Use one of the volumentric light materials that are in the volume presets. Apply it to the sphere. As per the rendering, go into settings (monitor, I think) and turn of sleep. I had the same problem when I upgraded to OS 9 until I set my computer to never sleep. Just turn off the monitor if it's going to be a long render. Sarah

Wow. You're really coming along! Great work. Sarah

Send me an image (ssammis@coll.pair.com) and I will see what I can do. Sarah

Sorry Bill, I'm not sure I can help you. I haven't done any animations in Bryce. =-( Nor do I have the Bryce FX book. I can try to replicate the instructions (if you sent them to me in the email) and I can try to make the animation happen and then tell you what I did. Sarah

Double check to make sure that your machine isn't sleeping after a certain amount of time, say an hour. It won't render when the machine is asleep. Just turn off the monitor at the front and let the thing render away. Another possibility is that the scene is so complex that the machine is still thinking about how to render that next 1%. I had one project that took about 2 days to render. There were many times that I thought Bryce had crashed but it hadn't. Try taking out non-essential things or try turning down the transparancy and reflection on non essential things. This will help speed things up.

http://www.bryce4all.com has tutorials and a list of other tutorial sites. Sarah

My guess, is the bry extension is a previous Bryce file version. Have you tried running Bryce and then opening the file?

You can highlight the files that are similar (say a group of water materials that go well together) and then export them. Give the file a name like oceanwaters.mat When you import them later, all however many will be there. Sarah

The BR3 extension is for Bryce 3D files (what gets saved when you hit CTL S) BR4 is the same but for Bryce 4 files. .mtl files are material files and must be imported through the presets library. .obp are Bryce Object Preset files and must be imported through the preset library as well (click on the triangle to the right of the word Create) .bsk files are Bryce sky files and must be imported through the Sky library presets. Hope this helps. Sarah

Here's a tutorial on doing gray scale images for the terrain/lattice editor: http://www.bryce4all.com/tutorials/photogray.htm It's not specific to dirigibles but it might help. What I would do is create your circle of ribs as one grayscale image. If you post an image of what you're looking for, I could give it a go.

There's no need to morph the light. All you need to do is give your lightning bolt a material with a high ambience. In the volume material preset library, there are some nice colored light materials. Choose one and change the color (in the diffusion and ambience) to whatever color/s you want your lightning bolt to be. Then place a radial light near the bolt and render away.

I mostly eye ball things. When I'm using Poser figures, I scale things according to the Poser figures. In that case, my scaling ends up being very similar to Anthony's suggstions.

First and foremost, create a custom sky that has the lighting behavior you want (especially ambient color & intensisity, sun color, dome color & height) Creating a custom sky will save you headaches later. (I have a sky tutorial at: http://www.bryce4all.com/tutorials.htm ) Next, you don't neccessarily have to create all four walls. The only time a closed room is neccessary is if you have a mirror or other reflective surface that will show the missing wall. Radial lights are your friend. Use them often. Turn down their intensity. Give them some color (Click E and then set the color). Warm yellows, soft blues, soft greens, soft lavandars work well. One light source isn't going to cut it. You will need at least three lights, possibly more. You'll find that your walls will get in the way of selecting other things, so assign family colors to similar things. Doing so will make selecting things like the walls vs the shelf and the tackle box easier. Practice, practice practice. =-)

If you have something that is reflective and you want to show it off without the expense in polygons, RAM, file size, then you use a reflection map to give the object something other than the sky to reflect. I usually end up creating projects with enough intresting stuff that I don't feel the need for reflection maps. Or I'll add the reflections in post production work in Photoshop.

Practice makes perfect -- or at least closer to perfect. Two years ago when I started working with Bryce I relied heavily on Ray Dream to do most of my modeling. Then I would import everything into Bryce and render. Now I hardly use Ray Dream or Strata unless I have a very specific need. If you are on a PC, there are many free or very reasonable modelers out there. There are fewer for the Mac that are free or reasonable but they do exist. Personally, I think you can make some very nice dirigibles in Bryce by using primatives, terrains and symmetrical lattices. Sarah