A Passing Gleam 2

Great as always David, the rock outcroppings look very realistic.

Rashad, I wasn't engaged for a long time already in testing. Perhaps my statement refers to a single-core processors. ))

Alexey, That is not exactly true. Much testing was done with B6 and B7. B7 is roughly 25% faster at rendering than 6.1. The slowest render version was 6.3, because PGO optimization was accidentally left disabled. Bryce 7.1 is definitely faster than 6.1 when rendering, but when navigating other things are going on that make things like the mat or Terrain labs slower. Most likely it is in the way the lab memory has been allocated.

I've always noticed that Bryce 6.0 (6.1) even in time of render the most faster version.

"[I]It is disappointing to note, when switching back and forth between Bryce 5 and Bryce 7 how much slower Bryce 7 responds when switching between labs after a high resolution heightmap has been added.[/I]" I run some tests on this. I prepared a 4096 16-bit gray-scale TIFF and imported it as a terrain in order to have the same conditions. Bryce 5 and 5.5 cannot load it. Bryce 6.0 and 6.1 need the same time to exit and enter the TE. 6.3 needs nearly 3 times as much. 7.0 and 7.1 half of what 6.3 needs - in other words 7.1 needs about 1.5 times more time than 6.1.

As always, great lighting and atmosphere.

Thank you Horo, Rashad, The baking technique is similar to that used in Rockfall, https://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/premium-rendering-hdri?item=12763 so the lighting overhead has already been paid. The next consideration is how much should be "evil" ambient, how much from the sky and how much from the sun to complete the lighting sum. My initial experiments involved using the Specular channel as well (but as a direct light source), but I found that because specular responded to camera position this was having the effect of hiding the bump in the material. Likewise, applying curvature can have similar detrimental results, unless the curvature is pre-baked. Here then, if a object is introduced into the scene, the main shadow belongs to the sun, then a second much weaker shadow will form because of the light above and finally ambient will prevent anywhere these two shadows intersect from becoming fully black (to simulate in an efficient way the natural light scattering effect). No "up" light is employed and the infinite light is positioned right under the cloud base, to keep thing as efficient as possible. The idea being to compromise the design with the bias towards speed rather than perfect effect. Without the clouds, the scene renders in seconds.

You sly dog! Clever choice employing an Infinite Width True Parallel instead of IBL or other dome types for the indirect lighting. So far so good.

This highlandish landscape is beautiful. I miss sheep. The material is excellent and it reacts beautifully to the cloud shadows. Coming from Rashad's Green canyon renders, haze and colour perspective match here perfectly with the clouds and the sky colour. Full marks. I haven't noticed that difference between Bryce 5 and 7. May have to run some tests.