Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=239085&Start=1&Artist=chewbacha&ByArtist=Yes

First, Thanks again Vile for the lighting pointers. Here's the info for the starfish I promised. The starfish I made in the manner described below are featured in the image link posted below. 1. First find a good overhead photo of a starfish. lasso tool it from its background and paste onto a black background. Try to get the center of the starfish as close to the center of the image as possible. 2. Duplicate the starfish layer and desaturate it to greyscale. 3. Bump the contrast on the grey scale lyer way down so its not quite flat. save the image and import it into the terrain editor. 4. In the terrain editor apply the gaussian edges to make the ends of the starfish arms a lower elevation than the center (this is why you want the center of the starfish Centered in the image). 5. Go back to photoshop and save the color layer as a different filename and that becomes your texture. you can also use the terrain map as a bump map for the texture. That's the BASIC idea anyway. There's always some extra tweaking here and there before it's right. On a Personal note, I actually made this pic in Bryce 4 over a year ago. About two months ago, Out of the blue I got an email from a guy who was a V.P. of a company called AAT fabrication. They Make custom acrylic large capacity display aquariums and they want to use my "Tidepool" pic as cover art for their product catalogue. I'm just glad I still had the original Bryce file so I could re-render it at a massive size/resolution to send to their publisher. I'm stoked about it and cant wait get my copy of the catalogue.

Excellent!! Congrats on the contract and thanks for the info!

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Ockham's razor- It's that simple

Nice little tut.I've tried to explain this method to friends before but not as eloquently.This method works well for fish as mell as many more objects.If you run the terrain editor at the same time as Photoshop you can copy/paste from one to the other-it can make the process much quicker.

Thanks for the tutorial! I went to Sea World a few weeks ago and took several pics of starfish. I was going to use them for textures - never though of using them as terrains. I did not have a chance yet to look really close at the pics - if they look OK, I will post a few to Renderosity. Peggy

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Tricky I will will have to try this. The terrain editor a highly unused feature of my Bryce unit LOL! Thanks Chewy and I want to see a planetary image! if i helped...

Very cool and instructive tut chewbacha, thanks!