As for an oldtimers reunion.. if it's anywhere in the netherlands, I  say 'make it so' ;)

Theres nothing wrong with baking cookies :D  In fact, while I'm not so good at baking (í'll leave that to the gf) I do enjoy being in the kitchen. I'm far from a professional cook or anything like that, but I enjoy messing around with various ingredients... 

Hey, a thread about the old days, cool!

My excuse for not being here as much as I used to? Turning into a workaholic programmer, getting involved in 4 start-ups simultaneously and spending the remaining free time with the gf.

I sadly must admit I haven't opened bryce for a while, though I do have a copy of bryce 7 laying around just in case life calms down a little bit...

Despite not spendign as much time anymore I do still spend time working with Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Indesign. Mostly when people need a go-to guy that whip out something decent at the last minute.

I've also spent about 3 years doing VJ perfromances at various clubs as well as some illegal raves, which is absolutely wicked fun! I use a program called Resolume, which is like a little real-time photoshop and video editor in one. You can blend multiple video's in layers, apply filters and effects to any clip, layer or composition, set up macro's that respond to keys on your keyboard.

So I make sure I have a library of hundreds of random graphics, open 3-6 video tracks, and improvise, tuning the video's to roughly match the beat and just go wild with layers and filters. The result gets beamed onto screens in the club and people are presented with a festival of colorful madness to go with the music.

Oh and because I always liked the photo threads back in the day. Here's the obligatory somewhat-recent picture that I'm still live! And yes, that's a hamster cage in the background... B-)

Depending on how far in the distance you're going all you might need is a terrain with some noise. That's how I made all the 'forrest' in this image beyond the 1st visible ridge: 
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=266155 

It's literally a terrain with some noise. Probably I added noise, blurred it, added a little more noise, etc. a couple times. The texture was quite noisy also. Due to the haze there wasn't much need for detail so the main thing to make things look believable was picking the same colors as the trees closer to the camera.

This particular trick definitely doesn't work for every case but it does render very quickly. 

Thank you Kimberly :)

Are any of the 'powers that be' around? It would be nice to know if there is any interest in my suggestion...

Sounds a bit like a bug.. Maybe your file attachment is too large, but even then the error should be specific and say so (afaik).

maybe one of the mods can pass it on?

XML on its own is more of a way to write down arbitrary but structured data, rather than a particular 3d format. Microsoft word files from word 2003 and newer, for instance, are xml files as well, as are RSS feeds, some xhtml webpages, etc.

So, I guess it depends on which xml-based format is used to encode the 3d model. If you could figure that out, you might be able to find some tool to convert that particular format.

hahaha you wouldn't believe how many times I've been asked to give 110%, 120% even 200%...

It doesn't matter how many times you make the impossible happen or save someone's ass. Even if you could give 110%, people would downgrade the same result to 90% the next time you've got to do the same thing.

In other words, when you're at work, any results of your labour will only be rated excellent once. After that, they become the expected result.

And still the ladies get offended when guys complain that women are expensive :P

Hyper Giants are an interesting breed of stars. Usually, in a star, the outward pressure from the fusion reaction at it's core counter-balances the inward pressure from the star's own gravity.

In a Hyper Giant however, something new comes into play. Due to their mass, they can end up fusing so much matter that the gamma radiation caused by this reaction reaches levels so high, that some of it would spontaneously convert into matter. This is essentially a real life example of "e = mc2" put into practice.

This conversion into matter creates pairs of roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, essentially turning the core of the star into an antimatter bomb, which is obviously pretty violent.

However, this isn't the only problem. The conversion from energy into matter also means there's a sudden loss of outwards pressure from the energy, replaced by sudden inwards pressure from the gravity of the newly created matter.

With the legs essentially pulled out from under the core of the star, it starts to collapse at an extremely high rate. For a star with 200-300 solar masses, about 60 solar masses worth of carbon and oxygen fuse into heavier elements almost instantaneously. The resulting explosion is known as a superluminous supernova.

An interesting detail is that even though these superluminous supernovae are some of the most intense explosions we know of, the most energetic particles we know about (cosmic rays) are actually not produced directly in these supernova explosions. Instead they're created later on, when the shockwave from the supernova collides with interestellar gas, where it rips apart hydrogen atoms and accelerates the protons to nearly the speed of light.

hmm.. interesting choice.. that does remove the need to do camera-tracking in AE. On the other hand it makes it harder to tweak the end-result..

Quote - The best Bryce video I've ever seen. But how did you manage to render so many polygons inside Bryce which only has 32 bit memory capacity? 

It's my experience that bryce can handle hundreds of millions of polygons as far back as the bryce 5 days, and at least millions of polygons since the bryce 3d days.

In fact, I never ran into a polygon limit. I just never needed more then 20-25million or so untill a couple years into the bryce 5 era, and even then I never tried to push beyond more then 650 million-ish polygons.

Thats pretty awesome! Definitely one of the best bryce animations I've seen!

If I might add a couple slight nitpicks:

• I'd add a bit of camera shake to some shots with explosions near the camera, for even more dramatic effect.

• There's also some shots where the dirt on the camera lens (from the video copilot lens-flares plugin) is probably more dominant then necessary, particularly one shot near the end where the dirt lights up so much that it blinds most of the view.

• There's one lens-flare that says exactly the same between 2 different camera shots somewhere around 2 3rds of the animation.

• Maybe a couple strategically placed out-of-focus twitches might add just that slight bit of extra atmosphere to the whole thing.

haha, well.. at least the input boxes and the main menu aren't stuck in 1996 anymore..

If 'rosity wants someone to update the rest to 2013, gimme a call maybe? ;) Seriously.. I build websites for a living and I haven't built one that looked this old in 10 years.

I can twitter-bootstrapify more then just a few buttons, input boxes and header menu's if the staff so desires.. or create something with more identity..