a .mat file is an exported Bryce-specific material file. They can only be created in Bryce, and only used in Bryce. You make a .mat file by creating a material in Bryce, adding it to your material presets (by displaying the Material Library and clicking Add), and you can export them to a file by highlighting one (or more, using ctrl-click) of the materials in the Material Library and clicking Export. That's it. Their only purpose is to exchange material settings with your friends, for use ONLY within Bryce, or to organize your own materials collection, if you have a whole bunch and don't want to fill up your Materials Library with endless variations. You can export all your mats and delete them from the Library, importing them again as necessary.

Render to an image sequence, then in a video editor, sequence the images into a movie. This has several advantages: (a) you can see the images before they get compressed by the video codec, to decide if it's the codec or the Bryce scene file that's the culprit (b) If you get interrupted while rendering a movie (power outage, out of memory, whatever), then you lose all the progress. Bryce doesn't save partial movie files. If you get interrupted while rendering to an image sequence, however, you only lose the current frame, and can re-render starting at that frame. (c) after the first few frames render, you can open them up and check for little details like lighting, etc. If you don't like it, you can abort the render then. With a movie you have to wait for the whole thing to render before you decide "gee, I think that bouncy ball would look better in green". --flick

Bryce does not use the graphics card to render. It only uses the graphics card to draw the wireframes (and OpenGL shapes, if you're using that mode). As far as I know, Bryce is not multiprocessor-aware. It is definitely not multiP-aware on a Mac, and I don't think it is on Windoze either. This means that it won't take advantage of your dual-P3 setup. Depending on your version of Windows, however, the OS is multiP-aware, so you could render in Bryce and then use another application at the same time without really reducing render time in Bryce. Those of us with single-processor setups have learned that trying to render in Bryce while surfing the web is a painful experience. Bryce renders slower than most other 3D apps. That's a fact of life. This is because it generates much more interesting textures and terrain shapes than other 3D apps. That's the trade-off. Supposedly, rendering will be sped up significantly in Bryce 5, but we have yet to see any evidence of this. Here are some things you can do to speed up rendering: - use fewer lights. Lights are a killer to rendering time. - make sure you have enough RAM. having more RAM doesn't really speed up rendering time, but having too little will slow rendering way down, because of the inefficiencies associated with virtual memory. For small renders, 128 megs is enough: for larger scene files you'll want at least 192 to be comfortable, and more than 256 if you can get it. - Imported meshes (.obj, .dxf, .3ds files) tend to dramatically slow Bryce down, especially if they have a lot of vertexes/polygons - Reflection, transparency, refraction, and bump are real time-killers. If you're concerned about render time, then limit the use of the first 3, and pay careful attention to your bump heights - more bump height = slower renders. - Volumetric materials are the #1 killer for rendering time. I'd suggest not using volumetric materials until you really know what you're doing, because they're not intuitive, it's hard to get good results with them, and they absolutely destroy render times. This goes for the Volumetric World setting in the sky lab too. That said, if you use these effects you can get some really cool renders. They just take forever. - If you're playing around in the Deep Texture editor, there are lots of things you can do to make textures render faster... most of them have to do with reducing number of octaves & frequency, and avoiding some of the costlier noise types, like Vortex Noise and some of the Voranoi noises. One thing about Bryce: most of the really good pictures running around on this site took many hours to render. Bryce is not fast. 12-hour renders are not uncommon, and I've personally had some renders that took more than 30 hours for a 800x600 still image. Animations take even longer (although usually you use a much lower image size and render quality for animations) --flick

Liftan, Maybe you accidentally enabled OpenGL or Sree3D modes for viewing. This is controlled by click-and-hold over the wireframe/render toggle button on the right side of the screen. Perhaps your new video card supports OpenGL and your old one didn't. The video card should have nothing to do with the actual Bryce render. Maybe your new video card has a different gamma (brightness) setting than your old, and the colors are appearing too dark or washed-out. This requires simply adjusting your monitor brightness and contrast until you're satisfied. If your old video card was simply VGA, only 256 colors, it will look much different now that your new one supports millions of colors. This could be the difference you're seeing: in this case, what you're seeing now is what you're supposed to see for the textures and bump mapping. Perhaps you could show us a rendered picture on your old system and the new system? Try moving one of the pictures created on your old system to the new system, and viewing it: if the picture still looks OK, then there is some bizarre interaction between Bryce and your new system that's screwing things up. Normally Bryce is completely uncaring about the processor and video card, except to know whether or not it supports OpenGL. --flick

This is not correct. The Edit Mesh/Ctrl+D trick ONLY works for objects which are Imported Meshes. Spheres, cubes, cones, pyramids, etc. don't have an Edit Mesh dialogue box, so they can't be exported this way. Any object or group can be exported as a .obp file, which is a proprietary Bryce format usable only within Bryce as an object preset. So it's no good to export to other programs. The only objects which can be exported from Bryce to other programs are mountains/terrains (you figured that one out already), and Imported Meshes (created externally anyway), using the Edit Mesh/Ctrl-D trick. All other objects can NOT be exported. Bryce is a renderer and a texturer. It is not designed to be a general-purpose modeller. For that, grab another program, such as Rhino, Ray Dream, Carrara, TrueSpace, etc.

Bryce doesn't store alpha channels within the images or animations themselves. If you're looking for a photoshop-compatible 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. channel (such as produced by Ray Dream Studio when exporting to Photoshop files when certain render options are turned on), then you're out of luck. Bryce doesn't support this option. The best you can do is a mask animation render, and then composite it with the full animation in a post-processing program, such as AE or Premiere. This should be relatively straightforward... if you export as a TIFF sequence, and use Photoshop version 4 or later, you can automate the process somewhat using the History/Actions tools in Photoshop, and it's just a matter of bringing in each frame and adding the appropriate mask channels to it, from the auxiliary mask render you did in Bryce. I would assume that Premiere and After Effects have a similar capability for animations for importing channels. A Mask Render renders only the silhouettes of any selected objects, including such effects as occlusion (but NOT complex occlusion such as partial transparency, fuzzy render settings, etc). --flick

That's a good question: the answer is: it depends. (a) If it really is a "full retail version" of bryce 4, then it's not an upgrade. An upgrade requires a previously-registered (i.e. paid for and with a serial number) version of Bryce 3D. If it doesn't say "Requires previously registered version" on the box, then it's a full retail version... Bryce 4 might have come down in price to $89, especially since Bryce 5 is coming out soon. (b) if it is an upgrade ("requires previously registered version"), is it Corel-branded, or Metacreations-branded? Did your free version of 3.1 come with a serial number? If it didn't, then the upgrade won't work, because you need a serial number, and the upgrade doesn't come with one, IIRC. I highly doubt that the upgrade policy from Corel covers the free giveaway. If that were the case, then they'd never sell any of the full versions. My guess is that you must buy a full version of Bryce 4, and that the free version of Bryce 3d is useless for upgrade paths. Remember, Bryce 5 is coming out shortly, so I'd suggest waiting it out.

Ack! I meant the Metacreations Bryce 4 upgrade.... I didn't think Corel has released a Bryce-3D-to-Bryce-4 upgrade, just the 4.1 upgrade, which patches an existing 4.0 or 4.0.1 installation. They also offer the full retail version of B4.1.

Bryce 5 will be out in the Spring. Hold off until we get word whether or not B5 is worth it -- then you'll probably want to buy that instead. To my knowledge, the Corel Bryce 4 upgrade was only available as a limited-time offer to previously registered Bryce 3D owners, about 2 years ago. Once that limited time expired, everyone had to purchase a full version of Bryce 4 to get it. The only difference between the two was that the upgrade didn't come in a box, just cellophane-wrapped.

Quick breakdown on exportables: Bryce Primitives (cube, sphere, etc.) and rocks: export as .obj only. This is a proprietary (and indecipherable) Bryce format. Other programs cannot use this. Imported meshes (DXF, 3ds, whatever): these are exportable ONLY if they were imported and have not been ungrouped/regrouped. Sometimes, ungrouping and regrouping is OK... but not always, it's weird. Use the Edit/Ctrl-D trick above. Terrains: exportable via the Terrain room. Several formats, including .obj, .dxf, .3ds are supported. Materials: exportable as Bryce presets only. Textures: exportable as Bryce presets only (however, you can get a full-screen planar preview of a texture, then take a screenshot, to export as a bitmap). Animation: Not exportable. Basically, Bryce is designed as a "final step" renderer, rather than a modeller.... it imports many things but exports virtually nothing.

yup, I got the beta agreement too. Coolness.

works just fine. No problems at all.

btw... it's Victor Gavenda Originally I posted a link to be able to buy the book at Amazon.com....but then I realized that it was a link using my account and one-click, which won't work if you don't have the right cookie on your computer lol... so it was a garbage link and I deleted it. Just go to Amazon.com and search for "Real World Bryce 4"

At the risk of sounding repetetive, "Real World Bryce 4" by Susan A. Kitches and Victor Gavino (spelling?) (by the way, "Bryce 4 f/x" SUCKS and is a waste of trees)

No. There is no way to take an image texture and make a procedural texture out of it. The two are fundamentally different. An image texture uses a fixed amount of data - represented by the pixels in the image - to provide the textural information. A procedural texture is theoretically infinite in the amount of data it can represent, since it is based on math functions and algorithms. Apples and oranges. So no, you cannot edit .brt files (procedural textures) in an external editor. No, you cannot bring a picture (jpg, gif, bmp, whatever) into the Texture Library. Yes, you can save image textures in "Picture Lists", although the utility of this is dubious. You can freely go from procedural to image textures using the P/T button in the Materials lab for each channel, but the two are completely different creatures. In fact, if you make a procedural texture for an object, then switch to "picture" (image) texture mode, Bryce will NOT attempt to convert the procedural texture to an image, although this is, in theory at least, possible. The reverse conversion is, in general, not possible. If you just want to get a limited picture of a procedural texture, here's what you can do: find a procedural texture you like, go into the Deep Texture Editor, and option/alt-click on the 'combined' swatch (I think.... it might be another key combination, I'm not sure). This will render that texture really large on the screen. Use a screen-capture utility to get an image of the texture, save it, edit in photoshop, or whatever. It is now, however, an IMAGE texture and cannot be made into a procedural texture again. It does not tile correctly. It might not even look right - certain effects such as slope, orientation, altitude, etc. will be non-existant. You'll have to 'wrap' it around objects - it doesn't live in 3D space the way a procedural texture does. It is a severely limited way of generating textures. KPT texture explorer is generallly a superior way of doing exactly this, since it has much more control over tiling, noise patterns, etc. But it's still fundamentally an image generator, and image textures are totally different from procedural textures.