Well unfortunately at a certain point floating point gets pushed aside by bus speed. Bus speed is often much much much lower than your processors speed and thus floating point operation. It's tough trying to think about how a whole system works and not just focusing on one component. Sure your processor can handle pushing Xmb/sec. but if your system bus can't deliver that much then your gong to see your physical limitation. So once you've got enough processing power and enough ram then you just have to worry about getting information from ram to processor and back again. Think of your system bus like a hose running between your ram(pipes under the house) and your processor(your swimming pool your trying to fill). The bigger the hose the faster your going to fill the pool. That's a real simplistic way to think about it. And then you also have to figure it's a loop between your processor and your ram so your talking effectively half the data rate. Wonderful your system bus can transfere 4.2Gb/sec but you have half of that heading towards your processor and half heading away. Your bus speed is then 2.1Gb/sec. Thus a pentium4 with the new 4x ddr is out performing athlons in 2x and 3x ddrs in rendering benchmarks. Not so much that the new p4's are better they simply have more bus bandwidth. And with the mhz speeds meaning less and less why do we still measure by these retarded numbers? Why don't we go by processes/sec or some other more meaningful number?

Change the floor! It looks goofy some how. Go with a stone texture of some sort.

Well hate to rain on bam bam's parade...but the contest is 'space battle' bam bam has the space part down very very well but he's lacking the 'battle' so my vote is for Vile.

geez I'm lazy. I'm sorry. I'd have posted those in the first place if I wasn't at work and didn't have access to a copy of bryce. Thanks allycat for getting that done.

Hmmmm...well that should change when you pick the new size. There's definately something wrong there. What happens if you change the display mode from wire frame to gl or d3d or if you try picking a higher resolution? Does it change in size or anything?

The working screen gets larger when you go file>new and pick out a new workspace size(or what ever the technical name is for that). Try doing that and picking out a larger res area. You can get some quick options for this by clicking the little triangle on the lower left hand side of the workspace.

Well as you'll learn, or may all ready know bryce is hardly 'other applications' it's one of the qwerkiest, weirdest pieces of software I've ever seen. But it's great once you get used to it. I was just thinking about it and if maxamizing it and doing a file exit doesn't work you may try creating a short cut to bryce and if you right click the shortcut and go in to it's properties you can tell windows to force bryce maxamized on open. It's the drop down box in the properties called 'Run:' Change it to maxamized and windows should force bryce to open maxamized.

Well is the problem acctually when you open bryce it's just not maxamized or is it that the view port for the wire frame is still tiny? If you want to get bryce to remember that it's maxamized when you first open it I believe you need to do a proper file>exit when the program is maxamized. If it's that the view port on the wire frame is to small it's because it's remained the default size of 640x480 which on a 1280x1024 screen is pretty tiny. To get the right size you have to go to file>new and then type in 1024x768 or what ever view port size fits you. As to get it to remember that size every time you open the application I've been lazy in looking that up. Probably some place in the properties that tells it to use that info as default. Can some one let us know exactly where that is? Either way that should at least partially solve your problem and get you to work on some renders. Enjoy. :-)

Lightning uses standard tcp/ip protocol and you simply point bryce to your lightning clients via there ip number or you let it try to scan your internal network to look them up. The only thing you may run in to is that the routers default settings don't allow the port that lightning uses to go through. I said 'may' run in to because usually the default settings let internal network traffic flow freely with out blocking anything. If for some reason the appropriate port is blocked you should be able to open the port via the routers setup software. Your DSL provider may even be able to help you with an issue like that.

Do you not have poser? Import a poser model and do a bolean(sp?) subtraction to knock it down to just the part you want. That or use 3dstudio, or truespace or blender or even GMax I'm sure to knock it down to its own mesh.

good call :-) Sihn helped me out with it. A huge thanks to Sihn! Every one give Sihn a pat on the back!

How is this effect being created again? What textures are being used? It's amazing! The Abyss is one of my favorite movies. Also one of the movies that made me really want to get in to film making and special effects, cg ones especially.

You could try to install right over the top of your old install. I don't know that you'd loose anything but it really sounds like you all ready may have....

Well...lets get it organized then. Some one needs to take control...that or we could each do one......some one has to figure it out and get it rolling though.

Yeah, your machine, the amount of ram, the number of polys and volumetrics etc. I had many renders take a few days on my old P266 system with bryce 3. Patience is a virtu when your to creative for your hardware. :-)