Hi, See, I am learning already! I was so excited about VUE that I followed a link into Vue 4 and jumped on the demo to give it a try, without even thinking that maybe there were more products offered! But thanks to your messages, I checked the site out more carefully and WOW! The demo movie for Vue Infinite is amazing, and the price for the product seems very reasonable considering all it has to offer. Someday-- money come to me-- someday... For now I can probably swing the cash for Vue 4. Thanks for your comments!

I noticed that in the book description. That doesn't daunt me in the least! I am used to "Using Director 8", another massive tome. It is a bible on Director, absolutely essential to that program, and beats the Macromedia manuals hands down. So, I figure, if they have all those pages, they MUST be good!

Attached Link: http://www.clydesight.com/bryce.html

Sounds good to me. I use Bryce so much that the book is probably worth the price. I see I can get a used copy and save some money so I will check this out. I can ALWAYS learn more about Bryce-- I hope it isn't going anywhere soon. I know a LOT of people are using the program. I have a bunch of Tutorials on my Web site (too big to post anywhere else, and they are a draw (no pun intended). This book may help me be more effective as a tut writer. I have no idea why I like to write Bryce 5 tuts. I just love the program.

You can check the tuts in the link.

Hey Zhann, Thanks for the tip about the book. The book looks good from what I see at Amazon, but it seems it is for Bryce 4, not 5. So it would not cover things like the tree lab and the advanced light lab, correct? Or is 4 the version number of the book? If the book is for Bryce 4, do you know of a similar one for Bryce 5? I'd hate to buy the book only to discover that a brand new book for Bryce 5 was just released and I'm stuck with 4-- you know what I mean? It's been years since I used Byrce 4 anyway. But I would like to get better tips on the DTE and lighting and the Terrain Editor and such. Those things are pretty much the same in Bryce 5 as in 4 I think. And how will this all shake out with Bryce 5.5 which DAZ is releasing... any clues? Thanks

HI, I am sure there is lots of help here, Renderosity is a great place! I am writing a tutorial and I wanted to point people to the Manual description of the Multi-Replicate command. I learned it in Bryce 4, so I never bothered to look it up in the Bryce 5 manual until this time, only to find it wasn't there. Which means that a lot of Bryce 5 users may have no idea (unless they dig around) that there is such a feature and how to use it. Of course, I will be explaining it, but I was rather surprised to find no metion of it (it is not in the index) in the Bryce 5 manual. I wondered if I had gone insane or not.

WOW! That was fast ;>) Thanks-- just what I was looking for!

Hi All, Thanks for the great tips and leads to the tuts! I'm re-working my Cloisters image using them and will post it in a few days. I really appreciate your comments and thoughts! Happy Holidays! Best, Clyde236

Hi All, Thanks for the tips. The scene by Rochrs is fantastic, although a bit too grainy for me, but the lighting is incredible and the image is just so impressive, gives me goosebumps! I use the standard Bryce materials in the scene with some modification. The walls are a bit heavy on the bump side, I rendered them with Antialiasing turned off because they looked too muddy when it was turned on. The columns and white arches are actually the beach sand texture with the color changed. I could boost the bump on those a bit. Ummm, the floor on my scene is made with a picture map. What I did was make a square of the floor using rounded cubes in Bryce 5. I knew having so many in the scene would overload it, (there are already quite a few objects in the scene and I am always afraid of the dreaded "Bryce is out of memory" error. So I opened a new scene in Bryce, laid out the rounded cubes to make a square pattern-- like a tile-- and took a picture from the top view. Then I brought it into the cloister scene as a 2-D plane-- several of them. Since the image was square, it had to be tiled. I couldn't get the image to tile on a long rectangle. Bryce just stretched it out to fit the dimensions of the rectangle. I thought I could make it tile-- I've seen it done I think. But the 2-D planes worked to get the pattern. Anyway, is there a way to take a picture and use it as a bump map? I tried with this one, but nothing happened. I wonder if I used volumetric lighting and rendering if that would help the image look better? I avoid the volumetric world because it takes so long to render. Do you think it would improve things much? I've never been really clear when it is useful except when trying to show light rays. I have to admit, I have no patience with rendering (I want to see my picture!) so I do tend to shortcut wherver possible. Thanks!

Thanks to all. That's what I was looking for!

Good point! Uhh, the stairs are for Hobbits. Does that work? Thanks for the pointer about scale.

Good point! Uhh, the stairs are for Hobbits. Does that work? Thanks for the pointer about scale.

That's weather stripping. When you close the doors, they rest on top of the strip. Are you buying that? How about-- it's a track for the optional sliding screen door that Bryce Depot has on special order for me? Is that more to your liking? Ummm- let's see. The house shifted and the marble floor conveninetly cracked at the doorway? Black Painter's tape? The architect is an idiot and made the outer marble deck higher than the floor so the rain will pour into the house because he has a lot of stock in a local mop company? Actually, it's a boolean error on my part. There is a very thin cut-out for the outer cube that makes up the rest of the room (it's too complicated to explain why I had to do it this way) and it is sticking through the floor because I forgot to make the floor a Boolean NEUTRAL and it is grouped to the outer cube (I forget why). One has to watch those boolean values!

Hi Again, Thanks for the encouraging comments! The image was created entirely in Bryce 5, except, of course, for the type, which was overlaid on the render in Photoshop. The "outdoors" is an image. I tried making that part of the scene using Bryce 5 objects but it didn't look as good and took forever to render-- the photo was an easy "cheat". Bryce is a cool program-- I love working with it! I find that I start something in Bryce and think "what if I do this?" and so on and when I next look at the clock, hours have flown by. Does that happen to you? In the upper left side of the image there is a candle in a niche. Making a niche in Bryce 5 is very easy. I am thinking of doing a quick tutorial on it. Do you think you'd all be interetsed in such a tutorial? Thanks for the kind words and thanks to those who posted kind words in my gallery.

Well, I was honored to have Bryce 5 Robby appear in ANYTHING (other than my gallery), so I'm not complaining! A kindness done is a kindness appreciated-- or something like that. And I think Rik has some cool robotic music on his video (he calls it a video, and who am I to argue?) I just thought you guys would enjoy it-- after all, it's free, and he didn't have to do it at all! Sometimes we may forget the gifts given by others in our all too comparitive and competitive society. (Did you know that in Ancient Rome the emotion of compassion was considered distasteful and a sign of weakness? Explains those bloody games!)

Hi, Congratulations on your first gallery image! It's a nice image with the suggestion of a story and has some element of mystery to it, so it is an interesting image as well! Here's a couple of tricks to enhance the "mysteriousness" of the image that you might want to play with and see if you like the results: 1) You can soften shadows in Bryce 5 (I assume your image is a Bryce 5 generated image?) by going to the sky lab and reducing the shadow setting for the sky you used. Often Bryce will set a shadow level of 90 or 100 for a sky preset which is extremely harsh. Dropping the shadow setting to about 50 softens the shadow without incurring the increased rendering times of using the "soft shadows" option. 2) Try some artifical radial lights using the ranged falloff method in the scene. This will definitely increase rendering times, but if you keep your light levels low, it won't be too bad. The lights will also allow you to control the illumination of your figure rather than let the atmosphere alone do it. Turn on the lights' shadows, but not the soft shadows. 3) Try pulling up the fog a bit so it is covering the surface (just slightly) of the "temple" around the figure's feet. I think adjusting the fog height and desnity will get this working for you. Usually you don't need much, just a little will do the trick. 4) If you decide to use some artifical lights, you can enclose your scene in a cube object, set it to 100 transparency and apply some refraction. This will deepen corner shadows if your scene is large enough (If it is too small, you won't see much effect..) You need the artificial lights for this to work. I've written a tutorial on the Bryce 5 Lighting FX that may better explain some of these ideas. You can find it here: http://clydesightproductions.com/brlitefx Again, congratualtions on your first gallery post!