If the three torches are supposed to be the light sources, why not turn them up a bit and let them light the scene? Then move the characters, as needed, to be lit by them. The guy carrying the torch - has he got a left hand on a right arm? Cool.

Rendering the same scene at the small size (200 pixels for the longest edge) gives a pretty nice thumbnail. Then convert this .bmp into a .jpg compressed to about 62%. Some of my best ones are done this way - and load quick. Another way is to render at a maximum of 800x800 pixels and then reduce your picture to 25% of it's original size and save to .jpg as above. 50%. 25%, 12.5%, etc. nice and clean. Noel

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Noel

Maybe group everything [I mean everything - objects, lights, camera - everything] together. Now rotate the whole thing down 90 degrees. Voi-la! No horizon there!

This IS the high-rez version, but it doesn't look the same with Bryce textures, as it does with the MAX textures. I used a procedural 'smudgy' texture in the ambient channel and the blue-green in the diffuse channel. It was hard to find a picture of the Kamov for reference, but I did run across a couple bad pics and based this on those. I got it at: http://modelbank.viewpoint.com/ It's the free sample model. I would LOVE to buy some of the other models, but instead I'll pay my rent. ;) Noel

I agree that the rope looks flat - it didn't before I made the last lighting change (where I was paying attention to the shadows on the sail bump-maps), but with this long a render time - it is what it is. ;) I've been working with the Zygote Galleon all month, texturing it and all, and I've got all kinds of ideas about how to use it in scenes, so in later scenes (like closer shots) I'll pay more attention to ALL the details. ;) Thanks everyone. Noel

The file "default.br4" is one that Bryce looks for when it launches, but is not included when Bryce is installed. Just make a scene with all the settings you want to start with, and save it as "default.br4" in the same directory as the Bryce program. Here's another tip. - You can make more than one default file if you have a few modes that you might like to use. You can save camera dots (views), screen resolutions, sky settings (and saved sky dots) - now just save the file as "default-2.br4", or whatever you want to call it, into your main Bryce folder. Bryce will still open with "default.br4", but you can open any of these other defaults anytime you want, to start a new picture.

Sorry, I can't distribute the tree. I can't even mention where I got it, but it's not available anymore. %^(

Very cool stuff at your site, Ken! You must have stocked a lot of good stuff for Bryce, feel like posting anything? We'd all love it. Noel

trismegisto, FasTraxx reported about the same amount of render time on his system. No, Bryce does not take advantage of multiple processors. There was word that Bryce was being ported to BeOS, and that this would allow multi-processor support, but the status of this is unknown at this time. My guess is that the people working on that project are now working for some company other than MC. In some ways this is good, because I'd really want to buy a quad PIII with a Gig of RAM, just to run Bryce. But then, I'd want to be doing this kind of picture at print resolution, with volumetric lighting and everything, and the render times would be even longer. ;) There are some ways to speed up the render, like minimizing the program while it renders. This saves about 10% of the render time by not having to write to the screen. But I could have improved this picture's render time by removing the bubbles that can't be seen anyway. The real trick is to balance what you want with what you have. Jeff Richardson does amazing things with his PII 200MHz - I don't know what his render times are like but he is able to acheive his artistic vision with the tools that he has at hand - rather than relying on new hardware to make his life easier. dlfurman - Thanks for the compliment. ;) Like I said above, I have a Micron PII 450MHz w/ 256 Mb RAM - I run Win95.

I rendered it on my Micron PII 450 - 256Mb RAM. The check, er... the file is in the mail. ;)

Sure Darth, I just Zipped the file into a tidy 175K package [without the bit-map image] - but I don't have your address handy.

'Twas the transparency that did it. Each of the 175 bubbles has 75% Transparency, 100% Specularity, 10% Reflection and 5% Diffusion. Render time without the Transparency is around 10 minutes.

Where can I find the Bryce ng (news group?) this came from?

Sorry I didn't answer this earlier, I got wrapped up in some other renders and lost track of this thread. ;) The hat and trees are the result of procedural textures, but the sled was easier. I copied the mesh and raised it a little bit (and moved it back a little) and then painted the new mesh with a snow texture. Oh, and the hat is pulled down on the snowman's head so far that a little of his cranium is poking through the brim. ;) Noel