Yeah, I've never used LW (for more than 5 mins) so I'm not sure about the function, but there'll be a setting on lathe to ask you how many steps you need. Obviously, more steps, more polys. Also, never used "sketch" but I assume it just lets you draw a spline. Even eliminating a single point can rid you of hundreds or thousands of polys (because the lathe function will duplicate the spline around the Y axis). There's nothing you can do in Bryce about polys, though. Then again, thinking about it - I've just done a 3450x5250 render that required several very detailed lathe objects imported into Bryce, hugely subdivided with about 200 lathed steps, but the OBJ files were only about 1.7Mb each and only took about 5 seconds each to import. If your files are more than this for a simple lathe then there's something else amiss... <:#

LadyTieryn, - sorry, but I wouldn't like to see a special gallery for nudes. That idea is waaaay not good. That would mean that a great sci-fi scene (for example) that had a bit of flesh in it would get stuck in with all the 2-min Poser crap and get no recognition. If this rule was enforced I would be forced to post much of my stuff elsewhere. It causes more problems for the "real" artists than the BTB, who would likely love to have a whole gallery full of ass. What's wrong with just having a rule that says "ALWAYS use the nudity checkbox and NEVER post a thumb with nudity in it" - then enforcing that rule? Someone breaks the rule three times then they have their account deleted plus all their stuff. Easy to implement, easy to enforce. No more overt thumbnails (or should we call them ass-nails) and no more problem. :)))

Quote "Why should you be offended by "00001101100011101000010111110101010010... ?" I think you just called R2D2's mother a ho...

Quote <<>> The day I go onto 'Rosity and get confronted by a giant schlong is the day I take up needlecraft.

Juried sites are good for a challenge (have a go at raph.com if you don't believe me!) but for a general site they wouldn't really work. The sheer volume of submissions mean you'd wait months. Look at juried stuff like digitalarts - my last one took 10 days to get in and their throughput is about 1% of Renderosity's. TBH, I think Renderosity is excellent the way it is. Of course there are flaws, but when you check out many of the other sites you'll realise that they are very live-able-with (?). Am I right BTW in thinking the nudity box doesn't put the word 'nudity' next to an image, it just makes sure the image isn't shown if someone has "don't show nudity" in their prefs? Maybe the "nudity" tag should be altered so that it just blanks out the thumb of people with these prefs, so that they can look at who the artist is and decide for themselves whether to view it. After all, a lot of artists who aren't members of the BTB (Big Tit Brigade) use nudity occasionally and it would be a shame not to see their work because of other people's crap art. And Jimi - CTRL-C - I remembered just in case!! ;)

Jimi has written basically the same as I did in my Magical Disappearing Post(!), maybe a little more strongly. Personally I don't get offended by stuff like this but I can see how a lot of people might. I just find it boring and extremely dull. Having said that, my mother came over the other day and I was showing her the gallery - I was embarrassed at a couple of the images that appeared in the thumbs - it looked like a page from a porno site. ...probably ;) What hasn't been mentioned yet is that many of these pics leave room for a rating and comment. How many of you (and I include myself here) have gone and posted a rating of 3 or 4 on these pieces, with comments of "boring" or "how long did that take - 2 minutes?" The thing is, if these people carry on getting 10's and "wonderful work!" then they're going to carry on posting! The comments sections are an opportunity to say what we think, yet we're all (mostly!) polite and only post ratings of 8 and above. Maybe it's time we singled out a few of the crappy Poser pics and handed out a few 2's and 3's! It won't cure the problem overnight, but at least we could say we'd expressed our views in a proper manner.

Or... create a new doc 4X the size of your texture, and put... top left - your texture bottom left - texture mirrored vertically top right - texture mirrored horizontally bottom right - texture mirrored vertically and horizontally

Hey, I posted a reply here and it didn't show up! Damn! It took me ages, too, and now you'll never know what I think! As if you care... ;)

I just press cancel when it starts asking me anyway. If you know where your textures are then it's the work of a few minutes to do it all manually. Bryce won't deal with transmaps, etc. anyway and half the time it gets it alll wrong. If I do it myself I can make sure it's what I want.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=107&Form.ShowMessage=792731

You should find the answer in here somewhere...

I got a full, free version of Cinema 4D SE v5.2 to learn basics on, and I use it for all my models. If you contact Maxon they might be kind enough to tell you where to get it (I got mine on CD). It's pretty good to learn on and it's unbelievably easy to use, which is just as well as the PDF manual is a bunch of arse. I even got my e-mails answered by support in a couple of hours, which is better service than I get for all my purchased s/w! I've got Maya, LW7 and Cinema4D v7 trials too. And I use the word "trials" advisedly for the first two. Maya has a watermark in the modelling screen and on renders that is so intrusive it's effectively unusable. Forget it. LW7 demo doesn't allow you to create any object with more than 200 vertices! So you can model a cube, or a cube perhaps. Oh - to be fair, you could also model a cube. No good for learning whatsoever, so I don't know why they bothered sending a demo version out. TBH, when (if) I get enough money together, I'll probably go for 3dsMax, if only because it seems to be used more widely than anything else. Or maybe it's because it's the only one I've never used! Seriously, though, after reading many reviews I think Max would be the best bet if you're not going to be spending more than 3K, although I believe Cinema4D 7 has the fastest and the best renderer of them all (it is damn fast!)

You need the trans map. Select the lashes or brows or whatever. Use the normal head JPG mapping, then use the transmap in the transparency channel (it's called V2headtrhi.JPG for Vicky2 - Steph should have something similar ). You can easy find transmaps because they all have TR in their names. Then set the material to Transparent, then choose Blend Transparency. Set the diffusion to 100 for light lashed, towards 0 for darker ones. Et voila! You might need to mess about with inner and outer eyebrows on Daz 3D's characters to get the best effect. Sometimes I leave the inner eyebrow without transparency for a better effect. Although I don't know how many sections Steph has to her eyebrows :0 as I've never had the privilege of examining her!!! This may or may not make any sense.

Ooops - I pressed Post instead of using return!? <: DUH! I was going to add that to alter the fuzziness of a cloud's outline, just mess with the fuzziness control under base density. You can then have totally defined clouds or very wispy clouds with little effort. Beware two things, though - 1) If you overlap volumetric shapes, Bryce throws up giant and nasty artefacts that you'll need to correct in post. 2) For a decent cloud you'll need a quality of 60% plus. The ones above were 75-ish, as I recall, but I think you'll only need to go above 80 if you're going for 300dpi+ hardcopy.

Don't be afraid of using the defaults for volumetric clouds - they're very good. This pic was the top part of a a-bomb render I did to test out how clouds work when I first got Bryce. I tweaked the settings but mostly it's default stuff. It looks a little different purely because of the lighting - get your lighting right (like inverface's pic above) and your clouds will looks 100% better.

On this test render I did a while ago I was trying to do the same thing, but with volumetrics I couldn't get the swirly look to work very well so it just came out boring... I suppose it looks dusty but it certainly isn't dramatic!!! Maybe the best way, if you can't get a procedural texture to look right, is use a JPG with transparency map. Draw a cloud up in Shop or Paint using swirls and smears and whatever (or even use a scanned image) and then copy it and convert to grayscale for the trans map, making sure you black out the top and grey out the rest for realism. You'd then need to map it onto a sphere using spherical mapping in Bryce (rather than object or parameterised) and you might need to mess about a bit to get it looking right. Just an idea!