I doodle a lot in bryce and I plod along discovering stuff a lot of you have known for years.  I have stumbled around and occasionally hit on something I really like and I consider art.  What started as experimentation with skies evolved into a render I truly like. 

Now that I am close to the finished product, I invite some help please.  Two things are perplexing me.

1. I achieved a grainy-ness I like by reduced render quality and no AA.  How can I preserve that grain and render at a larger size?  Will it have to be done in post?  I have PSP7 and 9 and PS7.  Any filter suggestions if it can only be done in post work?

2. Can the sky renders be degraded within bryce to match the object feel?

If you're talking about the thing in the foreground, you could render against a plain single color (black?) bg and do post work on the rendering that 'explodes' the image into pixels. Some sort of dithering type filter that pixelates the image. Then you could re-assemble it against the background skies, rendered separately, or even on top of the full render so that they blend over eachother, adding some disbursion just on the objects in front withiout the background affected.

If you want grainy looks in the backgorund instead, or the image overall, a number of post FX filters might do the trick.

There's even some apps that can take the image sequenes or animations from Bryce and make it look grainy in the sense of turbulent, hot air (or water) rising.  Such as [www.thebest3d.com/pdpro/tutorials/animswap

](http://www.thebest3d.com/pdpro/tutorials/animswap)

I thought of pixalating the finished render or using a mosaic filter if I can get the tiles small enough.  I even wondered if the entire scene could be rendered with a terrain or plane turned vertical between the camera and scene that was matted with a sand texture and transparency turned up.  That would increase render time considerably though.

***"I even wondered if the entire scene could be rendered with a terrain or plane turned vertical between the camera and scene that was matted with a sand texture and transparency turned up."***.

You're along a useful track there, skiwillgee. 

You can place a 2D Face (or Disk) Vertical; or a flattened cube, in front of the camera. Make it entirely transparent but with a little refraction, and apply a noise at high frequency to the bump channel. After a bit of fiddling you'll have a satisfactory grain effect that will scale reasonably well with render size (will likely need a bit more fiddling). If you want more "art" you can use a softly undulating terrain object instead of a flat one - with the same material applied, you'll get low frequency distortion along with the grain. You can also do this noise-grain thing with a reflective object, if you don't mind things being backwards. Bryce5 brought along blurry transmissions/reflections, which is another avenue worth exploring.

Obviously these will all put the render time up, but not horrendously so on a modern computer. And it's better than all this non-Bryce editing sacrilege.

In the immortal words of Val, here's one I prepared earlier. So much earlier, in fact, that it's a Bryce3D render from the previous millennium. This is all Bryce except for the Poser3 dog. I could even do trees back then, before Bryce5 came along. Beer and general decrepitude has made me forget how, and I can't even remember if the file still exists or on what disk (or where).

.

Thanks PJF.   I'll try the terrain and a 6 pack of beer.  Now if I could only find a pretty lady to come watch it render with me.... Ang25 are you out there?     sorry, I stray.   Where have you been, PJF?

The Cardinal will be proud if post work is nil.

Twelve hours since original post.   Thanks PJF.  It worked.  I put vertical rolling terrain behind the water and boat with some refraction and sand for bump.  Since transparency is turned on the other items, it added grain to the entire image including the sky. 

I'm answering to let peeps know that PJF's suggestion works.  No post work necessary.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1480796

Final results posted.  Thank you.