Another one for the gurus: How do you create waves? Is it just the texture of the water. I have tried different water textures and noise, but the results are not satisfactory to me. I usually end trying to cover up the glass flat texture with haze so I don't have to worry about it. Any thoughts? Thanks again.

I cheat. I take a terrain and flatten out the y axis so it is about wave-height, then attach one of the watery materials to it. Then I might amplify the bump of the material a bit. Try using one of the fractally generated terrains, ie. not the standard mountain peak.

There used to be a wave generator for this. If you have photoshop you can experiment doing greyscale images the look like waveforms. Look at pictures of waves from a height. Try to emulate that, but working in greyscale. Import these into terrain editor and apply as New Terrain. They often look like semi-concentric splashes seen from above. Hope this helps.

I find that waves are random enough that hand drawing the waves in the terrain editor works well for me. Then I rotate the terrain about 45 degrees and flatten it so it is flattened (but still rotated about 30 degrees).

My suggestion about what to do with the rendered waves. For what is is worth, I suggest taking whatever renedered wave thing you have made in Bryce, opening the rendered file in Painter 5, or 6, and then painting in the details, with the watercolor, and oil brushes. I also suggesst this for Poser hair. I say this with respect, and apply it to myself, also, that we can't expect Bryce, or Poser, to do everything. There is no getting around, post-render, painting work, using either Painter, or Photoshop, to make a CG image look really high class. Don't be intimidated by Painter, if you don't have a traditional painting background, because you can continually erase your mistakes, until you get things just right. Bryce does a great job with textures, and you will only be adding some post painting details to the image. Sea foam can be made using Painter's chalk, and a sponge type brush. Tim ( the man in the rubber Godzilla suit )

Hi, there seems no recipe, to get really good looking waves within BR4. Thus, I cheat too. One terrain (ripples, water-mat) for the waves and itself duplicated (now with fog/cloud-mat/transparency-fiddling), filtered and with cut-off base, to consider only its highest parts in the terrain-editor and finally slightly shifted, to look like foam on the top. never looks like the real thing, but throwing in your additional haze-trick might help. ;-) Hubert

Check out this app, WavesWorld 1.1 at: http://www.hknot.com/wavesworld/ Generates grayscale height maps for rolling waves & matching sand for beaches. It's a MAC shareware app but the author (Mark L. Hessenflow) has some nice examples at the site. No "crashing" tidal waves here but some pretty good stuff.