I may stop here, but somehow I think this needs a velvet box to sit in and some better lighting. Whatcha think?

At first glance what comes to mind is the lighting..its to bright or theres to much haze or something. Seems like the colors are muted because of it. Also the dolphins dont seem like they are attached really to the ring. And I think I would change to a little higher perspective also, looking more down onto it, not a lot just a little higher. Hope that helps

Thanks, I smoothed the dolphin mesh and will change the sky cuz it sux. Someone at brycetalk suggested engraving and I liked that at first but I'm not so sure how to engrave the inside of a torus. Compound curve and all. Can do it by trial an error with Matisse and the lattice editor, but that will take weeks. Any thoughts on that?

The engraving can be done with a image map, alpha and bump.

Since your ring is yellow, see what happens if you make the color of the inside of the box violet. I think yellow and violet are complements.

pnevai, ok, you got me. I haven't tried that in bryce yet. any tuts out there? Seven, thanks, Mazilla sent me a maroon velvet jpg text. I'll play with colors.

Hmm, I know there are a lot of Byce tut sites out there. you may want to look through www.bryce-alive.net for mapping tutorials. essentially do is create a image map in photshop or paintshop with the engraving texture. You then create a alpha bump map from that image to simulate the tooling marks. You apply the map to the object like any other texture map. I'm not saying it will real easy but that is one way of doing it.