Well, you can make doors and windows in Paint Shop Pro if you make them as grayscale-to-height maps. You can then colorize those maps for the textures. Check out some of the tutorials (see the tutorials link on the sidebar) for details. DXF was originally a 2-D file format for describing architectural and engineering drawings. It was later expanded to include 3 dimensions. Your 3D Architect program may just be exporting the 2-dimensional floor plans to the DXF file - you'll have to check the documentation for that software. Bryce usually will either completely import a DXF model correctly, or it will choke and complain that it couldn't import the file at all. I've never seen it import a 3D DXF file as 2D: most likely, 3D Architect is saving the file as a 2-D floor plan. cheers --flick

The gamma correction feature is located in one of the little triangles next to the render and camera tools - It's the lower-most one, right next to and below the trackball. I'm also not sure which versions of Bryce have this option.. I know that 4.01 and 4.1 on Win/Mac do, but does 4.0? I dunno. The gamma correction option attempts to correct for the difference between Mac/PC monitors and "the real world". IMO, it's pretty useless: it has no controls to adjust the target and source gamma, and you can get much better results using an image editor like photoshop. I'd say try rendering the image once with gamma correction on and once with it off, see if you can tell the difference, and make sure to check dark images on both Windoze and Mac boxes, because they'll look different. cheers

use the solo mode! This is an invaluable tool. A better alternative to a file that huge, however, is to make each part of the file separately, in different files. Then, at the end when you're ready to do a final version, pull them all in using either the file/merge... command or by saving the parts as object presets. --flick

Having more RAM will allow you to render more complex scenes with more objects and lights, but won't significantly speed up renders in Bryce. Memory doesn't really equal speed. The only speed increase you will see with additional RAM is that there less swapping to the hard disk, which is what slows down low-memory machines. There is nothing in Bryce that will speed the renders just by having more memory. You could have 1.5 Gb of memory, and Bryce wouldn't care. The best ways to speed up rendering in Bryce are: 1-) use fewer and less complicated objects 2-) use lower-frequency and less complicated materials 3-) use fewer lights 4-) stay away from volumetric effects 5-) for scenes with many objects, adjust the "Spatial Optimization" setting (in one of the little triangles next to the camera controls) 6-) Render smaller pictures, then scale up using an image post-processing application (such as Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro). cheers, Flick

Like robhol, I have no access to photoshop gradient files. I'm wondering why Corel decided to put support for that quirky little feature in anyway. Certainly, it sounds good in theory, but they seem to have forgotten that Bryce is all about the interface. We (the users) love it because of its interface AND its output. I find it odd that they didn't pick up on that -- and added something with literally NO interface to it. I think it would have been a better idea to create a kick-ass interface for that feature and then release it with Bryce 5... if it ever comes out. That way, the users say "oh boy, this is cool! Let's see what I can do with it!!!" and not "sheesh, they finally made this usable... but I never used it before, why should I now?" Requiring the users of Bryce, a low-end rendering program (in terms of $$$), to use Photoshop ($600US) to access this feature seems kinda goofy to me. Makes me wonder what they're doing to our program! ;^) If anyone from Corel bothers to poke around here, chew on that idea for awhile and clue in your PR people.

glowing effects are typically produced by a) very high Ambient settings on the glowing object's material, and b) making sure that the 'Ambient Color' setting in the Sky&Fog palette is set to a bright color. Otherwise the glow effect in part (a) won't work.

very nice! looks like you picked up the technique just fine

bandwidth, schmandwidth. :^) You've got several options: a-) make a visible light for each fire. In the "edit light..." dialog box, there's a little triangle pull-down menu: one of the options is "surface visible light" and another is "volume visible light". I prefer the quality of the volume visible lights, but the surface visible lights render much faster. b-) skip the light entirely and just make an orange object (sphere, cylinder, cones are good) with ambience set to 100. This only works if your overall ambient setting (in the Sky&Fog pane) is set to something fairly bright -- it won't work with dark ambient colors set in the sky tab. c-) combine the two: make a non-surface-visible light and an object with its ambient set really high. Option (b) requires very little rendering power, so your image will finish quickly. Options (a) and (c) will drastically slow down the render if you have a lot of teeny tiny fires. Things you can do to speed up the render: -- use squared fall-off on the lights (again, it's under the little triangle pull-down in the "edit light" dialog box) -- better yet: use ranged fall-off mode -- surface-visible lights render much faster than volume-visible lights, but it might not make much of a difference if the lights are really tiny. Things you can do to improve quality (but they'll take a hefty toll on the render time) -- use a volume visible light with "infinite light" set and squared fall-off -- use a volumetric material for the glowing fire -- or for the ultimate slowdown, use both. cheers, flick

Chris, you can do exactly what you want to do: use one terrain and one material. First, make a single terrain picture for the whole set of islands. You probably want to use a large resolution. Second, copy the terrain picture from the Bryce editor (or wherever you made it) into an image editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro. You can do it all in the Bryce Terrain editor as well, but it's a bit of a pain. Third, select all areas in this new copy of the terrain picture that you want to be "grassy" and paint them white. Then, select everything else (which will be the "sand") and paint it black. You should have a black-and-white image. Now, blur the image a bit. You can even use some of the distortion mapping functions if that floats your boat. Now, copy your modified image. Go back to bryce, click on your new single-terrain, and open up the Materials editor. In the components grid, HOLD DOWN CTRL and put a dot in component 'C' for the Diffuse Color row. Three dots should appear in the A,B, and C columns, and 3 textures should appear at the right. This is called "ABC" mode. Yes, that's a technical term :^). The 'C' texture controls where the A and B textures are applied. dark areas of the C texture result in the A texture being applied, and light areas result in the B texture being applied. (or is it vice-versa?) Change the C texture to a Pict texture, and load in your modified picture. Refer to your manual. Change the A texture to your grass texture, and the B texture to your sand texture, and voila, you're done! I apologize if this is a little confusing: if it doesn't make sense, e-mail me and I'll write you something more complete: I'm at work right now and don't have all the tools. --flick

maybe... when I get home I'll check if Ray Dream Studio can do the conversion for you. --flick

Attached Link: http://www.corel.com/support/ftpsite/pub/Bryce/4/index.htm

BTW, the little hand and +/- icons work in the director's view too, but be careful because if you pan too much (using the hand tool), and then use the camera forward/backward tool, it might not quite go in the direction you expect!!! once you gets past the initial "What the $$&*% is this?" reaction with the interface, hopefully you'll find that it's much more intuitive than other 3D packages! ...but you're right, the manual definitely sucks. One of my favorite pet peeves is that it's in black-and-white, yet in the Materials section all the little illustrations are referred to as if they're in color!

a-) there are many ways to improve render times in bryce: most of them have to do with reducing the complexity of materials. Volumetrics, reflections, and and transparency drastically affect render time. I would highly recommend rendering animations at very small size and low frame rate, until you're absolutely sure you're happy with them: then start a final-quality render. b-) There's a difference between the 'camera' and the 'director view' in Bryce. The manual goes into some detail about it. Basically, the director view is NOT keyframed and is NOT animatable. So be sure that you're in camera view mode when setting up your animation. The camera, on the other hand, is a 'free camera', i.e. it doesn't have the nice trackball motion effects that the director view has, like 'center to selection', etc. It's basically just on a tripod. To get the effect of spinning around a stationary object, you can do this: 1) while in Director view, select the camera (or choose 'select camera' from the selection triangle menu at the bottom of the screen) 2) bring up the camera's Attributes dialog box 3) click on the little red padlock icon to break the link between position and origin 4) enter the coordinates of the object that you want to fly around, and close the dialog box. OR, you can select 'Show Origin Handle' (also in the attributes dialog box), and drag the little green dot that appears around manually. This can be hard to do in 3-D, but if you use the orthogonal views it's not too hard. 5) switch to Camera view, and now if you use the trackball icon, the camera will fly around the object (and, it's auto-keyframable). Animating the camera is one of the most difficult things do do in Bryce animation: that system needs to be overhauled in Bryce 5 :)

ha, I lied! The sawtooth is one that I made and added to the list of presets. You can make one pretty easily, then add it to the list of presets by scrolling it to the gray square, and clicking on it. voila! (a sawtooth looks like this:)

   /|   /|   /|   /|
  / |  / |  / |  / |
 /  | /  | /  | /  |
/   |/   |/   |/   |

Hold down option/alt and click to delete one of the presets if you don't like it. They're persistent from project to project. Happy spinning

easy fix: Make your wheel rotate once, from 0 - 360 degrees, with one keyframe at the very beginning of the 'wheel motion' time and the other keyframe at the very end. Next, go into the Advanced Motion Lab. One of the shapes across the top of the motion curve editor is a sawtooth: this is what you're looking for. Select the sawtooth shape. You can play with the number of 'teeth' to increase or decrease the speed of the wheel. What this shape does is increase your wheel's rotation from 0 to 360, then in ONE frame sets it back to 0 again and starts it spinning. From the animation point of view, it looks like it's spinning continuously. NOTE: I think this actually creates a wheel spinning with a 'hiccup' in it. The reason is that you get one frame at 360 and the very next at 0 (which are the same thing). So you get two frames right next to each other, once for every revolution, where the wheel appears to stop momentarily. You can eliminate this by having the wheel settings go from 0-355 instead of 0-360, or 0-345 instead of 0-360... you'll have to play with the exact number to get it to look right, because it's dependent on the wheel speed and frame rate. Happy spinning.