Been working with bryce quite a lot but got a simple newb question to ask: what is the damn difference with metaballs and normal sphere??? may sound dumb but i havent figured out a damn single difference myself... someone can tell me ???

Metaballs "snap" to each other, so you get a seemingly continuous surface, while spheres always have sharply delineated boundaries of individual spheres.

-- erlik

thanx

You only see the "melting/merging" in render and how much is determined by thier bounding boxes (more overlap means the more they merge). Do a search on the forum for more info on metaballs.

Okay, you won't see the difference in a wireframe view, but just move a few of those metaballs right next to, or very close to each other and then render them. Trust me, you will see the difference. You can assign a different material to each metaball(except volumetric materials,they don't work with metaballs)and the materials will blend where they "touch".

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=365216&Start=1&Artist=Gog%5FCA1&ByArtist=Yes

Think of metaballs as muscle without the skin, stretch and place meta's where you would expect there to be muscles and Bryce will 'skin' them for you. Will also recreate the surface tension found in liquid drops, so great for water etc. I've included a shameless link to one of my images with a metaballed Hydra in it, note the texture blend as mentioned in this thread, they work superbly.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.

metaballs do work with volume materials but the material has to have more black than white in the alpha channel (or vice a versa.....been a long time and I'd have to find my post I did months ago). But they do work with the right volume material.

OOoops, my mistake, Aldaron!

Put 2 or 3 metaballs in close proximity to each other (NOT touching) and then 'GROUP' them......then render......

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All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

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Aldaron show me! I have not been able to get my (er hmmm) the Metaballs to work with a volume.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1066411

Found it Vile. Take a look at the above post. It deals with the alpha and density settings.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=462467&Start=1&Artist=SevenOfEleven&ByArtist=Yes

Can model all sorts of cool stuff with metaballs. Can model almost anything with them if you have the patience. The liquid is done with bryce metaballs.

Uh is that naughty? and Aldaron I still wanna see something you have done...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=223554&Start=1&Artist=SevenOfEleven&ByArtist=Yes

*Nudge nudge wink wink* Crikey mate it could be naughty! The 2 objects in the front were done with metaballs. Not Bryce but you could make them with bryce metaballs. Actually lots of stuff in my gallery is made with metaballs.

Vile, just for you :) 5 metaballs, left 3 with a volume modified cloud material (mostly white and grey in the alpha channel) and 40% density, right 2 red plasitc. As you can see the volume and non-volume materials don't work good together but volume with metaballs is possible.