I experimented with fog a little bit at the beginning and came to the conclusion that it just makes the entire scene a little whiter. It just washes it out a little and I found this dull. But I'll try it again with some very small settings. Regards, A B

I'm pretty sure that wolf359 is correct in his usage. Caustics is the effect of light being focused and is caused by either a reflective (seen here) or a refractive (light passing through a bottle) surface. It's the same difference between a refractive telescope which uses a lens to magnify an image, and a reflective telescope that uses a parabolic mirror. In any case, you're both right. I got over excited by what you can do with rectangular lights and gels. Now that I've made the discovery, I need to do it right. Regards, A B

I had exactly the same problem. Yes, I had no problem installing the upgrade after I reloaded Bryce and yes you can lose your custom objects, materials and textures. I don't think the uninstall will delete the materials you store in the specific "User" folder but it will definitely delete everything else. To play it safe copy all of your custom materials to the "User" folders. You can then go into the Preset subdirectory and move user.mat, user.obp, and user.bst to another directory. Also if you have custom skys then move SkyPresets.bak as well. After this you can uninstall Bryce, reinstall it and install the upgrade and then move the user files back into the new Presets directory. There have been a number of complaints regarding the upgrade. Personally I haven't had problems and the new features while modest are still interesting. In any case you should look over some of the older threads as well as the posts in egroups to make your own decision.

Tephladon, I think I'm missing something obvioius here. I understand how you create the nose in the spline modeler (and the tutorial is great by the way), but I'm assuming that a face would be composed of several surfaces created in this way. But how do you patch them altogether in a way that would make the face appear seamlsess? Regards, A B

There are at least two other applications you should consider, Cinema 4D Go and trueSpace. Cinema 4D is put out by Maxxon, a British company. It is not that well known in the US but is highly regarded in Europe. I've been using Carrara because I already had Raydream and was able to get a good upgrade price but all things considered I would go with Cinema 4D. Functionally they are almost equivalent but Cinema 4D probably has just a little bit more. For instance, Cinema provides a far greater number of primitives and comes with a scripting language. Also, Maxxon has a high-end package, Cinema XL, and if you get more serious with all this you could probably get some kind of decent upgrade price. TrueSpace is a completely different ball of wax. It's interface is completely different from Carrara, I hate it personally, but from a strict functional perspective it is clearly superior to Carrara. Among other things it possesses metanurbs modeling, radiosity rendering and a scripting language based on Python. Also, bizarrely enough, it is better at making at making props for poser, morph targets in particular. You can download demos for both of these products and I strongly recommend that you do. To a certain extend functionality is secondary to ease of use which is largely a personal matter. Like I said I think the interface to trueSpace is from hunger, but lots of users swear by it. Only you can tell. There are also a number of free and shareware programs such as sPatch. They are certainly nowhere near as powerful as the applications mentioned above. But if you are just starting out it's a cheap way to learn some basics and in the process get a better idea of what you really need.

Looks good. Two points of advice. First add some kind of surface texture to the ground plane. Second haze or in some other way make the more distant objects more blurry or hazier. I think both will add a greater sense of depth to the image which I think is your intent. Regards, A B

Ditto on using Corel CD's. They're a great reference source and very cheap given the number of images they provide. Also just surf the web, with just an hour of serious searching you should find a bunch of images that fit your need. However the problem with both approaches is that you will not get high resolution images. 72 dpi is the standard here though there are some exceptions. For example I've found some great maps and art reproductions that are extraordinarily high quality. A B

I downloaded the patch but wasn't able to install it. The program said it couldn't detect the presence of Bryce. The Corel web page only says to reinstall Bryce if there are any problems, which I can't do at the moment. Anybody else having problems?

A good start and adding motion to the waves and sky will handle the only aspects of the clip that's artificial. One thought though. The focal point of the animation is the plane and this should dictate the movement of the camera. The camera should be zooming in at the very start of the clip and then dolly behind the plane as it disappears into the distance. Also, there's a point when the motion of t he plane and the camera makes the plane seem to stand still which is a bit disconcerting.