Congratulations Humorix. You've done great work!

I render the alien seperately from the background, the background was filmed in real life, it's not CG, but it's slightly motionblurred and the alien looks to flat when I composite it with the background and when it's not motionblurred. For instance the alien has to walk around in my school, and beside the geography-teacher. The teacher is slightly motionblurred, and the alien should also be motionblurred, to create the feeling that the alien is really there. As for Adobe Premiere and Lumier Suite, I don't have them. I've checked my warez-archive, but I can't find both of them. A legal solution is also more favourable, because I can then publish the film when it's done without the risk of getting into problems with copyrights. Any free-ware solutions or other programs like Premiere and Lumier Suite that will also do the job?

Thanks, I think I've got a (non-legal) version of Adobe Premiere lying around somewhere.

I agree with you, I'd really like to be able to get my images in a magazine, and winning it against some competition makes it more fun too. Contests are great to improve your skills.

There's some good competition out here. Everyone has done great work. It's so hard to decide, but my vote goes to AgentSmith not only is it a great model, the textures are great too.

Oh, I've just got an idea, kinda stupid that I haven't thought of it before, because I use it myself all the time: Go to the render-settings and set the number of shadow-ray's on a low value, like 1 or 2 in the render-setup, it really speeds up rendering glass and metal, and it might make your machine more stable during rendering because of that. I'm defenitely interested in your progress.

I can't really help you without seeing your scene. I can just give you the clichaswer like use less reflections and transparant and glass objects. And keep your scene-files as compact as possible so your computer doesn't start swapping (swapping really slows down rendering, I once monitored processor-activity and it was 100% while using RAM, but when my computer was swapping the harddisk was working at 100% and my processor at 3%(!), it was just waiting for my harddisk). If you e-mail me your scene I might be able to give more specific solutions to your problem. My e-mail adress is: rayraz.rv@hccnet.nl and I've got an ADSL (broadband) connection, so I don't really mind downloading large files.

I've had some experiences like this. I don't know for sure, but I think the amount of RAM can be the problem. When I got more RAM i was able to import more complex files. Also I've noticed that .cob-file import very quickly. Much faster than .3DS and .dxf files. I seams like a more stable import too, since I've been able to import a 2 milion poly test-file in .cob format but it crashed at 30% in .dxf format.

I think you can't link the deformation of metaballs to animation. You have to animate the muscle-metaballs seperately. Using families does allow for easier orientation in your scene, so use these wisely and you'll be able to work faster. But it's a nice idea, you should really try it. I'm almost sure it's possible.

Wow, you are truly one of the best bryce-artists I've seen work of. The scenes look great. How about putting someone telling the story behind these animations in the sound-track. By the way have a look at my gallery, I've just posted two shots from the animation I'm working on and more images will follow.

PSD supports multi-layering, so if you want to save after doing some multi-layer post-processing and you want to be able to work in it later and you need those layers seperately and not the merged version than you should save to PSD format. BMP doesn't work save multiple-layers as far as I know.

I don't know about the store, but there are 220 (or so) phototextures on the CD of this months 3DWorld magazine they might just be what your looking for.

Yes, making objects 'Bryce posable' is not so hard. I'm using it to animate an alien for my latest animation, in wich one of my teachers (he gave geography 2 years ago, I've dropped the subject since then) meets an alien, it features a combination of humor and action. I'll let it know when it's finished and online.

This is a very nice model! Is it posable?

In my vision Photorealism is not the main thing to go for. It is in fact a barrier on the artistic intuition of the artise. There's so much more able with 3D than photorealism. Making things you can't photograph in the real world is what makes 3D worth working with at the moment but when we accomplished the goal of replicating the real world in CG there's more to gain in completely new styles.