I gave up trying to get a realistic fog effect with the Sky Lab fog a long time ago. Big rectangular fog. Yuck. If you like to keep your terrains large (as I do), you can get a fairly good fog effect by using a sphere with a volume cloud texture. In this pic I created a sphere large enough to surround the camera a bit and reach all the way back to the terrain. Then I dropped the sphere to the ground and sized it down from the top only until it was the height I wanted. I also turned off the fog object's shadows in the Materials editor. I think this looks more like real fog than the Bryce fog does. You can place as many of these around a scene as you want for spot fog, and they make good low-lying clouds for your mountains, too.

The - after the word "not" in the fifth line of my previous post is suppose to belong to the next line. I could not get it to stop treating it like a hyphen. Sorry.

In Bryce, if you try to change any of the size axes of an object to a negative number, you are actually changing all size axes of that object to a negative number. If you'll check the Objects/Attributes for the last frame of your animation, I think you'll find that the size is -40,-40,-40, not -40,40,40. So naturally if you go from 40,40,40 to

-40,-40,-40 the center of the animation is 0,0,0. The way the geometry of the sphere is set up in Bryce, you can not mix negative sizes with positive sizes at the same time, because the sphere can not be a negative size and a positive size at the same time (think about it). I think the basic thing that's happening here is that you're turning the sphere into its own mirror image over time and also spinning it -180 degrees on the x rotation axis, but it would just shrink to nothing and re-expand to the original size...maybe if you had a texture that was oriented to the object (not the world) it would be mirror reversed in the last frame, I don't really know. I'm curious about what you want the animation to look like. Maybe you can do it through some other method than resizing the sphere. Hope this helps. :^)

Here is a simple example of metaballs in action. The rubber duck here was built using metaballs. The eye sockets were made using negative metaballs.

Lots of folks are confused about metaballs because you can't see the effect in wireframe, you can't see the effect all that well in the preview pic, and have to render with at least 2 metaballs in close proximity before you can really see what they can do.

Clay, thanks for answering. It doesn't hurt anything, it just looks weird.

Are we allowed to use Photoshop to remove artifacting...like smoothing out places where the triangles show in the mesh when the smoothness doesn't work exactly? Hope I've made it clear what I mean.

For example, the posting two down from this one.

Ironbrew=3 big hoovie=2 StephenRay=1 Ironbrew: I had a special reason for liking your pic...My dad was a watchmaker until he retired (he's 84 years old now), so this is a scene that I've seen many times in many ways. This is one of the most unsatisfying votes I've been involved with. It was too hard to narrow down to only three. Well done, everyone! :^)

Realism is pretty broad as a concept. "Toy Story" is realism of one type, "Final Fantasy" another. If it has a desktop and is obviously at least an attempt at realism, I think it qualifies. This is supposed to be fun, so let's try not to get over-analytical and just vote for the one you like the best.

If you want to make a river "flow down a mountain" you might want to check out previous posts about waterfalls in this forum. There are a couple not too far down from this post. BTW, welcome to Brycedom! :^)

I respectfully must differ. I have used both programs extensively through several versions and although both can have their quirks, Bryce has never: 1. had objects suddenly disappear without a trace. 2. Had objects that were grouped with other objects suddenly come unstuck when one object was moved. 3. Crashed when trying to add an object to the scene. These are only 3 problems of many I have had with Poser (repeatedly), sometimes I have had to give up and start over, with perfect results even though I did everything EXACTLY the same way in the first place. In each case, I can never trace the failure to anything I've done wrong (at least, according to the manual). In the case of Bryce problems, I have been able to discover my own errors behind almost all of the problems. You are, IMHO, experiencing what I like to think of as the steep learning curve that comes with learning to use Bryce. Stick with it, and you will likely begin to appreciate the huge amount of versatility that Bryce offers as a creative tool. Surf at random through the Bryce galleries here and check out the wide range of visuals that users have crafted. I believe that with both Bryce and Poser (and PhotoShop Elements) there is nothing that cannot be realized. The only limit is your own imagination. Keep trying, and RTM (read the manual). :^)

Where I come from, to "knock up" something would be to impregnate it. :^)

I can't find a place to change it in Windows as a preference, but left clicks on the download buttons at 3D Cafe performed an auto-UNZIP (this happens everywhere else,too) and left me with an empty unzip (this only happened at 3D Cafe). The fix, as usual, was too simple. RIGHT click on the download buttons, Save target as, run Unzip, open the zip file, voila! The objects are there. Oh, well.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=191669&Start=13&Artist=tjohn&ByArtist=Yes

Here's lightning done in Bryce with a transparency map applied to a plane.