You can also use this feature as a kind of rough-and-tumble collage or composition tool. Open an image, create a scene, and then plop-render or ray-spray-render parts of it. Make sure to do ray-spray-render while in Render View Mode, not Wireframe View Mode, otherwise you'll lose the rayspray pixels. Save the image, and repeat with more scenes. Voila, instant cheesy collage!

Bryce will not "bounce" or "bend" light sources through or off of materials. You cannot, for instance, shine a light from the ceiling, onto a mirror, bounce off, and have it illuminate the floor. The floor will remain unlit. Try it sometime. That effect would be simpler than the effect you are trying to achieve, and yet Bryce can't even do that. In order to do this, Bryce would have to consider every possible surface in the scene as a light source, and check each to see if it is reflective, a light is shining on it, and that light would bounce to the surface in the pixel currently rendering. It's totally possible, but would slow down the raytracer tremendously and so is not a feature. To get these types of effects, you must fake it as BT suggests above.

Amixiam, I think you need to use the "metallicity" setting. Metallicity tints all reflections with the diffuse color of the metal, and is the key ingredient to making metal textures work properly in Bryce. I would try the following settings: Diffusion 45 Ambience 5 Specularity 80-100 Reflection 60 Metallicity 100 (Refraction does nothing unless you're using Transparency) Set diffuse color to a light or medium gray, with specular halo/highlight color very light and neutral (use the option/alt-click to change color via the RGB editor to something like 253/253/253). That will give you blasted-out highlights, which is the effect I see in the poser render. Tone down the specular halo/highlight color to reduce the highlight blast. Make the specular halo/highlight slightly non-neutral (i.e. 251/253/252) to get a greenish off-color caste around the highlight, which can increase the realism of the metal. Just be careful not to get too saturated. In general, materials look very goofy in Bryce when their ambience is set too high. As a general rule of thumb, ambience + diffusion + reflection should always be approximately equal to 100, unless you're going for a special effect. Also, all materials in your scene should have identical or nearly identical ambience settings, or they will appear to stand out from each other. A good ambience value is generally around 5 or less. Higher than 5 and the scene generally looks washed out. You might also try adding a spotlight or two to highlight the man from a particular angle rather than relying on the Bryce sun. Hope this helps, -flick

You can tab through all the clothes using the VCR controls, next to the Solo Mode button in Bryce. All the imported objects are Meshes, so by clicking one of the VCR buttons you can tab through all the meshes in the scene, one by one, in the order which they were added. The outer buttons will make you jump to the next object type (terrain, sphere, cone, mesh, etc), and the inner buttons will tab between objects of the same type. You can also select each mesh individually by using the little triangle on the selection palette and choosing the "selet mesh" submenu.

The original BryceTalk is toast. Corel has a cheesy IRC channel with a somewhat happy Java interface, but it's always empty when I show up. As far as anyone knows (publicly, at least) there are no plans to include BryceTalk functionality in the next release of Bryce.

I've gotta vote for Februus's, #2. Got a really great "post nuclear blast" feel to it.

Wait for Bryce 5 ;-) I promise, you will like it a lot. -flick

okey dokey, ken ;-)

awesome! I'm drooling already, even though I'm not a Poser nut. Now all you have to do is make a Mac version too, since a disproportionately large section of Bryce users are on a Mac :^) Have they decided on flower arrangements and cake flavors yet for the wedding? You do realize, of course, that you're about to become the single most popular guy in the Bryce/Poser world, almost overnight. You might even get your own personal stalker! -flick

One more point: Since the native Bryce formats are not published, they would likely be considered by Corel and/or MetaCreations as Trade Secrets and thus covered under the reverse engineering license. I imagine you'd have a quick visit by their lawyers if you created a program which could write to or read from those proprietary formats (.obp and .br4/.br3) and started charging for it. Of course, I'm by no means an expert in patent law. I'm not trying to shoot you down: I'm just not sure you're aware of the hurdles involved in importing animation into Bryce. I mean, both Bryce and Poser have been around for many years, and everyone's been crying for an animation import tool, but no one (including MetaCreations or Corel) has come up with one. -flick

I wish you the best of luck, Konan! If you could do this, the Bryce world will be turned on its head! I imagine you'll make a lot of money (assuming it's in the same price range as your truePose and PoseMax products) for only a week or two's work! Just want to point out a few things that I hope you're aware of (and are the principle reasons no one has been able to do this successfully yet): (a) in Bryce, poser objects are imported as several distinct meshes. (b) in Bryce, meshes cannot change shape over time in animations. To achieve this, you would have to have 1 mesh for each frame, which would be prohibitive for file size considerations. The only object shape property which can be animated is scaling and shear. (c) in Bryce, all meshes must exist for the entire duration of the animation, and are always visible on-screen when working with the scene. This means that if you choose to follow route (b) above, all the individual meshes from each frame will be visible simultaneously. There's no real way to hide them in Bryce, except using Solo Mode, which is a user tool not an importer's tool. (d) Materials import from Poser to Bryce is time-consuming, non-trivial, and cannot be scripted. I think the materials all have to be rotated, and the transmaps have to be inverted. (e) the Bryce .obp and .br4 native binary object formats are not published. There is no way to create a .obp file or .br4 file given a poser file (unless you've somehow deciphered them: if so please publish the specifications you've figured out, there are a lot of people who have been dying to make converters for a wide variety of stuff). (f) You can't import keyframes or positions/rotations/sizes with an object: the user must assign keyframes and position. All imported objects appear either in world center or in the middle of the screen (preferences). The exception is if you can somehow put it in a .br4 file. (g) Bryce does not import animations from any known format, including 3ds, poser, truespace, or anything like that. (h) Bryce has no scripting interface, like VBscript or AppleScript. I hate to be a party-pooper, but if you're thinking you can just take your existing Poser format parser and somehow magically create a "Bryce animation format" file, you're going to be disappointed. Details of Bryce's animation-capable file formats are not available. -flick

I'm also a b5 beta tester. You're going to love it when it comes out. When, we still don't know.

I am also on the beta test team. Our lips are sealed as to features, new stuff, whatever, but I can tell you this: Corel's put a lot of work into it so far, and there's more to come. It's definitely going to be A Really Cool Upgrade and you're all going to want to get it. Even the beta testers haven't seen all the cool new stuff yet. There is no word on an ETA for Bryce 5 to hit the shelves. I'd guess sometime this summer, but that's pretty much a wild guess... but the press release on Corel's site said "early next year", it's unclear whether they meant early 2001 or early 2002.... I hope it is done before 2002 rolls around. --flick

There are 3 distinct ideas of "enlarging your view" in Bryce: (a) Zoom in/out using the +/- magnifiers (b) Zoom in/out by moving the camera using the camera controls (c) Changing the field of view. Each is fundamentally different. I'll approach them from the perspective of a person standing with a camera in his hand. (a) is like taking a snapshot and then having your film developer enlarge the image. The image is exactly the same, only bigger, and you've cropped away a different portion of it. Incidentally, this is what the pan (hand) tool does as well: it just moves you around on the final picture. (b) is the easiest to understand. When you move the camera in and out using the camera tools, it has the same effect as walking back and forth with the camera. Objects will change positions relative to each other in the picture if you take a "snapshot". The left-right camera controls are similar to this: they move the camera through the scene. Objects can block each other in different ways as you move the camera around. (c) is the most subtle. When you change the focal length of a lens from telephoto to wide-angle or fish-eye, you are changing the field of view. Changing the field of view away from 60 lets more or less of the surrounding world into the picture... and objects tend to become distorted. For a really bizarre effect, render one scene with a FOV at 60 (default) and then render it again at 150 degrees, and look at the sky and ground near the edges of the image. Using a FOV less than 60 tends to make objects appear "flatter", and makes objects at different depths appear to be closer together, because you lose some depth information when you go to a small FOV. By changing the FOV, you're essentially taking a picture which is not the same size as the canvas, and stretching/squishing it so that it fits, instead of cropping it like in (a) above. It's not a uniform stretch/squash, though: objects near the center are squished/stretched less than those near the edges of the picture. Hope this helps. --flick

Some of us are currently beta testing Bryce 5. I would expect it to be released in late spring or early summer.