i have a list of questions: 1. what is the avarge render time for a 900px image? 2. is there a text tool in bryce or is there a possible FREE download? 3. is it possible to have text with a transparent background? ex. on image 4. how do you do splashing water, mist? 5. how do you get detailed trees? 6. is there a grass texture, not the flat moss like stuff? 7. is it nesscary to render at max capicity (power)

1. anything from 2 seconds to 10 days. depends on your render settings and whatever you put in (reflections, glass, volumetrics, etc). 2. gimp is a good free photoshop-light kinda tool that might help you with text. 3. yes... in postwork (re: gimp, photoshop, etc). 4. mist can be acheived with volumetrics. look up tuts on the matter. splashing water can be done with metaballs and/or any modelling tool and water material presets. depends what you want, again. 5. tree lab. it's a painful process involving a mad amount of guesswork with mediocre results. corel rocks my world! 6. a texture is 2D, no matter ho much bump you give it. you can get 3D grass (look up ornlu's freebies here on site) with modelling tools and/or painful boolean modelling with bryce inhouse tools. then add green/grassy textures. 7. no. you can get amazing results with just normal anti-aliasing. there is a huge amount of information on this forum. I'd suggest you look up some of the posts (search the forum) regarding radiosity, global illumination, render time, etc. drac

I suggest you do a search on the web to learn some of the things you asked. The answers are to complex to be answered in a forum environment. Look in the tutorials section on Renderosity, and the web.

Hope that helps some.

Message edited on: 11/30/2004 14:02

Hey Scoleman, I'm not the best source of info as I am very much a newbie myself, but I might have some suggestions: 1. I think coming up with an avg time would be very difficult unless you were comparing apples-to-apples. This would take into account your hardware and what sorts of effects you use in your project (ie. volumetric materials/world, etc...) Maybe if you post more details on what you have, someone with a similar situation could give you more accurate estimates. 2. Text tool - you mean to create text as 3d objects? Not built into Bryce (that I know of), but if you come across any, let us know. You could probably build up an alphabet of letters by mapping images onto lattices, etc... but my guess is that they would still look rather "organic". But if you just want "flat" text to appear, you can create an image in a 2D program (Photoshop, etc...) and use it as a texture on a 2D surface object (not sure exactly the name for this in Bryce, but I know its there). 3. Again, like #2, you can "draw" text to an image in a paint program and if you assign the same image (but in black/white version with white being the text) to the transparency channel when you are creating a material from this then the alpha will make the non-text part transparent. 4. Wish I knew - maybe use a sphere(s) and apply some sort of cloud texture for the mist (whether surface or volumetric you'ld have to test). I think I saw a tutorial somewhere though on splashing (running) water. 5. Haven't needed them yet myself. There is a bunch of free stuff on this site and others, though. I think there is also a very good stand-alone tree-generating program too (not sure the name - maybe Plant Studio?). 6. I've been doing an underwater scene and have been using some free models. Check both here and other sites. One in particular is at http://www.planit3d.com/source/meshes_files/meshes.html 7. Not sure what you mean. I know Bryce is bringing my Athlon 1.33 GHz to its knees at times, but I don't know if you can govern how much processor time (priority) that Bryce can consume vs other apps (maybe in a multi-processor environment, but a stand-alone???) Anyway, hope some of this may help from a newcomer :-) Happy Brycing - Dave

1. For 3D text, Elephont. http://www.armanisoft.ch/webdesign/Downloads.html#Downloads 4) www.petersharpe.com 5) Xfrog. Plant Studio, Grass and Twig don't do trees. 6) Grass. www.grass3d.com 7) Bryce uses 98-99 percent of CPU power when rendering. Nothing you can do about it. Putting it into background lowers that, but then it renders much slower.

Aye, as for number 7... If you're using Windows XP Pro, like what Erlik said, Bryce will never use the full amount of power, no matter what you do. The only time I've actually convinced Bryce to use full capacity was when I was using the, "Drop To" function on 600+ ground objects. But, even then, it will oscillate between 98 and 99, and never go to 100. If you try to set it's process to "Real Time", chances are you'll just crash, or it will take so long to un-set it that you might as well just reset your machine. But I think you were asking more about render options...? In which case Drac had good answers. There's very few instances when you actually need to use Premium AA modes, but they are a cool function to have around. One way to optimize is to adjust the Ray Depth / Total Internal Reflection in the render options. If you're not using glass or waters or reflections, there's no need to have these higher than 4. If you ARE using transparencies and reflections/refractions, experiment with these numbers. For example, in "endless mirror" types of scenes, you'll want the Ray Depth as high as you can make it, but not necessarily for the whole scene. You can render most of the scene at 4 or so, then plop-render the mirrored parts at the highest level you have patience for... Another thing you can do with shadows, instead of using the Soft Shadows Hope that makes some sense! There's a lot to learn about this program, but don't get frustrated. Just keep experimenting! And have fun, don't waste your time on projects that aren't fun unless someone is paying you for them...

"Another thing you can do with shadows, instead of using the Soft Shadows" I suppose you meant to say, instead of using Soft shadows, use multiple lights spaced very closely together, right? As I posted recently, I read that one soft-shadowed radial light raises rendering time 16 times. Sixteen. Said by a guy who worked on Bryce 5 at Corel. So, create one radial light, duplicate it, move the duplicate a tiny little bit to one side. Repeeat, move to another side, and so on. Don't overdo that, cause the calculation of all those shadows can also take a lot of time.