I said I'd try to post an old image made with 'true ambience' this weekend, and here it is for the last effort of Sunday. In this image (no post editing except for credits) there are no diffuse materials at all. There is only one normal light, and its sole purpose is to add the specular highlights. Other than those specular highlights, the light puts nothing into the scene - 'cos there are no diffuse materials. All materials are ambient ones. The thing that struck me about 'true ambience' upon first reading about it was - "ooh, area lighting". And that's what to see here. This little scene is effectively lit by a couple of soft-light boxes similar to the ones used in still life photography. Note there is also some light given off by the display. The render times are suitably horrendous - I can't remember for sure, but I'd estimate this at about three hours on my P4 2.53Ghz. The other major drawback to this technique, and the one that stopped my fiddling with it further, is that for some reason known only to the programmers, polygon smoothing doesn't work with pure 'true ambience'. That means imported models (such as Poser figures) show the mesh unsmoothed (the reason Jeff's model in this pic looks OK is because it is, incredibly, made of Bryce terrains; hence zillions of polys looking pretty smooth anyway). I never got around the mesh smoothing limitation, and it became pointless continuing developing the technique - especially since blurry reflection works fairly well for radiosity faking. Anyway, I hope this shows that 'true ambience' is/was a potentially powerful tool, and that it didn't deserve to be dismissed so quickly. More details to follow as time allows.

Silly question: have you tried smoothing at 180? I did a model and exported it as lwo, because for some reason, I couldn't export it as 3ds. (Told me "The disk was full." Hah! At least 10GB on it yet.) Ordinary angle smoothing never really worked, but 180 smoothed everything out. And obj's are not much for smooothing anyway.

-- erlik

180 can disturb the model's clarity though...

Sweet! How did you get the display to look so glowy? This looks like a similar option in lightwave. When you have Radiosity enable, any materials with an ambient value greater than zero will cast light. how cool!

Yeah, True ambience rocks. It can really add realism and feel to a scene. It's a shame it takes so long to render otherwise I'd use it very often.

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I've never really worked with true ambience so I don't know much about it. Are there any tuts out there on this subject or are you going to do one PJF?? Catlin

Impressive render technique! Only, it seems to negate any need for the DTE or other material effects...? I still like it!

Erlik: Thanks for the smoothing suggestion. Unfortunately no setting works in that regard. Remember, I'm using true ambience way beyond the level the programmers designed it to be used in Bryce5, so it is perfectly reasonable that this 'problem' might appear. I doubt it would be an issue at all with 'normal' use of t.a.. The starship mesh (by Eric Peterson) in the image above is 3ds format; the smoothing issue is not an obj thing. Seeing polygons on the Enterprise isn't too bad, but you can imagine they're pretty distracting on a Poser figure. madmax_br5: The display is actually fairly straightforward use of ambience / true ambience. It's bright green and it casts a green hue on nearby objects, in this case the ground plane. That does point to what I'm using to light this scene: just off screen are two 'ambient light boxes' giving a soft illumination. catlin_mc: I don't know if there are any tutorials out there on true ambience. I don't think what I'm doing counts as what the programmers intended as true ambience. What I'm doing is the equivalent of using blurry reflections to fake radiosity - taking a technique designed for one thing and taking it to extremes to do something else. I ought to write something up, but I don't get much time to play nowadays. shadowdragonlord: I'm not sure how true ambience negates the need for other material effects including the DTE. Objects can have Bryce materials applied OK, though I certainly wouldn't want to try this with volumetrics or complex transparency. I feel inclined to delve back into investigating this some more - who cares if imported meshes look crap, Bryce can still do stuff! I'll keep you posted.

Dammit, forgot the image (slap).

Interesting effect. The above pic uses 0 diffusion, 100 lt green ambience. Notice the color bleed onto the ground even though the ground has 0 reflection. Maybe Bryce does have radiosity. :)

This has some definite possibilities. The back wall, ceiling, floor and left sphere are the flat white preset. Red and blue walls are 75 diffusion/25 ambience. The light is a 75 intensity squared fall-off. Notice the clolr bleeds onto the floor and the sphere but not very much on the back wall and ceiling. It does act something like radiosity.