Ah, okay fair enough. One thing though about a boat with sails up and no one at the helm. They tend to round up into the wind automatically. The sails then start to "luff" and flap in the breeze. The only way it would stay on course with sails full is if the autohelm is set (or someone lashes the wheel so it can't spin). I use to do a lot of sailing and racing offshore so I'm pretty familiar with boats. Full sails mean the boat is underway. I'd love to see the close up detail. It really is a beautiful image, I'm just nitpicking the details. ;-)

Hi Vile! ;-) Hmmm...a couple of critique points for you. First of all I love the sky and the water, no need to improve that. The boat however could use some work, it looks kind of flat like a cut out. It may just be the angle or the fact that is is dark. The other thing is that the boat should be "heeling" in the other direction. You have it leaning to the windward side (which never happens) when it should be leaning to the leeward side. Waves or no, a boat with that much sail up should be at a 20 degree heel to lee at least. It also wouldn't hurt to have someone on deck, it looks a bit like a ghost ship. Some bow wave splash would make it feel more realistic too. Other than that you're on the right track. ;-)

Ah yes, there it is on page 307, one paragraph, hehe. Hey I don't know what to say, my renders take longer with gamma correction ON than they do with it OFF. I'm starting to wonder if there is a bug in the PC end that shows it is on when it is actually off? Or vice versa for the Mac. I mean we are getting the exact opposite results. This may warrant an email to Corel huh? Very strange...hmmmm. ;-) I wish some other Mac users would give this a shot and post their results so we can compare notes.

It's funny that the manual for Bryce5 doesn't even mention Gamma Correction anywhere. I checked the glossary, index and table of contents, nada.

Yes that is very different. So I guess it's Gamma Correction ON for Macs and OFF for PC's. I'm curious whether you had a difference in the render times too?

For a high end modeler FormZ is one of the best. Rhino is good too. I have an old version of Infini-D4.5 (which was combined with Ray Dream to create Carrera). It works pretty good for most of the stuff I do. You might be able to find a cheap copy of that on Ebay. I don't know what your budget is.

Or you could buy 4 brand new G4 iMacs for the same price as Lightwave and set up your own render farm, hehe. Just a thought. ;-)

Gamma OFF looks slightly darker in my renders, but not by much. Quite a different result from what orn4rk got. I'm at a loss to explain it though. Are you using the updated version Bryce5.1? Just curious.

Aldaron is right, you can't stop and resume a "Render to Disk". Sounds like you should have just restarted the render from the beginning, but I understand how frustrating that can be when you've already let something render overnight.

Of course "A" is the better picture. Strange that you get those results considering that Gamma Correction is supposed to prevent images from looking both too washed out and too dark. Everything of mine that I post in my gallery, both here and on my own server, are done with Gamma on. All my work looks the same on my Mac monitor as it does on my PCC, whether I'm viewing it in JPEGView, Photoshop or my web browser (except the browser reduces the amount of colors). Are you guys using PC's or Macs? I wonder if that could be a factor. Hmmm I guess I'll have to do a test render myself, I'll post it when it is done.

That's right, Bryce only uses the CPU. The more RAM the better and the fastest CPU possible is the only thing you need. Mac G4's have exactly the kind of processor speed you need.

Attached Link: http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/color/gamma_correction/gamma_intro.html

On my Mac, as long as I have enough RAM, Bryce will render in the background at the same speed it does in the foreground. I multitask all the time with Bryce and Photoshop running at the same time, no problems.

Any interest in naming these sites that are giving away your work for free? I would think that is a violation of your copyright and you should be able to go after them for damages. I also wouldn't mind seeing who else they are ripping off.