It looks good. Especially for only a 3rd creation. You REALLY don't want to see what my 3rd creation looked like ... :) Okay, the sycophant part is over. Here's a couple of comments: 1. Sea floor: At the depth you're at (you can actually see the bottom ... :) there would be more vegatation/greenery on the rocks. Lichen and algae and stuff if not actual plants. Use (or create) a material w/ some green on it. That would better match the scale that you've got here. 2. The torpedo looks more like an air-to-surface missle (looks more like a Maverick than a Hellfire). Definitely NOT a torpedo. Try stripping the wings from it and just leave the cylinder part of it. Torpedoes (even the vintage one's like you're appear to be shooting for here) (pun intended ... :) have the maneuvering fins within the radius of the cylinder. That way the firing tube on the sub is smaller and it's a litte more streamlined for quieter passage through the water. 3. Try increasing the grid resolution on the terrains in the foreground to 512 or 1024. That way you can avoid the stairstep look that you see on the hill in the lower left hand corner. 4. The air bubbles coming from the sub. It appears that the sub is just sitting there with the bubbles going straight up like that. If it did, the sub would be sinking towards the bottom of the ocean. Subs have to maintain a 2 or 3 knot forward motion to maintain depth and steerage control. Move the air bubbles closer to the back of the sub the closer to the surface they are. Example, the air bubbles in the upper right hand corner would probably not be in the frame because they would've move that far back on the sub (or rather, the sub would've moved that far forward since they were released). Overall, it looks very good. Keep up the work! Again, these are just minor points that I think would improve the picture. YMMV. John Stawarz II jstawarz2@netzero.net http://io.spaceports.com/Gallery for my gallery

Were they Phil Hokusai's wings? They can be found at http://victorian.fortunecity.com/wooton/1493/hokusai.html along with some other stuff that I had forgotten about ... :) John

Something that you may want to check out. Wolfie's got one that might do. www.wolfiesden.com. Check under the Bryce section (Materials then Terrains, it's on the last page). He's also got some of the moon, earth, cloud layers for the earth, etc. Some neato stuff. John

Or import everything from Poser in Bryce and use a double exposure type effect. This is necessary when it's a double sun (think Tatooine in Star Wars) and you want to account for shadows properly.. Render the scene with the sun in one position. MOVE ONLY THE SUN and then render again with the sun in the second position. Composite in photoeditor of choice. The same could be done for moons. Also, Bryce WILL export OBJ's (sort of). On any items that have the E(dit) command that doesn't take you into the Terrain Editor (don't know if it'll work there), press CTRL-D (Command-D on a Mac, I think) and it'll export. No primitives or booleans will export. It's more of an Easter Egg than actual functionality. :P Something they were working on and it got pulled for one reason or another. John

Try clicking on the taskbar so that the Bryce button is the one that's depressed ... :) It's not sometimes, even when you're workig in Bryce ... :) Then move the mouse to the top of the screen. If that doesn't work, (it doesn't always, at least for me) then try clicking on it once to make it the "active" app and then again to minimize the window. Then click on it AGAIN to restore the window. That should work ... :) John

They're supposed to be 5 - 10 % faster than a comparable PIII. In fact, WinMag used Bryce 4 as one of their benchmark apps and it rendered the same scene about 7% faster, I think it was. This was back in April right after the 1000MHZ systems were introduced. Personally, I've found nothing wrong with my K6-2 and am planning on upgrading to an Athlon and abit board when the funds are available. HTH, John

Sounds interesting. Would you be interested in coming up w/ a tutorial on it when you get it ironed out, Bonestructure? It would be much appreciated. Then I might actually be able to get some of these pictures out of my head. It's getting kinda crowded up there ... :) John

Tell me about it ... :) As for residing on the same machine, they almost didn't get to on my small (HD size, at anyrate) computer. One (1) 2.0 Gb drive and one (1) 1.2 Gb drive don't leave much room... Finally had to use my CD-R for the purpose that I got it for. Archiving! TTFN! BTW, just to keep this on topic, I'm constantly amazing myself w/ what Bryce can do. Now all I have to do is convince Plant Studio that it wants to export the plant sections on different layers ... :) But that's another fight!

Ooooh.... Makes me just want to drool... :) Too bad I can't afford the $800 for the camp itself (or else I'd have bought Rhino by now ... :) nor the cost of lodging and what not in Denver. Oh, well, there's always next year (I hope! :) John

Also, make sure that it's in your Bryce 4 program directory... :) First time that I tried to set this up, I accidently saved it in My Documents and wondered for a week why it wouldn't start the way that I wanted it to... :P It's working fine, now, though.

That's the truth. Check out some of the stuff at http://io.spaceports.com/~jstawarz/Gallery (copy & paste or type EXACTLY what you see. Spaceports is UNIX and VERY unforgiving about capitalizations ... :) Some of the ones on the Gallery #1 page are the first EVER 3D scenes that I did. In fact, Where the Sea Begins (1st row, last thumb) is the VERY first one that I did. And amazingly enough, it's got NO post work done on it... :) Now, admittedly, I haven't put anything new up there in a while (got Diablo II, who has time for Bryce? Or web page updates for that matter? :) And all of those are what came out of just fiddling with it for the most part.

The original intentions behind Bryce were just what you said, a photo-realistic landscape generator. But, as always, the users took it much farther than the authors first intended. I've some some great interior scenes, space scenes, not to mention bloops (er volumetric interpretations) and fractals mapped to terrains using the terrain editors. I've seen giant pipe organs modelled entirely out of terrains, symmetrical lattice, and Bryce primitives. I've seen a huge, highly detailed castle including merlens on the walls, flags on the turrets, and stainglass windows, modelled ENTIRELY out of Bryce primitives. Now, admittedly, some of this stuff would have been easier in another package, but it's a little more fun in Bryce, I think. Caligula mentioned the sky lab. It's a great place. Full (almost, no radiosity) atmospherics including haze, fog, skydome colors, etc builtin and easily customizable. It's so good that I've caught myself looking at sunsets and wondering "I wonder what settings they used in Bryce to create that ..." :). So, where is this long rambling idea going? Just far enough to say that Bryce is well past the "just a landscape generator" stage. It's a full fledged 3D rendering system that will do animations and everything that your (our) twisted, devious minds can come up with for it to do. Now, if they (Corel) would only keep their promise and speed up the renderer in B5 ... :) That would make it the ultimate rendering system (to me at least). Having used 3D Max, trueSpace 4, and taken a gander at Lightwave, I prefer the Bryce interface the best. Okay, okay, I admit that it's a minority opinion. I think it has a much smoother learning curve than Max. Anywho, enough for now. TTFN! John

Well, all of that is in ADDITION to what the 4.0.2 patch did. Basically, they reissued the 4.0.2.118a patch and changed the splash screen and logos to the Curious Labs logo. The "spying" is the same type of thing that Adobe does. It checks on the local area network for other copies of Poser running with the SAME serial number. That's it. See the letter from Steve Cooper on the main page for further details on that. HTH,

The blend transparency option kinda automates what GhostofMacbeth is doing... :) I kinda like one step answers if I can help it ... :)

One thing you need to check is this: In the Material Editor, in the upper right hand corner, but to the left of the texture column, is a little triangle thingie. Click on it. You'll see an option called Blend Transparency. Click on it. Then go back and try the render again. That should clear you up. HTH, John