been version 4? - dont know whethert his makes a difference! - If you can, upgrade to 4 or better still, 5 will be out this summer, a lot of improvements made between 3-4 and 5 has some bonuses too!

Firstly, unless you are doing animations for broadcast TV/Video, you dont need 30fps, if its standard computer/ CD-ROM playback, 15-20fps should be fine! - if at all possible, lower the amount of things like bump on textures that are not really needed, glasses and highly reflectives are the worst, as are too many lights, so basically just cut back on anything you may not need or see if you can compromise on some aspects of your scene. Changing the fps after keyframes are set should keep things where you wanted them in relation to each other, although exrtremely fast, complex movements will maybe lose some ledgibility if you halve the frame rate! - Check out 'Real World Bryce 4' by Susan A Kichens, its an invaluable resource for any Brycer!!

Wow! - thats excellent! - you could be the Picasso of the Bryce community! :D ..sorry, couldnt resist it! (regains composure) - other than this being a wind-up!? - I am perplexed by this based on what you have said, but I have had a strange glitch which messes up the meshes when any animation keyframes have been used in objects in a scene. I have previously copied an object from one scene to another etc. and then hit the play button only to see my beuatiful constructions fly apart/shrink/explode in some insane manner. I assume you are using a 'clean' document each time!? - with no keyframe remnants etc in it!? - its a possibility! - If you can easily do so, ditch the preferences file for Bryce or even re-install it as well.

..the other possibility is to make sure that 48bit dithering is selected in your rendering options dropdown, read somewhere that that may help if you have banding in skies, although the monitor depth does seem the most likely!

PS: Blur More applied several times does a more convincing job than Gaussian for real out of focus fx!

The best method is by usind Distance render on the render options pulldown, this gives a greyscale image of your scene ranging from black (nearest) to white (furthest), you simply create and export one of these renders as well as your standard perspective render, then open them both in your image editer (photoshop in my case). In your layers pallete, select channels and using the arrow on the right, create a new channel - this creates a blank alpha channel to which you copy and paste your distance render. Then using Load Selection, select the alpha channel and flick back to your layers tab. now you should have the familier 'selected' line around various items in your scene. reverse this selection by selecting inverse. Duplicate the layer at this point and apply a gaussian blur to the new layer, hopefully, this will blur the background of the scene mostly, chances are that it might blur the foreground to some extent also, so.... undo that! - and tweak the contrast so that the blacks are very black and your infinately far items are as white as possible (levels is a better method if you are familier with it!). Now, re-select that alpha channel and re-apply the blur... may have to repeat until you are satisfied with the results! - sorry if this sounds complicated! - It really isnt, just need to experiment. Also, it is worth doing as someone else said, and create a mask render of the key object you want sharpest also, that way you can select this part from your untouched render and paste it into the top layer! I believe the Bryce manual does explain this to some extent!!

One would hope that dual processors would be optimised within Bryce as OSX itself is! - will be a lot faster anyway with its re-written render engine!

Processor it is for rendering!!! - more memory, just makes it easy to build more complex scenes and have them remain 'workable'

I believe that the Mac version of Bryce 5 is optimised for G4 Altivec processors (dual as well!!) and OSX! - that should be a great combination! - I must admit, at least 'some' more complex modelling tools would be sensible by now, as to the render engine, sure please speed it up, but dont lose its quality!! - soft shadows, plants and built in motion effects would be cool also!

Thanks I will give that a go!!