You could try this... if you just want a lazy river, and since your POV is not close to the water (thus you don't have to mess with distortions and such). You can take a mirror, make it transparent (the amount of transparency depends upon your taste), and apply a bump map to it. The trouble with your river is that it's too unnaturally blue, water that shallow is just transparent, with maybe a hint of blue which you'll get from your reflection of the sky. But water itself of course is not naturally blue. If you want the water to be deeper, then you can just do the same thing, only use fog settings, or if you can't get those to work you can try a sphere/cube with the texture "Marley's Ghost" that comes with Bryce applied to it. But I have yet to see any river that is that color =) As for the willow, if you're saying that the building is large, and that's why the willow looks so small (12m is quite a ways from a 2m tall human's standpoint), you may want to consider taking some steps to make the building look taller. Such as adding more detail for instance, or putting something nearby whose scale we automatically recognize, like a poser figure or maybe one of your sheep (great job on those BTW). Also the size of the sheep nearby makes the building look smaller. Hope this is helpful to you and good luck!

LOL I didn't mean EVERYTHING (wouldn't that be a dream), just some of the more common FX such as lens flare mentioned. If a company did manage to make a program with every single feature of both programs, without losing anything, they'd make trillions of sales. Maybe it would be a better way for them to go... never mind, you can't argue with equations. Cheers

Well it looks good thus far. While you're in Photoshop you should consider applying the Smudge tool to your flames; I find that you can greatly enhance the "blasts" in this way. Just a thought. Good luck!

Have you tried simply covering it up with another sphere? You would put it in front of your messup and it would cover up that awkward bright sky background as well... Also you could try switching to another cloud texture, then reducing the Diffusion and Ambience, if you haven't tried this already.

Attached Link: http://hinchu.com/tuts/hidden/

Um... I can make a stupid suggestion (after all, why not?). Have you tried reducing the reflective values on the water? OR, possibly the specularity is set too high. This really ought to reduce the relative "brightness" of whatever it reflects. Also you could try using the blurry reflections feature of the Premium render. This doesn't look good with water IMHO though. Hope this helps

stormdragon, that study you did is extremely interesting. Funny thing is, I created a gemstone using Peter Sharpe's multi-replicate method, and it seemed like the higher I set TIR, the more null areas I had. I'm not disputing your results, I can't remember how high I set the TIR before giving up. Could have been as low as 10; probably should have gone all the way up to 18 or even higher (LOTS of facets using Peter Sharpe's method). I'd check on this right now but I have a MAJOR long render going so I don't want to interrupt. And of course my computer doesn't have enough memory for me to dare open another Bryce window and try to perform two highly complex renders at once...

I think Max has the best advice for roads... I think that also for fun and realism you should decrease the height of the terrain slightly where the road is. This makes the road look well traveled. As for the cheating thing... while the Storm Dragon's certainly right, it's also a really good thing to try and boost your Bryce skills first before starting to use postwork. That way your final scenes using both Photoshop and Bryce will look that much better for looking great in both raw and post (I think this is what you had in mind?). In other words I think that this is a laudable goal (which is laughable coming from me whose Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro skills are nothing short of amazingly sickening =P). One more thing, and it might just be a personal thing that only applies to me. Personally I notice that trees of a certain type tend to grow together because of the way that trees reproduce (unless of course they are planted by humans, but that's another story). So personally I would avoid having trees of different types growing right next to each other, as you do in the foreground. What I would do is to have forests of each type of tree spread out across the landscape (oh, come on, don't be a wuss! It's only thirty minutes to save and two days to render, what are you complaining about? lol)--looks a bit empty to me which was probably intentional--or else just make all three trees in the lower right the same sort. Just some thoughts and yes the mountains in the background need to be improved in my opinion as well.

And thus we go back to a point I made earlier: the whole idea behind Bryce (and what makes it work when there are far more popular, though not necessarily better, programs available, and also why Corel almost killed the franchise--praise be to DAZ!) is that it offers a very large amount of power for a very small price. It's always been this way, except when Corel had it, but we won't talk about that. =) I think that DAZ should try to reduce the number of other programs necessary to create great renders in Bryce. Photoshop is quite expensive as I understand (haven't looked at prices yet). This is why I mentioned the 2D FX from Photoshop such as lens flare earlier, again trying to reduce the number of other programs. 'Course, you can also change the colors in the much cheaper Paint Shop Pro. I think the point still stands though. Just my $.02

Okay they don't necessarily have to provide a fully featured texture maker if just provided a wide variety of photo textures. Then they would have an editor built in that would allow you to change the colors, similar to the procedures used to customize the avatars in the Hardwood card games, if you've played those. So if you have a photographic brick texture, for instance, you could make the bricks blood red and the morter black. Or you could make the morter a nice bright red. And of course you can always increase Ambience. And I still think they need to add a system of Dynamics! Bryce's animating capabilities are nill to zero! A physics engine would also be useful just for realistic object placement in still scenes.

Hmm well you could have a test function that would check every single variation to determine if you would crash or not... actually scratch that, such a check would have to perform literally thousands or millions of complicated calculations, and would likely lock down your computer. At the very least it would dramatically increase the system requirements, which would be a no-no in my opinion. What they could do is provide this as a plugin for Bryce6. Of course, they would also have to add plugin support for Bryce as well (wouldn't that be grand!). Personally I would like to see a plugin (or even a feature of the main program) that contains some of the "2D" FX that Photoshop can make, such as lens flare effects and et cetera ad nauseum. I mean, isn't the whole idea of Bryce to provide a cheap but powerful method of rendering complex graphics (which is why Corel totally demolished the franchise--they didn't understand that if someone wants to shell out $500 for a renderer, they might as well go for something a bit more powerful, or at least more popular, than Bryce)? Said idea kinda goes caput if you have to purchase expensive software to achieve the results you want (PSP9's lens flare effect sucks).

Hmm well thanks, that makes sense. Suddenly I don't know whether to hope that they will stuff a LOT of new features into Bryce6 (and thus raise the price), or leave it pretty much the same as they did with 5.5 and just improve a few existing features (and thus leave the price alone). Wouldn't it be nice if they stuffed a TON of new improvements into Bryce6, but somehow left the price the same? =) Wonder if something like that will ever happen in my lifetime lol. Thanks AS.

Okay, AS. I meant the list of procedural textures that you have immediate access to. This is the list that you can get to by shift-clicking the title bar of the texture channel to get the icons, or regular clicking of the title bar to choose from a text-based list (boring). But the default Bryce textures that Bryce5 comes with (many of which are very tolerable textures) use many procedural textures that are not included in the above list. This is what I meant by additional textures that you don't have immediate access to. If you want to use them in another texture, you have to go into the DTE and save them. Screwy in my opinion. Dan, as for the algorithms, I think that the CAPABILITY should be included, whether you are intended to use it or not (apparently this is what happened with the entire DTE--note that this was a good thing to leave in). Some of us may be able to understand them enough to use them if someone explains it clearly enough to us, and some of us may not. That's not the point; the point is that it should be there. Fractals (I hear) can be very complex too--yet there is an entire community here at Renderosity dedicated to understanding and celebrating the math involved. Just my $.02

Hmm didn't have Wings at the time... good idea though. Now you've got me thinking. Umm... the main trouble would be the face, bats have very complex faces. I'm sure the wings wouldn't be too hard (how hard can it be when your program is called "Wings"--yup bad pun sorry about that). The body also likely wouldn't cause too many problems. Thanks

Hmm I nearly always have the bump height applied to either a standard bump map (I love GoldenBump, works well for this), or to both my main texture and the bump map. This way the texture gets more detailed the closer I get to it. Another trick I picked up from video gaming (not sure how common it is amongst graphical artists) is to create my object, let's say a rock. I then pick out my texture and leave everything alone, except for transparency which I set to 50%. I also make sure "blend transparency" is set. I then duplicate my rock and make it slightly smaller than my original rock (attributes dialog works best for this), and then give it a normal bump map (again, like goldenbump) applied to a boring texture such as "flat gray". This has a similar effect to the first method, looks better IMHO but takes longer to render. But I'm still a newbie really when it comes to texturing. I've been using Bryce for quite a while but have only just recently started to really explore both it and other programs. Cheers