Hmm, well, like the title said this was an experiment in breaking the "bryce look" of a render. ALl it uses is bryce, there is no postwork, and yes I meant for it to look like this ; for those who were about to post "learn how to use the dof" =) Just wanted some feedback on how this type of rendering was recieved, so post your c&c to decide whether or not I do more of this kind of rendering. one last note before I go into the howdunnit, this is a technical render, it is not meant to be fine art. How Dunnit: The main deal is in the "specular halo" This controlls the angle of "refraction" on the exterior surface of the objects, IE how blurry reflections are, the closer to pure white it is the blurrier it gets. There are 50 lights used in this image and a sphere dome with a beige/mildly bumped surface on the inside. The dome is pretty big, large enough so that none of it shows 'directly'. 48 of the lights are spotlights with yellow swirled gel maps pointing upwards at the dome (in a smaller domed array). Edges are set to full softness and this gives the "radiosity" look to the image, (for more information on this method see my gallery with some images using 0 direct lighting.) As I have always said lighting is everything. The remaining 2 lights were omni lights in the upper right corner of the image, spread lightly appart and set to soft shadows. The specular halo on the floor using the copper material, was set to 90% white. The specular halo on the shapes was set to appr 50% on glass mats of various colors. I applied a light bump of 1 + scaled texture size WAY up, to appr 500% to make the surfaces refract/reflect light in a more realistic way, IE even glass is not 100% perfect. And the floor is not meant to look like copper. Rendering: It was rendered in effect aa, 256 rpp, dof was set behind the objects to give a nice (out of focus) effect. Blurred reflections/soft shadows/true ambiance/Internal reflection was turned on, IR was set to 2, for those who don't know, internal reflection also decreases rendering time when doing complex renders like these. So, to keep up with my extreme theme, it took 2 hours to render. Using some rather complicated rendering techniques, but you be the judge, does it look like bryce?