I have Bryce 5 installed and have seen some wonderful tutorials listed here. Before I try them, though, I wanted to get a basic understanding of what was in the program and how to do the basics. Unfortunately, my experience with 3-D is extremely limited and I wanted to get a feeling for placement and texture. When I attempt to make a basic landscape scene, I can get all the objects into the wireframe mode. In the upper left window, it shows a very basic image in color. When I render the image, however, it comes up in black and white - like a silouette type of thing. What do I need to do to get a 3-D color image from the wire frame? I bought the program because of all the beautiful work I've seen done with it, but can't seem to get started.

Sounds like you have one of the Mask render modes selected. On the left side of the main window are 4 little gray arrows, the bottom one is the Render Options pop-up. Click that and make sure that none of the Object, Distance,or Altitude Mask items are checkmarked. HTH-Dan

Do you have the manual? I suggest going through that to learn all the basic controls. As suggested above your problem seems to be you have mask render on.

Thank you! Now it works perfectly! I have a manual for Bryce 4 but not for 5. I tried to read it, but found that I couldn't relate anything to anything so this is why I wanted to play around in the program a bit hoping it would make more sense once I had a basic idea of what I was going to be looking for (or at). The extent of my 3-D knowledge thus far is some 3-D text I've done with Ulead's Cool 3-D which is a far cry from Bryce! Once I get a bit of a feel for it, I can try some of the tutorials and compare things in the manual. Thanks again for your help, everyone!