Posted my first image to the gallery--made it about a year or so ago. I was looking for some constructive criticism. Keep in mind, other than making the render today, I haven't touched this file in months...

Thanks!

nevanna.blogspot.com

Hi, Congratulations on your first gallery image! It's a nice image with the suggestion of a story and has some element of mystery to it, so it is an interesting image as well! Here's a couple of tricks to enhance the "mysteriousness" of the image that you might want to play with and see if you like the results: 1) You can soften shadows in Bryce 5 (I assume your image is a Bryce 5 generated image?) by going to the sky lab and reducing the shadow setting for the sky you used. Often Bryce will set a shadow level of 90 or 100 for a sky preset which is extremely harsh. Dropping the shadow setting to about 50 softens the shadow without incurring the increased rendering times of using the "soft shadows" option. 2) Try some artifical radial lights using the ranged falloff method in the scene. This will definitely increase rendering times, but if you keep your light levels low, it won't be too bad. The lights will also allow you to control the illumination of your figure rather than let the atmosphere alone do it. Turn on the lights' shadows, but not the soft shadows. 3) Try pulling up the fog a bit so it is covering the surface (just slightly) of the "temple" around the figure's feet. I think adjusting the fog height and desnity will get this working for you. Usually you don't need much, just a little will do the trick. 4) If you decide to use some artifical lights, you can enclose your scene in a cube object, set it to 100 transparency and apply some refraction. This will deepen corner shadows if your scene is large enough (If it is too small, you won't see much effect..) You need the artificial lights for this to work. I've written a tutorial on the Bryce 5 Lighting FX that may better explain some of these ideas. You can find it here: http://clydesightproductions.com/brlitefx Again, congratualtions on your first gallery post!

Thanks for the input. :)

I'm not sure if I mentioned this above, but I did make it over a year ago. So it was done in Bryce 4. When I opened the file the other day, all I did was render it in Bryce 5...just didn't do anything to adjust the image. I know the material on the temple is a preset. And I'm pretty sure the sky is, too--if not, it's only some minor tweaks. :)

I think I'm going to try playing with the lighting, as you suggested--I'm familiar with the techniques. Actually, I've used them some on other projects.

I just wasn't sure what else to do to it. I kept feeling like it needed something else, but I wasn't sure what. But I also felt like I wasn't going to really do anything else to it. So I thought I would put it up to see what others thought.

Sorry if this seems rambling...just sort of thinking out loud. :p

nevanna.blogspot.com