Rendered all in Bryce 9! (heh) Nope... Just wanted to get some feedback on this image and style from people who might know my past work. I finally got some time on Maya 6 and wanted to share it with you people, since I don't know anyone in the Maya forum yet and I know they'd mock me into submission... The ring was a combination NURBS and poly model, created in Rhino (The blasphemy part, Maya has plenty of capability for modeling a ring like this, I'm just inept and new to it...) Rendered with Mental Ray using Global Illumination, the real, photon-based GI. I fear I won't be going back to "faking" it in Bryce, but will likely use Bryce more than Maya no matter what, because most of my images are Brycean-style at their very core. Also, I don't have as much access to Maya, only at work... But for the eye-candy scenes, I have to say I'm blown away by Maya's capabilities and by the way it clicks with me, as opposed to Lightwave and Cinema 4D and RayDreamStudio, which I slaved on for months without producing a single image worth showing anyone. Been playing with Maya for a few weeks and it's just been a blast... Reminds me of my modeler-hunt. I played with Wings for fifteen or twenty minutes and it drove me to drink, then played with Blender for about 30 seconds, and even te ZBrush demo to no avail. Then I tried the Rhino 1 demo, boom! It just clicked, and I've been using it ever since. I'm still a Bryce renderer, it's so much faster even than Maya to set up a scene with. I wish you could transfer Bryce's User Interface to other apps! But there it is... My first, pathetic Maya render. This image rendered in about 5 minutes, with caustics and GI and photons and ray tracing and blah blah blah blah... Now back to my Bryce scenery-ing!