Thanks for the suggestion, Rich... I did try this and unfortunately I didn't work for me :-( I have raised a bug report with Daz - I suspect it will be a C6 fix! Garry

Just to be sure - I reinstalled Carrara and Transposer, trashing the old prefs too... However, importing the top still crashes Carrara... I'll raise a bug report. Thanks for the help, Mark Garry

Hi Mark thanks for responding - I was beginning to think that no one loved me! ;-) The top - with TransPoser - imports into the wrong position (too low - 50% below 'ground') and Carrara becomes unresponsive and dies in less than 15 seconds... This is with both a new (empty) document or one that includes other imports. With the native importer, the top never completely imports - at the moment you would expect the top to appear, the document window clears and Carrara dies... I tried resetting Carrara preferences - no difference. I beginning to suspect that I should give the problem to Daz Support and use another product... Garry

Excellent! Got it!!! Thanks wawadave! Garry

I would love to have a go at this, but I have tried to download the file at regular intervals since this post started, and I always get the following: Message: RogePost's downloads are undergoing maintenance and will not be accessible in the next 2 hours. Please come back later. Today, I have tried at regular intervals over 8 hours - no go! Can someone please (temporarily) mirror/host the file? Garry

Hi Burpee, I had exactly that problem with this image: http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1354515 In my case, the 'non-zoomed' image was fine, but when you clicked to zoom/enlarge, the image was very saturated (the rocks in the foreground had a distinctly red tint)... So - as you'll see in my notes, I reloaded the image, and it was fine after that... So try that (remembering to clear out your browser cache before viewing) Garry

This is excellent - thanks very much! Garry

Echo the other comments - excellent tut, thanks for a clear and concise explanation of a great technique Garry

@Gog_CA1 - yes there are clooges to make OS's on a 32-bit CPU's address more RAM - BUT they are clooges and don't work effectively. The chip design fundamentally means they can't REALLY address more than 4G RAM - 32-bit CPUs have 32-bit registers, meaning 2 to the power of 32 addresses, or 4 gigabytes of RAM, can be referenced. This is why the ability to address more RAM has been the primary driver for 64-bit CPU's. UPDATE on Bryce under Rosetta - seem to have uncovered a problem with the trackball remembering which setting you have enabled... Again, more testing to do. I can see its going to be a fun weekend! Garry

@Bandolin - to address more than 4GB you need 64bit CPU - which the G5 is... The Intel Dual Core isn't, so 4GB would be the maximum (I guess possible when 2GB modules appear). So I rendered another image and this is whatI got: CPU: 98.9% utilisation Real Memory: 241.26MB Virtual Memory 946.75MB Now, I cannot hear the disk working at all and the Activity Monitor shows spikes for data reads only - so does Mac OS X go to spare memory for its VM space first? I'll poke around Apple's Dev site I think... Garry

I'm assuming that, during a render, Bryce pre-fetches data from the hard drive and holds it in RAM for rendering (because reading from RAM is always way faster than reading from a hard drive)... The larger quantity of RAM I have now allows more data to be pre-fetched and rendered than my iMac G5. I'm trying to find out if Bryce works this way. Garry

Alex.. Every time I see an Orbital or Roche image I'm aware that I'm not close to mastering everything that the current Bryce has to offer... But the render times! I thought that Bryce Lighning might be the answer - I have a spare machine... But no, read the details - two machines takes longer than a single machine because of the networking protocal overhead... From comments at the Bryce forum at Daz, 3 machines is little better. :-( Hey ho - and sorry everyone for the general grumpiness of my posts. Its cold and wet here in Paris, and I'm stuck in Excel preparing my business review for last quarter. :-( Garry

I have Vue 4 too - for Mac - bought it whilst waiting for Bryce 5.5. On the Mac at least its way faster than Bryce 5.5 for similar settings (render quality). I suspect that this is because Vue 4 on the Mac is simply better optimised for Mac OS X. On the operating system side - both Vista and Tiger introduce many new API's for video, graphics (eg, in Tiger you get Core Graphics, in Vista Presentation Foundation) etc, etc. Bryce doesn't take advantage of any of Tiger's new API's (actually, its still clinging on to mostly the basic 'carbon' API's) - not least because you would begin to get feature differences between Mac and Windows. If you follow the recent Apple & Intel announcements, Apple's stated intent was to be fully Intel by the middle of 2007, with first products in June of this year. Apple is ahead of that, and Intel have modified their roadmap such that the dual core's that Apple need for the Pro line appear about the middle of this year - I would be amazed if Apple isn't all Intel by end of the year. Sure - I would bet that Daz outsources code work, given the low cost of Indian coders they would be dum not to. But that still has to be project managed, the code integrated and verified and so on - there will remain a bottle neck in such a small company. Garry

Whilst I'm aware Bryce is missing many features, my biggest issue remains the crippling render times... I have a full-on job that leaves me very little time for this hobby, and increasingly I seem to be starting a render before I leave for work so that it will be ready when I return. My experience with Vue 4 and the Carrara demo suggests that this issue doesn't exist (to the same extent) in other products. (BTW Carrara recently introduced a cross-grade price for other 2/3d packages) In terms of Bryce 6 - can't see them getting anything major out ahead of Vista. Why would they? They must have an eye on the significant changes that will introduced with Vista, and in keeping feature parity between the OS's they get the opportunity to finally do some real Mac OS X work. We also shouldn't forget that Daz are a tiny company, with (very) limited resources (27 employees in May of last year). Those resources first and foremost are always going to be used in support of the companies business model - and that is the sale of models/accessories. This is what keeps the price of Bryce (artificially) low - to pull through the content. I don't see that changing after the effort to develop and integrate Daz|Studio. (As an aside, a product which also a proves to me Daz don't understand UI's) As much as I love Bryce and would prefer to see it developed to equal Vue, Carrara, etc - years of neglect at Corel, Daz' resources and business model seem against it. :-( Garry

I still cannot believe you do this with terrains! Briliant! Garry