Bit of a newbie question I'm afraid...

I'm rendering a 35 second animation in Bryce. Fairly straightforward - basically the sun rising up over some mountains. Looks great as a still, but during the animation I find that shadows are appearing very abruptly, sometimes dissapearing again. In certain areas of the scene they look fine, gracefully moving as the sun rises. Is this an issue with the geometry of the terrain, or a known problem with the renderer itself?

Any ideas as to how I could smooth out these rogue shadow bits?

Many thanks in advance

Hmm.. hard to tell from that description. If the shadows look goofy, as in sharp edges, it sounds like you're seeing the sharp angles of the terrain itself. For grins, open that scene up, save it as a different name, then select the mountain, hit E to EDIT it, then change the resolution to a larger size, like 512 by 512 or larger. Then do a test animation to see if that fixes the problem.

The thing about Bryce- the textures can hide a lot of flaws in terrains. One thing I usually do when doing test renders with terrains is to make the surface that stock, lighter colored basic gold preset. That will usually give me a better idea what flaws are there, and allows me to either rotate the terrain to hide bad areas, or to go into the terrain editor and see if can fix it.

After re-reading your post, I'm assuming you're seeing the shadows from the sun acting up? Let me ask you this- do you have the autokey function on? I'm guessing that it is, or that you somehow added a keyframe to the sun in the middle of things. You might try deleting all the keyframes for the sun, then making one at the beginning of the animation, then one at the end and see if that takes care of things. That autokey feature has goofed me up quite a few times, and now it's turned off. I'd rather set my own keyframes manually than have to backtrack and try to find and delete a few that were accidentally added.

Hope this helps- and let us know how it turns out.

Steve

Hello,

Thanks for the quick response - I've finally been able to get back on the Bryce Machine.

I've tried to find the "resolution" option for the terrain but can't find it anywhere. I select "E", and a window opens with the terrain editing screen, but no resolution data.

Any ideas?

the default is 128. the maximum is 1024.

-calyxa

And to add another thing- if you're going to be importing a picture into the terrain editor, and need good detail, change the resolution to a larger scale *before* you import the picture.

Steve

Thanks for the help. Found the grid. Changed the resolution. Shadows look better.

Now, I don't suppose you know where I can find some dxf's of beautiful naked ladies for the "up-in-the-mountains" love nest I'm creating?? ;-)

Thanks again.

I think 3dcafe might have one or two, but you'll have to check.

-calyxa