Evening in the Park

It's beautiful!

tools I think in this case Gat has a point though. I feel that bryce can fake alot of things and can do almost everything that Vue can do if the brycer knows his stuff, but on the other hand when a program freezes up because of a few trees or crashes during save after your full day of hard work, it does make you look to other programs at least for the added stability. Bryce is having stability issues that it did not have before, perhaps a sigh of it's adolesence and new development. As David has said, composition and light color and these things are great indicators of a render and work for me like the nano preview. But technical talents of programs is a key factor. Example. In the scene above you can tell the difference between the transparency "trick" leaves of the trees and the opaque "normal" blend transparency leaves of the ivy. Notice how flat the ivy looks on the left side of the tree. I only have secondary lights to help me. I could use ambient but ambient is even flatter than secondary lights. What I need is true GI, photon mapping, and folige transparency. At least the transparency part is accomplished. I only recently figured out how to achieve that effect in bryce. Bryce could always do it but I don't think anyone knew. A big part of the lighting we all like in the above scene was accomplished with a trick of transparency in the materials lab that changed everything about the way the light behaves in the scene. A very technical skill that has a huge impact on the overall effect of the art. Example, Vue has had folige transparency/translucence for a long time. Vue has had more dedicated staffing, but bryce is still a tool that has power. I hear the render engine will be updated with carrara's soon, making bryce as good of a render engine as Vue. Bryce needs better memory handling ASAP!!! Question, how do Vue 5 infinite and Carrara 5 Pro compare? Their powers should be about equal I'm guessing.

Well, mostly it's all been said. It is an excellent piece, very complex, good lighting, pity that you lost the source file... so, instead of repeating those things, I'll tell you how I fill up my hard drive with continuous incrimental saves to combat the problem of bad saves. Oh I just have... OK, in that case, I'll point out that better tools make art easier but that they don't necessarily make better art. I can usually judge a good render from a bad one just on the basis of the thumbnail... which give me reason to believe that while we may intelectually judge an image on quality of render, sophisticated materials, complex use of models, these things are not paramount. And we should pay closer attention to those things which can strike us in something peared down - like the thumbnails. For example, overall composition, quality of light and use of colour.

thanks I forgot to mention that I used a fade correction in psp7 to add a sense of heat to the sunlight. The scene as rendered above has been lost. I can probably rebuild it. Yes there is ivy also. It is blend transparency rigged which means that I cannot use my transparency trick On the subject of Vue, LitoNico (someone I haven't heard from in a long while) has experience with the two programs and he too swears by Vue. Back in the day Bryce was number 1, but 8 years of neglect and no real updates or new features such as GI left it behind and gave Vue the chance to become the number 1 that it now is. Bryce goes for only $100, Vue infinite for $500. Not all versions of Vue are better than bryce, but Infinite is indeed better. Bryce needs better memory handling and eco systems and GI lighting, and then it would be alot like Vue. For now bryce is indeed behind. But there is no other program on the market that can produce terrains like bryce, not even Vue, so bryce still has a place.

The lighting is very natural. The bark texture is perfect. It feels like Spring with new flowers blooming. The only thing that detracts from this spring feeling is the one tree in the middle that has brownish leaves. Very nice.

Apart from the flaws you've already commented on yourself, this is going to become a very nice piece of work. The trees are very convincing (do I see ivy?) and that you have mastered plants and flowers is a well known fact. Excellent lighting.

. First, great scene, I really like the texture on the trees and how you grouped them to make them look more realistic. It looks like you ran out of memory and that caused it to mess up your file on save. The imported objects take up huge amounts of ram. THis is one of the many reasons why I want to make a switch to Vue. I used the trial version of Vue5 Infinite (I won't buy Infinite) and it kicks Bryce's ass as much as I hate to say it. And its not even Vue6!!!!