Last night, after reading up on panoramic rendering in Real World Bryce, I figured out that you can use Bryce to really enhance the environmental effects in 3D STudio Max. By doing a Hi-res Panoramic render in bryce, you can use the output as a 360 Degree Cylindrically mapped environment in 3D Studio Max. WHat I did for a simple underwater render was create terrain which I made in the shape of a donut, and then messed around with the height map for mountains. I enlarged the terrain so it was in the distance, gave the environment a murky look, put in a ground plane, set the camera positioning and rotation to zero (though you can lower or raise it on the Y Axis) and did a full length Quicktime VR Panoramic Render at really hi-ress (one of the dimensions was 4000). I brought that image into Max as an environment, and viola! - a nice underwater background. - just make sure to add a uniform volume fog with the same color of the murkiness and make sure not to apply the fog to the background since it is already foggy. It ends up looking really nice, once you play with scaling of the environment map a little. This also applies to just standard bryce skies - something Max cannot compete with. While Max is an amazing rendering and modeling tool, environmental effects of the sort you can find in Bryce (clouds, sun, haze...etc) are very dificult to produce in max. Just thought I'd mention it.

Could you post and example or two? I am new to 3DS and not quite sure I follow you. TNX thenodemaster

I will post the environment map if I get permission - it is about 825K, and I don't want to violate any posting rules here. Ken - Let me know if it is OK. I am new to max myself, so I suggest you open the help file on environmental mapping (or if you bought one of the basic Max books out there) it'll explain how to import it and to set it up as a cylindrical map.