I'm having trouble creating a mirage effect. Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

hmmmmm, do you have photo shop, or someother simalar program? If so, try rendering whatever it is you want as a mirage and paste it as another layer and distort it that way.

Is this what you're after? If so, this was basically done like brholte suggests, I built a scene in Bryce complete with the elements I wanted to make into a mirage. I rendered and saved. Then I removed the items that I wanted to be the mirage part, saved it under a new name and rendered again. Then I loaded both images into Photoshop (I have Photoshop Elements) and copied the mirage image onto the non-mirage image (it becomes a layer) then adjusted the transparency of the mirage and ran the Ocean Ripple filter on it (settings 3, 3). I hope this helps. Tjohn

The image with mirage trees and pool of water.

The image rendered with mirage items removed.

good job tjohn. that's exactly like I was thinking. I've never tried this, I like the idea. Kind of inspiring actually. I think I will try a mirage image of my own (hope you don't mind runwolf).

Not at all, and yes that is what I am thinking of, only on a much smaller scale. I'm wanting it to sit right over something like a grill. So it's the effect of a mirage but limited to right over the grill. I had thought of a primative with a rippled glass texture that was almost transparent, but the edges are too defined when I try to render it. And I'm trying to do very little in post.

Attached Link: http://www.unmuseum.mus.pa.us/mirage.htm

For info on exactly how a mirage is formed and an experiment you can do yourself, check the link, knowing how it's formed may help you figure out how to produce the effect in Bryce...just a thought

Attached Link: http://www.shadowwindmanor.com/tutorialsbryce.html

You could always try the "Pepper's Ghost" technique described in this Bryce tutorial by ShadowWind.