Juat playing around with this last night. Straight outta' Bryce render. No lights in the scene at all. 50 squished cubes stacked on top of one another directly over the model, with ambience and diffuse at pure white and 100 percent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks just like (to me, anyway) a radiosity render out of some of the higher-end packages. I have the demo of C4-D 8. I've played around with the radiosity in that, and this one here looks a heck of a lot like that. Here's a theory: The reason that Bryce TA renders look so grainy is because this is Bryce's version of photon mapping. That's why TA in Bryce doesn't look so good until you kick it up to 256 RPP. Even a radiosity render in C4-D doesn't look so great until you up the number of photons used. Bryce uses a raytracer anyway, how difficult is that to...I don't know..."convert" those "rays" to photons. You can see the seat in the cockpit (even though the "light source" is directly above the model); and you can just make out on the bottom of the engine nearest the camera, the light reflected off of the ground plane and onto the bottom of the engine cowling. Isn't that radiosity? Anyway, sorry to ramble on. I was just playing around last night and all of this kind of popped into my head. Thought I'd share. :-) Mike

Yes Mike, that is essentially radiosity - although the process is so different to an "official" radiosity calculation that it needs another name. I'm starting to really like the term "True Ambience" as a description of what is happening. Looks like the programmers weren't being as optimistic as we said in the beginning. Your render shows one of the weaknessess of True Ambience. Imported meshes are always rendered unsmooth. The bodywork on the engines should be a smooth curve, but True Ambience reveals the polygons. As far as I'm aware there is no 'cure' for this. It can sometimes be OK for mechanical models, but Poser figures look very silly.

In most cases it's covered up by textures. You can always smooth it, both in bryce, or in a modeler. SubD that is.

poser meshes don't subdivide properly because of the joints.