thanks for the suggestions. going to go fight my way into the material room now and see what happens. as for the hair rendering problem, i think i'll just set the computer to rendering overnight and see if it has been actually locking up or just taking a loooooooooong time to render.

you can't get digit around here either, but you can order an issue online. just ordered mine. (no telling when it will arrive). http://www.digitmag.co.uk/

i'm learning all kinds of new terms in this thread. although i'm not sure i even want to know what cod-feelies and bona-palones are.

i hate it when there are too many really good ones. i feel guilty for not choosing them all. it was hard to decide on the 3-2-1 between the ones i did pick. quest - 3 points zhann - 2 points stephen ray - 1 point

i'd say you definately are a tree lab wizard.

wow. beautiful. and it does look very paintingish. (paintinglike?)

thanks for the link.

wasn't there a link in this thread earlier to a good silver texture? i think by agent smith. i didn't download it earlier because i was logging in from my laptop. now it isn't here. or was i dreaming? :-(

"Every freaking time, I swear, lol. Everyone likes the pics I slam out complete from concept to upload in 24 hours versus the ones I spend 3 weeks on." i think it's possible to overthink a piece of art. people like the little cartoons i sketch out in 2 or 3 minutes, but when i spend days on something and put in a lot of meticulous fine-line detail, it usually gets a milder reception. and i tend to agree. the quickie sketches have more life to them.

ok, this is probably a stoopid question, but oh well. . . i've always built my scenes with the bryce default window size of 540x405, then rendered to disk at 1024x768. is there really a difference in final picture quality in doing it that way, as opposed to setting the bryce window to 1024x768 and rendering on screen?

i'm really puzzled by this idea that someone has to be as good as or better than the artist whose work is being critiqued in order to have or express an opinion on it. everyone has an opinion (or two or three), and everyone has the right to voice it. i'm not a movie director, but that doesn't mean i have to like every movie i see just because i can't make a better one myself. i can't sing worth a damn or write the great american novel, but there are still plenty of writers and singers out there whom i don't like, and i'll say so. and it's not even just a case of whether the artist is good at what he/she does. . . i think still life paintings are boring. the artist may use great technique, but it's still put to use in a genre that i don't like. so, in the end, great technique or not, i just don't like the painting. art is more than just becoming proficient with the tools of the medium. i've seen bryce pictures that were very crudely done, obviously by someone very new to the program, but which i still liked just for the idea behind them. on the other hand, i've seen pictures that technically were outstanding, but were otherwise empty. maybe the guy who didn't like the marble picture just doesn't like pictures of marbles. maybe he needs more in the way of subject matter in order to give a picture an overall great rating. anyway, as i'm rambling a bit here, i'll shut up. i don't have many pictures in my gallery, so my opinion doesn't count anyway :-)

i've gotten pretty good results by adjusting the diffusion and ambience. but as an experiment, i tried what you suggested, modifying the texture in photopaint and using my original settings in bryce just to see what happens. i found that if a adjust the gamma of the texture jpeg until the flesh tones are a dark reddish orange, then it looks almost normal in bryce.

"then slimsand at 1 or 2 slider setting and 600 scale" you completely lost me there :-( what is slimsand? anyway, i have a bump map, and once it was actually enabled (as tjohn pointed out) and i turned own the diffusion and ambience, things looked a lot better. the diffusion looked best at 79 and the ambience at 6. i also moved the diffusion marble over into the A channel and that helped a lot, although i have no idea what's actually happening there when you do that. (just got my real world bryce book about a week ago. i really need to sit down and read it cover to cover before trying any more art. i waste a lot of time stumbling around in the dark)

there's already a huge difference in the look of the texture. thanks again for all of your help.