How about an inn with an archway through to the stableyard, and a coach & horses standing in front, just about to load up all its Victorian passengers, off to their families in the country for Christmas? Got an name for the inn, even: "The Hollybush". Would make a nice seasonal sign.

Is that what they call a Bill's-eye?

Thanks Aldaron, that sounds encouraging, at least.

Message edited on: 09/22/2004 11:34

I hope that twice as fast isn't going to mean half as good.

We have 4 machines sharing an internet connection via ICS (going throug a hub). There are 2 W2K clients and 1 XP client using a broadband connection on a W2K ICS server. Don't know if this is anything like your setup, but we have had very little trouble with it EXCEPT when we have to update the firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro in our case): this seems a very common cause of grief with ICS. If you can access the internet from your server (the one with the broadband connection) but not at all from your client(s), check your firewall to ensure it is not preventing outgoing connections to any of your ISP's servers (DNS servers in particular). You can use reverse IP lookup to identify IP addresses it's blocking, if it doesn't give you that info. Some ISPs can also alter something in your TCP setup called an MTU setting, which can make it difficult for you to browse certain sites. If your client(s) can see some sites but not others, it could be this. There are some fixes around on the internet for this, but they involve updating the registry. Also, if you happen to use VPN, this will shut off your client's ICS access.

Open object attributes box, hit ctrl+upper case, hold these down and click on the tick box to save attributes. Doesn't work for trees or metaballs.

It's pretty cool for any sort of model... i.e. it's excellent. I don't come by here much any more, but every time I do, your work just keeps looking better and better.

If you haven't already, try playing about with your sky settings (save your original Bryce file first), and experiment with moving the sun control about a bit. You're probably finding that the bits of your figure you really want to be seen the most(her face for instance) are being shadowed by the rest of her. If you change the angle of the sunlight you may come up with a better compromise. Alternatively you could move the figure, if you want to keep the sun the way it is. Also, more haze in the atmosphere setting will have the effect of lightening shaded areas without upping texture ambience. If she was done in Poser with a default skin texture, spending a few dollars on a decent set of textures should improve her realism. If you have already got a good texture on her, it may be that the high ambience and the bright radial light are leaching all the detail out of it.

Start up Bryce, create any object (sphere for example). Select the sphere, click on the M in the little stack of options that appears beside it, which takes you into the materials lab. In the mat lab, put a bead in the first column against the diffuse option, so that a default texture appears on the right. Now click on the little P under the texture, to turn it into a picture object (you should get leo as default), then click on the bead above leo's head, to take you into the picture editor. Click on an empty square in the pic editor; this opens an explorer window. Find your .bmp file and double-click on it to load it in. Create a bump channel for it if you want to, then click on the tickmark to close the pic editor. Back in the mat lab, adjust the settings on your new material as required, then click on the little right-facing arrow to the right of the preview window. This will open your material library; decide which category you want to add your new material to, then click on add at the bottom of the window, give the mat a name and description, click the tickmark to save it, click the tickmark to close the material library, and Hey Presto! your .bmp is now a Bryce .mat!

Woodhurst - thanks for the image; it's on my desktop and I love it! ddruckenmillar - no, I guess there ain't, but I guess I like us all just as we are ;-)

It's a fantastic image, very much in the Myst line, very nice. But - I'm going to get shot down in flames for this - I like 3 better than 4. I like colour, and you have some great colours in your textures, why wash them out? OK, I guess it's sea-mist coming in, and it looks convincing, but everyone seems a bit chary of using strong colour. Did you mean to do a misty scene from the start, or did you bring the fog in to lose the colour? I'd have image 3 on my wall or desktop in seconds given the chance, but image 4 - I don't know, proabably not, even though it's a great piece of work. Am I abnormal?

373Mb is pretty big for a couple of Poser figures... I seem to remember from one of the Bryce manuals that you can get away with a file up to half the size of your RAM, but any bigger than that and things get a bit problematical. I've got files with six or seven Poser figures in that are only just over 100Mb, but they are all P4 or V2/M2 figures. If you want to use a lot of the top-end figures, a Gb of memory would probably be of help to you. I would second the advice above to delete any mesh that's hidden under clothes or behind other objects, and stick your background figures on 2D planes. It saves a lot of memory. Cutting down of the specularity settings may speed up your renders a bit, and if things are slow even in the wireframe view, like when you try to move something, lower your wireframe resolution; this helps a lot. I don't know whether you're fairly new to Bryce, but unfortunately it is quite slow, and if you are doing complicated renders you may just have to be patient. The good-quality Poser hair does take a long time to render, and running other applications alongside Bryce can be slow -it can take me up to 30 seconds to open an image with ACDSee when Bryce is running, and I have 3GHz and a Gb of RAM. Also running other stuff against Bryce will slow your renders down unless Bryce has priority.

I like it very much; it's like an old cover from Creepy Worlds (who remembers Creepy Worlds?) - I like the bridge, and the buildings are very imaginative. Maybe soften some of the edges a bit?

Noise noise noise... continue, it's fantastic! Very nice modelling, can't wait to see it with some textures.