I think he was referring to the option of making alpha planes in Bryce 5. ie rendering a bryce tree, saving the textures and applying them to alpha plane in Vue. (Forgive me if I am wrong donhakman) For variety. With Bryce 5 the tree builder is very powerful. I only wish Vue 4 had the tree builder like Bryce's. I do agree the over all quality of Vue 4 trees are better but you either have to download new ones, or make new ones in an outside program.

Defocus? What and where is that?

Thanks for the suggestion Pete. You've been a lot of help trying and I appreciate it. I went in PSP 7 and made a 16x16 pure white bitmap. Applied it to everything. Same deal. It was a nice idea though.

Ok, I think I have finally figured this out. The way soft shadows works in Vue 4 is that the far fading edges of the light darken through the color spectrum. Picture a bowl. The very middle inside of the bowl is pure white. As you go further out toward the edge the white slowly goes through the color spectrum to pure black. The closest colors to pure black in the light spectrum is red, infra red so that last visable colors you see near balcness is red. When u add more lights the red, which isnt visable with justa few lights,as it is so lite, is defined with more lights, hence you get the noticable pink with radial lights. Becuase radial lights radiant in all directions for the center, thereis a cirular red area around each light beforeit fades out. With the ability to edit the fall-off of radial lights there is nothing that can be done. This is why with spotlights the pink is easier to manage becuase you can control the fall off of the spot lights so the "red" area is only at the very edges of the spotlight. SO the only way to "fix" this would to be able to 100 completely control the fall-off decay of lights which I can;t see doing.The only other option I think of is to try very dark colored direction lights as they shouldn't have any fall-off.

Roflmao I actually have World Builder.. and don't use it ;) What I meant by real was that even if a tree is far away the raytracer takes into account its Z-Depth, light tracing and so forth.I use the Z-Depth render to do Depth-of-field in Paint Shop Pro. If you use an alpha plane it doesn't have Z-Depth (well flat) and for some stinking reason my alpha plane trees are always too dark. But yes I agree, for far off trees alpha planes can't hurt, I just have not found a convincing way to use them.

Well.. here is what I do.. I personally don't use alpha plains becuase Im a big stickler for realism. FirstI have just a bare scence with a ground plane. The first thing I decide on when I do a scene is the vegatation, then terrain in that order. I start with my lowest veg. So I place about 20 to 100 grass patches on the ground plane. I do not individually place each one. WhatI do is go into top down view, select grassand click click click the veg button until I get the desired number of grass patches. At this point they will all be in the same exact spot. I then move the grass patches to layer 8. Then I select all grass patches then EDIT->SCATTER objects. I then check -Move Objects Between-. For its settings I put something like 0,0,0 for the top line then 400,400,0 for the second line. This tells the scatter routine to scattter the selected grass 400 places on the X and Y plane but to not scatter them on the Z plane (this will come later) I also check -Use Selected Objects- which causes it to only do it to the 40 or so grass patches I have selected. Once this is executed you should have a nice square patch of randomly placed grass. Next I manually move this grass up higher than my terrain is going to be. Now I hide the layer 8. Do NOT group the grass at this point as the drop to floor will not work right. Then I move on to my next veg like weeds. I do this each on a seperate layer unti l I have all the veg I want. On Layer 1 I now create my terrain.. Once you have finished the terrain, put any water planes in. Now, go to layer 8, Unhide just layer 8 and layer 1 with the terrain. Now select all the grass objects(make sure they are all above the terrain) and click the -Drop to Floor- button (on left hand side) All your grass should properly drop onto the terrain. DO a quick render andadjustany grass that either A:looks like it is hanging off a cliff or B: in the way of a path you may want. Once my grass is just as I want, then I group all the grass patches into one group and hide that layer again. Two things. ThereasonI say dont group the grass before dropping to floor is for some reason when I group objects then drop them they dont drop correctly. Also the reason you hide each layer is two fold. One it keeps your memory down, but most importantly it keeps other unhidden objects from failing to drop onto them. For example. Say layer 3 has oak trees and layer 4 has pines. Some of these trees may overlap branches or parts of trunks and so forth. But if say both layers are unhidden and you want to drop layer 3 onto the terrain and layer 4 has already been dropped the layer 3 will stop dropping when it runs into the "visable" layer 4. In other words, some of your oaks will drop onto the next lowest objects which in this case would be pines. To stop thisI would hide my layer 4 pines, then drop the oaks which would ignore the pines and drop completely to the terrain. Do that above for all veg layers. Once you get all veg like you wantthem, you can place them all on the same layer, group them then hide them. The above is how I work and by no means the only way you can doso.But it gives me randomly filled terrains with 100% 3D trees and objects. I hope this helps. PS: Sorry for any spelling errors,when I get going I just type ;)

And interesting update. The pink is coming from the radial lights. It seems the more lights youadd the pinker it gets. I started with 1 light and started adding one at a time. When I got to 20 lights I started noticing a shift in the colors toward blue.. As you add more the blue shifts toward red.. ??

Well, I have checked the following: In the atomsphere, first of all there is no sun as I deleted it. There is 0 fog, 0 haze, sky color and all other colors are 100 white. No flare, no colorshift, no decay. On the radial lights I have no flare, just pure white light. Same effect. Adding the 30% lum setting only washed out some of the pink but where shadows darken the pink is still there. Im totally baffeled. If someone out there can use a radial light dome with soft shadows that does not have the "pink" effect, can u please send me the scene file so I can compare? Thanks

THANK YOU! That display material summery info is what I needed. So simple it could have bit me on the butt ;) Thanks again Wabe and Guitta Now I can have real tree look 8-)