So I've taken to Rhino as my modeler of choice, but I'm still so new to it that I'm afraid these vases/jars are the pinnacle of my capabilities! I know that Bryce doesn't support NURBS, and that it's all polygons when you import objects into Bryce. Still, I'm excited because these vases actually have an inside AND an outside! No guesswork involved, just math. Here's a quick render I did to test some lighting and materials on these simple objects... Note that none of these objects have been "smoothed", so far...

And here is the same scene, minus the volumetric lights, and rendered with True Ambience at 16RPP... I haven't been able to match Ornlu's renders, for example, and perhaps someone can help me define what I'm doing different (wrong?). Again, none of these objects have been smoothed at all.

And then I thought I'd go for world-reflections, the technique people misname HDRI. In this one, I smoothed the glass jar in Bryce, and there are only three radial-squared-falloff lights here, the vase, the ground plane, and the big sphere for reflections. At this distance, you can see the polygons deforming due to Bryce's inability to make sense of it all. I will try a higher poly-count version to see if I can rid myself of any need for Bryce to smooth the mesh, but this vase is already 10,000 polygons. Notice the "black" reflections? What's up with that? Ray depth, or TIR depth issue? These are simple models, a vase takes me about 15 seconds to create in Rhinocerous now. Now if I could just figure out how to make a head in Rhino, too!

Well, no, hdri is partially the same technique, but it is used in true ambiance renders. and it's called "LDRI" in Bryce's case.

The black parts may be the refracting of the black areas in your scene. Btw, that is a SWEET render/jar you have there! Also, looks great because you also have an outside AND an inside to your jar. Most just take a "bottle" and put a glass mat on it. That will look strange, because there is no "inside"; it is literally just a solid piece of glass. Yeah, it is misnamed HDRI. When I was first creating pictures using it I called it a global image (taken from global lighting). Never caught on, lol. AgentSmith

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Very nice. Rail revolve is a nifty feature. One hint about converting nurbs to mesh in Rhino; Rhino loves that critical angle for deciding where to place polygons on a mesh. That's why you have the straight long polys on the bud vase neck. Sometimes this can be a bear when you want to smooth. Choose the detailed controls when converting. Set the default aspect ratio of 7/1 to 2/1 or 1/1. Change the minimum angle to 45. Set the Min initial grid quads to a higher value 64, 96, 128... You can get some neat cut glass shapes just by how you allow Rhino to resolve the mesh. Welcome to the world of insane poly counts;)

(grins!) Thanks, Electroglyph...! I will play with those settings, most of it makes sense to me from playing with RDS a while back, but of course Rhino is much more advanced... Far as I can tell, it's the most ridiculous modeler around, much more productive for me than LW Modeler, at this point! Agent Smith, I thought that the black haze and fog was the cause of the black refractions, but wasn't sure. The Ray Depth was at 6, and the TIR at 6 as well, so I'm thinking that's all it is, perhaps I'll render it on white next time...

Don't forget that Rhino has a reduce poly tool where you can specify the number of poly's you want in your new mesh. Just keep plugging in numbers and undoing it until you find the number of polys that looks good to you.

BTW nice vases/renders.

Remember, Its not really a solid. its an object with an inner and outer surface. I would be really suprised if you had more than 6 internal bounces and the black was because the reflections ran out. Try taking rays up to 7 or more and see if it goes away.

Very interesting work, and a cool render.

Thanks for checking these out, I'll post a 12-Ray version of the last vase when it's done rendering, see if we can't get rid of those black areas, or if they are just refractions from the black haze and fog...