(grins) Unreal 3.0 is not intended for art purposes, but I have watched and played with Unreal since day 1, and they have a ridiculous product plan. Unreal 3.0 is over 100 times as powerful as Unreal 2.0, which was over 100 times as ridiculous as Unreal 1.0. If Corel could pull that off, they could call it Bryce 50, instead of Bryce 6. ICM is right, though. This technological advance is fed by the millions of hungry would-be-killers out there in 3D world, blowing each other away. Zhann, I don't know what you mean about licensing? As far as I know, Unreal has been licensed to anyone who has applied for it. Postal, Rune, Wheel of Time, Tribes, Lineage, and Tournament are just a few of the games running the Unreal engine... Not to mention Unreal and Unreal 2. But, no fears. I am only using my excitement to fuel my ambition. I'm still knee-deep in modeling my fortress in Rhino, but soon I'll be done, and then it's off to Bryce-land for a week or two for texturing!

I think that, other than what has been said, it's the clone-army that really breaks things down. After watching the program, "Massive", in action with 3DStudio and Maya in the movies, I think it's unnecessary to try to copy such a grandiose technical achievement with a program like Bryce. I don't mean to discourage you, but it just seems silly to me? Flak's suggestions about randomizing the army are dead-on, but one other thing to remember is that it's ART, and realism in this type of scene is, to be blatant, un-achievable. Don't worry too much over the realism, I'd stick to compositional issues like you mentioned, Hythshade, and see where it goes! It's a great pic, though, with loads of "potential masterpiece" all throughout...

I don't care about using the GPU for rendering. All I'm saying is that, considering how good video games look these days, there is NO reason that our preview screens can't look that good. Wait, there is a reason : Money.

(grumbles) Too many bit-discrepancies, if you ask me... On top of all that, NONE of these applications deals with hardware acceleration. It's simple enough to make UT2003 (a three-year old game) Direct X 8 compatible, but nobody inthe industry can remotely keep up. It's where the money's at. UT-2003 made more money than any version of Bryce, Z-brush, or Poser. Sad, but true. Even the "big dogs" like Maya and Lightwave offer nearly NOTHING when it comes to hardware support, leaving our NV-17's and NV-25's almost completely unused...

ZBrush has long since outgrown Amorphium, alas... I've seen it used in conjunction with other character software, and it's amazing...! I'm not certain Poser would handle Z-brush geometry very well, but it would depend on how well the displacement mapping in Poser 5 works. I've only used it a couple of times...

Aye, there really aren't many elements to this image. It's way too bright, there are no details except the silhouette of the sword and the light-rays. I think you have a way to go before making a convincing story here...

Microscribe used to make those kinds of tools, ICM. Even then, they started out at $2,995, five years ago or so... Those Z-Brush guys are really top-notch. Amazing work, it just blows my mind, every time!

I dont' see any water coming from a pipe, I think what you're asking is if they spray you added in post was convincing? I'm gonna have to say no, it really doesn't look like how water reacts when bumping into an object. For it to be accurate, in this situation, you'd need some waves rolling and overlapping back off of the cube. How large is it supposed to be? The scale of your structure will determine the scale of your waves. Waves can be done fairly easily with terrains. There was a nice tutorial from Quest or someone fabulous recently about the whole incident. Wait, I think it was Frogdot? I'll get back to you later if you can't find this tutorial...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2092509

Warblade, if you don't have Photoshop but want to do those fogs in Bryce, it's entirely possible and in fact quite simple! There are some preset fogs that work well, but if you get sick of those I've got a bunch of fog materials I coud email you, if you so desire. I made them and .zipped them for some other Renderosity denizens, and felt the offer should extend to you as well! Really, all you need to do is create a Volumetric Slab and rotate it so that it's vertical, then stretch it so that it either encompasses the character or target of the scene, or so that it fills the entire scene. Then adjust the material settings, and test-render it a bunch of times, and you'll get it perfect after awhile! Let me know if you want the materials, here's a thread about it...

Are you folks being serious? I can't imagine making a character model in Rhino that's UNDER 500,000 polys! The recent fortress I was working on was only 200K polys, and that was after some serious workflow optimizing... My question is, how do you ever get anything done in Wings?

And the fourth Bryce-based image... Same scene initially, with a whole lot of tweaking on terrain size and placement, and the first S2000 image instead. Also, different materials on the terrains and of course a different POV.

The third, a nightime dreamy version of the second...

And the second scene, which is also the third, and to an extent the fourth scene. They evolved together...

The first scene, a really (REALLY) quick beach setup.

(grins at Bryster) Aye, I'll do my initial render in Bryce, and see how far we can take it. I also set up the Rhino file for use with Maya, we'll see how far that scene goes as well. I'm using this as a training scene for my transition between Bryce and Maya... Sorry to blaspheme, but it's gotta happen...