Hi Before Christmas I saw working on a scene. What I wanted was to have to characters fighting of some big nasties on the edge of a wood. Just in the nick of time help arrives. So what i wanted to do was have one big scene with several things happening but which could only be seen using several diferent renders from different position in that scene. a) is this possible without killing my machine b) I found that to get the woodland effect I wanted I had to use 'flats' for want of a better term so any help with this would be good. and C) how in the heck is it posible to make a landscape that big.(I ended up using smaller terrains placed/grouped together which was good but only from one perspective. thanks Dave

I'm a little confused by parts of your question, but I'll try to help. Using "flats" for your woodland is only going to work if your woods are viewed from the front or back. If you are generating views from any other angles, it won't work. If you want to make a large terrain for your basic ground plane, use the settings for gigantic or planatary size (it's the little 9 box grid in the terrain editor). My thoughts on doing a big scene with several things happening would be not to try several different renders ... unless you plan to composite it into a panorama or render it as an animation, but to consider a bird's eye view.

Let me see if I get this straight. You want to create 1 scene file with all the action as if you are on the set of a movie (ie like in real life) and then be able to move the camera around taking "pictures"/renders. a) depends on the specs of your machine (mostly how much RAM it has) b) There are trees made of 2D planes in the objects presets (or content disks if you have them). A flat 2D plane/object will only work if looking straight at it and thus you won't be able to just move the camera around. c) You will almost literally have to create a small world for what you want to do which will require several terrains (what ricky suggested will only raise the res of the terrains to unneccessary proportions and drag your comp down (ie huge amounts of unneeded polygons). You can edit the terrain size in the edit pallette and make it real big (sculpting it in the terrain editor to the shape you want) and use this as the base terrain then add other terrains for detail and low res terrains for background.

Ummm Aldaron .... your "c" is exactly what I suggested. I don't see that making one large terrain as the base terrain will raise the resolution to unnecessary proportions. Not unless he makes ALL of his terrains huge, which is not what I suggested.

I'm not sure I understand. It seems what Ricky was saying is that the grid will make the terrain larger. I thought it only changed the resolution, so that when you attach the mat, it will fit properly. If that is correct, then how do you change the size of the terrain without making it look all stretched out and strange?

Wanderer, good advice here. My own suggestions: - A flat is good. In other words, creating a scene that will be a background and rendering it. Import it into a new scene as a picture on a plane, like a stage backdrop. Saves tons of time and memory requirements. Your POV is strictly limited, though, and you can rotate the flats somewhat to be perpindicular to the camera view (am I just repeating what everyone else is saying?). - Consider doing more than one scene. All scenes would have the same basic qualities (i e, light, haze, atmosphere effects, POV) but each would only incorporate one aspect of the image, such as background terrains, middleground and foreground. Render each of these seperately. The nice thing is, if you mess with one aspect of it, you dont have to re-render the whole blasted thing. Composite the three scenes in a paint program. - Use Bryce to capture the essence of the image, then post-work everything that needs detail and crafting. I've seen where the image is rendered completely in white, no textures, then ALL of the textures added in Photoshop (I think reflectives and transparents are the exception). - As for terrains, you can go into the terrain editor and increase the resolution to be huge. It makes the terrain have lots more bumps and crevices, but also increases the file size. - Don't worry about long renders. It's a fact of Brycean life. - Buy more RAM. There is no such thing as "too much RAM"

What I was trying to say, is that rather than have several 128 resolution terrains, it's better to have one large one that is fairly detailed. Certainly better from a management of the scene point, and doesn't make the number of polygons any worse.

or take the Hollywood approach- just render the trees at the edge of the forest, maybe a row in from that (depends on your angle), and put something dark and forest-matlike behind that, obscured for the most part by the trees. You can get a vastness also by bringing the camera down almost to the level of the plane, then pointing slightly upwards (and I do mean slightly, unless they're birdmen..;)
one thing I've done is to create a terrain, lop off the really distinctive features, then duplicate and rotate each copy to a random orientation on the 'y' axis. Just my 2p..;)