You can get a bare tree in the tree lab. Just lower the number of leaves slider to "0". Voila! Bare branches.

Attached Link: http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/plt_pics.asp

Thanks for some great suggestions, but I've been on Medical Leave since August 28th with a ruptured disc (this makes my THIRD one!), and can only spend about 30 minutes at a time sitting at the computer, followed by about 2 hrs flat on my back on a heat pad to recover. So a fix and rerender is out of the question for right now. I'm due to have corrective surgery soon, so my ability to Bryce is probably going to get more handicapped for a while, but improve after that. :^) You guys are right about the dirt and rust textures making the tractor look more interesting, but it wouldn't make it more accurate. Uncle Roy took very good care of his tractor, protecting it from rust and even washing it periodically. (Although reading what I just wrote about it does make him seem a little geeky about the whole thing, LOL). :^) The overall look and feel of this pic was influenced heavily by Country magazine which prints very brightly colored (some might say cheesy) photos of landscapes and nostalgic, farming-oriented photos along with their articles. If you are familiar with this magazine, you understand what I mean. So I really wanted the colors to be a little TOO strong to be 100% natural. The skies after the first couple of frosts look pretty much like this when it gets drier and clouds get pretty scarce as the leaves change color and drop. Lastly, I liked the suggestion of a team of horses to draw the wagon. Hey, I'm not that old! LOL! We stopped using horses (more often mules) around here as draft animals before I was born, so I'm really only familiar with tractors. Thanks again to all for the personal attention, and the genuine desire to help me improve this image. Hopefully, in November, I'll be able to act on the suggestions you give me on the next monthly challenge and put out a version 2.0 next time around. PS to lsstrout: yeah, but my Uncle Roy really was kind of drab. :^) He always wore khaki work shirts and pants, even to church. He was a bachelor until he retired and then married for the first time at the age of 65, and died last year at the age of 91. He was one of my personal heros.

"The two I'd like judging my work, I think are dead, Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, I could be wrong. I thought their stuff was great, the start of fantasy illustration (way before Valejo, Hildebrandt, etc.)..." Barring them dying after I write this, I believe both are alive- although I think Mr. Frazetta is officially retired from all work (even conventions), but he has a museum that he and his lovely wife run. I think both have websites so check it out by keywording their names. Someone else comes to mind, especially in light of our French members, Jean Gir (Mobius). I think he could be a great judge of Scifi/Fantasy.

Tjohn Male 49 Rural Tennessee near Chattanooga. No wife or children, 2 parakeets (would that be 4 keets?) named Boyd and Berdie (i guess Airflamesred would call them budgies or budgerigars)

Dan Whiteside=3 Stephen Ray=2 Alleycat169=1 Great challenge this month!

Well, everything has pretty much been said, but I think I may the only member left that hasn't posted to this thread yet, so here's mine: I like both of the original pics that were being discussed. Each for different reasons. And from what I can see, both took thought and time. Both deserve to exist. But, being born and raised in rural Tennessee, I guess that would qualify me to be an official hick, so I'm not too sure my opinion is valid. You know, sometimes it seems we're the only ethnic group that is still OK to hold up to public ridicule. Don't feel too bad for us, though. We all thought the Beverly Hillbillies was funny, too. And to echo some statements from earlier in this thread, I hope my English is not too hard to understand. :^) Thank you, Agent Smith.

Don't forget about "Planetary Traveler", the first movie made with Bryce. "Infinity's Child" was a sequel to it. Also, "A Boy and His Dog" gets my vote for weird SF movie. This was written by Harlan Ellison and starred a very young Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith (it's much better than it might sound, really). The real star is a dog which is telepathic and smarter than Johnson's character (but they are best buddies).

EVERYTHING tastes more or less like chicken. :^)

I had to replace a couple of mine with the "edit". Everything works OK but you might have to "F5" (refresh) to get the pics to update and load to the screen. Did not lose comments.

If you don't mind surfing through a lot of threads (messages that are connected), just go to the Welcome to Bryce Forum page, click on "search" and type in the word "challenge". I tried this and it pulls up messages connected to the challenges going back to the very first one. Hope this helps.

I don't think that is a looped animation...I believe it is a "real-time" program that is drawing each image as it displays it, objects, textures, and all, like in some of the more sophisticated playstation 2 games. Some of the other screensavers in the Plus! screensavers are also done in this way.

Is the "render line" slowing to a crawl when it reaches your glass objects and then speeding up again when it passes them? If so, there's a good chance that is your problem. If not, do you have the volumetric world turned on? This makes everything crawl. You can speed up glass by turning down the refraction slider. Hope this helps.

Rochr: I agree with you about the haze, but when I tried to boost the haze even a little bit, I lost the whole pic in haze. I don't know if it is the scale of the scene or what, but every change I made just made things worse. I have a pet peeve about overworking a scene, so when I find myself fussing over it for too long, my policy is to go back to the best render and call it quits. I get itchy to move on to my next idea. :^) Also, I have a thing about getting a pic too dark...for the longest time I was rendering in a dark room so as to minimize distractions. Then when I first came to Renderosity I realized that all my renders were way too dark. If the lights are off in the room, the monitor is much brighter in comparison. Now I render with the lights on.

Apparently the "Caption" thing doesn't do anything. The title for this pic is "Relic from Atlantis". Now the comments under the pic should make more sense.