Thanks all!

tjohn/drac, Thanks both of you! What a time saver this will be.

Hey Scoleman, I'm not the best source of info as I am very much a newbie myself, but I might have some suggestions: 1. I think coming up with an avg time would be very difficult unless you were comparing apples-to-apples. This would take into account your hardware and what sorts of effects you use in your project (ie. volumetric materials/world, etc...) Maybe if you post more details on what you have, someone with a similar situation could give you more accurate estimates. 2. Text tool - you mean to create text as 3d objects? Not built into Bryce (that I know of), but if you come across any, let us know. You could probably build up an alphabet of letters by mapping images onto lattices, etc... but my guess is that they would still look rather "organic". But if you just want "flat" text to appear, you can create an image in a 2D program (Photoshop, etc...) and use it as a texture on a 2D surface object (not sure exactly the name for this in Bryce, but I know its there). 3. Again, like #2, you can "draw" text to an image in a paint program and if you assign the same image (but in black/white version with white being the text) to the transparency channel when you are creating a material from this then the alpha will make the non-text part transparent. 4. Wish I knew - maybe use a sphere(s) and apply some sort of cloud texture for the mist (whether surface or volumetric you'ld have to test). I think I saw a tutorial somewhere though on splashing (running) water. 5. Haven't needed them yet myself. There is a bunch of free stuff on this site and others, though. I think there is also a very good stand-alone tree-generating program too (not sure the name - maybe Plant Studio?). 6. I've been doing an underwater scene and have been using some free models. Check both here and other sites. One in particular is at http://www.planit3d.com/source/meshes_files/meshes.html 7. Not sure what you mean. I know Bryce is bringing my Athlon 1.33 GHz to its knees at times, but I don't know if you can govern how much processor time (priority) that Bryce can consume vs other apps (maybe in a multi-processor environment, but a stand-alone???) Anyway, hope some of this may help from a newcomer :-) Happy Brycing - Dave

ok, I'll give it a shot. I think I will first try and redo my basic mesh (it's only a 6x6 panel of squares) and make sure it isn't something as simple as unwelded vertices.

Hmm... foleypro - not sure if I really want 2 objects instead of 1 (if I am understanding you correctly). Since I'm texturing in Bryce, I would think that trying to texture 2 objects and align the textures would be difficult. wildman - smoothing did not help the situation any, unfortunately (but thanks for the advice). I seem to recall reading something somewhere about normals, whether it was that Bryce got screwed up if another program had precalculated them and they were included in a file(?) I dunno - something like that about perhaps being able to delete them from a file and letting Bryce calculate its own?

Pakled, Thanks for the info! I think Sefi's links are (at least for now) broken, and his email link is also not working. Oh well, there are plenty of other mat's as you suggest and the one's you listed are great! thanks again...Dave

How much morphing or modifying is required before you COULD distribute a .x model which started out based on a Poser default?

Thank you, all, for your replies so far! btw Phil, cool models! Here's my situation, I am a hobbiest. I have no delusions of creating a "Quake" or "Diablo" or whatever game. I have an idea for a 3d strategy game, but I'm thinking the "pieces" (models) would be fairly static (ie. chess) but shown on a 3d terrain and allow the camera to zoom around. Game would be turned based and no rely on moving characters towards attackers, etc... like Diablo for instance. My goal would be: 1) a good compromise between a simple but powerful tool. 2) good for characters/creatures. 3) libraries to start with. 4) good community support/plug-ins/model purchases. 5) perhaps some basic animation loops like walking(?) 6) need to get directly or indirectly to .x, .mds, or .3ds format. 7) want to have FUN!!! not bogged down in ugly interface. 8) not very expensive. Poser would be about my limit. Now regarding polycount, I have no idea what you do with a model within game code. I'm waiting for BB3D to arrive with some demos/tuts so I can see how it does it. I also don't know what happens with things like LOD depending on camera position, etc... So given this extra detail, maybe Poser with its higher polygon counts would still be ok since I'm not asking too much for the models? Assuming the poly's are too high, does Poser have a plug-in (or some other 3rd party tool) that you can run to reduce the counts and still produce a pretty good quality model?