I see beautifully lit renders on high-end 3D sites, that just kill me, and those are just the grey shaded models sitting on a floor. I want to make my lights in Bryce 4 match those in higher-end renders. This would involve faking Radiosity, Ambient Light/Global Illumination, and even glare. Radiosity is the trickiest of tricks to fake in Bryce 4, I still have yet to try doing it with some of the tutorials I have found online. What I am attempting here is Global Illumination, and already I can see what I have more to do to make this work. The model in my picture here is surrounded by sixty-six spotlights creating a semi-sphere shape around the model. Spotlights are linked to the model in the middle. Photoshop is used to ramp the effect of soft glow and glare glow. What I believe I need to change...is to have a configuration of about one hundred lights forming two semi-sphere's one inside of the other, with the model inside of that. That configuration along with varying light strengths should be close to what I want...I think. Yes, Bryce 5 has "True Ambience", but I have now seen that in action and to be effective it had to set at 256 rays per pixel to avoid a "splotchy" image, then add in soft shadows and you are looking at an all night render at least, or even way longer depending on your PC and size of render. That being said, I am a control freak in 3D...I would rather use Photoshop to manually tweak my renders for Ambience, softness, d.o.f., etc. Also, faking it in Photoshop not only allows me more control over the pictures attributes, it also means way faster rendering times. Anyway, I'll keep working on this, post results later. Here is a Rederosity artist (nick2k) whose Lightwave renders I really like, he has some very good exaples of radiosity in his gallery. http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=54190&Start=1&Artist=nick2k&ByArtist=Yes AgentSmith

Contact Me | Gallery | Freestuff | IMDB Credits | Personal Site
"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"