Note that the MSRP for it is $309 full, $159 upgrade. Some retail places were supposedly pre-ordering it for $199 upgrade price. I would guess that if you're willing to wait a bit you could find street prices more like $249/$129 fairly easily.

Information about the specifics of B5 will surely be released once the beta period is over and the feature set is finalized. I would guess they don't want to get into a situation where they hype a feature and then it doesn't make it into the final. Look carefully at Clay's gallery: there is some stuff there that's quite obviously new.

Attached Link: http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/brycepg19.html

This is pretty involved: Bryce uses a fairly sophisticated environmental model. If you think about it, if your sun is red and everything is reflecting lots of red and orange light, then the only light available is red - so pretty much everything looks red and orange. That's how the real world works, too. So, you have two options: 1 - change your Sun and Ambient colors to something non-red. This will probably lose the fun red color for the landscape that you liked. 2 - use a light to shine on the angel. You could shine a bluish-white light on her to give her a different coloring. It will take some playing to get it exactly how you like it. I would create a new spotlight, and point it at her. Make sure to make it large enough, with enough brightness (intensity) to do the job. As for the glow: for the angel you could put a sphere around her, set to a material which is fuzzy, mostly transparent, and has high Ambient values. There's no way to truly do a "glowing" object in Bryce - you have to fake it by putting additional objects around that are fuzzy and transparent. Use that as a jumping-off point, and play with it from there. You could post your image in this thread too, so we can see how it turns out and offer more suggestions.

Wow Ken, that's really great stuff! -flick

I use win2k all the time with Bryce - very stable. Make sure to install service pack 1. Fewer problems than with NT. I wouldn't touch '98 with a ten-foot pole :-D

DO NOT change the FOV. That will definitely alter your perspective. As BigRobot says, you can pan the image and re-assemble it in Photoshop. This is what you're looking for. In fact, if you double-click on the Trackball, you'll get a numerical readout. Use the Pan X and Pan Y fields, along with the plop-render mode, to get what you're looking for. -flick Looking for more 3D resources? Check out 3D Commune www.3dcommune.com

Changing the FPS will have a very minor effect on your motions. What happens is that your keyframes will get rounded to the nearest equivalent keyframe when you convert. For instance: say you set up the original animation at 30fps, with keyframes at frames 0, 9, and 20, or times 0.0s, 0.3s, and 0.66s. If you move to 15fps, the keyframes will be rounded to 0, 4, and 10, which translates to 0.0s, 0.27s, and 0.66s. Notice that the middle keyframe has been shifted slightly in time. This is due to the rounding when you change FPS, since every keyframe must land exactly on a tick. The way to avoid this is to pick beforehand your development FPS and your final FPS, and make the development FPS an even multiple (2 or 3) less than the final FPS. So you might do your development at 12fps and then output final to 24fps. If you do that, there's no shift, since everything gets scaled evenly by 2. As far as decreasing render time, you have several options, but remember that in general Bryce produces very high-quality output, very slowly. Options to reduce render time: (a) buy a faster CPU (the brute force approach) (b) use less complex textures, avoid volumetric materials, reduce the number of lights, don't use "volumetric world" setting, reduce your bump frequency and height, reduce the number of imported mesh objects - .obj, .3ds etc. files (c) render your animations with anti-aliasing turned OFF - note that this might slightly increase the animation's file size, since the leftover 'jaggies' tend not to compress very well (d) render your animations in small chunks on multiple machines and use a video editor to splice them together (e) reduce the FPS and/or image size of the animation. -flick Looking for more 3D resources? Check out 3D Commune www.3dcommune.com

Nope, doesn't work. Currently there's no easy way to do a poser animation in Bryce, other than importing and rendering each frame separately. but wait -- Konan is currently developing a tool which will do the importing for you! Nobody (except Konan) knows exactly how he's managed to do it, but it looks very promising, although he says it's very RAM-hungry. Stay tuned - last I'd heard he had done an animation of a poser dragon and then put it into Bryce, complete with moving clouds, & bryce camera moves. Very impressive.

replicate and duplicate do slightly different things: Duplicate makes a copy of the object and sticks it in exactly the same place as the source. Replicate first duplicates the object, THEN performs the last transformation that you did to the object (move, resize, rotate). Use replicate (and its big brother, multi-replicate) when you want to position/resize/rotate a series of identical objects in identical ways. Such as making the steps of a spiral staircase. Create, rotate, replicate, replicate, replicate.

Actually the distance blur controls only the blurring of textures mapped onto the surface, to avoid moire effects of high-frequency textures receding into the distance. It doesn't actually do a depth-of-field blur on the image. Probably the best-results method to do depth-of-field is to use Ken's method: a good starting point for your mask is to render a "distance mask" of your image in Bryce (from the render options popup, next to the render buttons), and use the Photoshop curves to re-map it to blur only the distances you want and use it as a selection mask. -flick

Here's a great way to create waves for a water terrain (advanced knowledge of Bryce required!): 1-) Head into the Deep Texture Editor. 2-) In channel 1, use the Waves noise in 2D. Add a couple octaves to it. 3-) Copy it into channel 2, rotate it a bit, set the blend mode to Add. 4-) use a low-contrast Clip filter on each channel to keep everything from clipping (don't want flat wave crests!) 5-) There's a special key combination you can use (I think you can option/alt-click on the texture preview) to rip the texture preview to the whole screen, much like the Terrain Editor Room's "RIP to screen" menu choice. 6-) Take a screenshot, and voila, instant waves terrain! I can't remember the key combo offhand, but you can find it in Real World Bryce 4 (which all serious Brycers should get!!!) -flick

Corel has not announced any plans to include native multiprocessing support in Bryce 5, but I guess anything's possible. It sure would be nice, wouldn't it?

I Gotta go for Allen9 on this one. Great job everyone!

No release date has been announced. Bryce 5 development is well into the beta testing cycle, though.