Nothing original here, but useful to know if you are in the habit of using the Internet to browse for Bryce content:
To change the links in the Bryce 6 Links menu.
1. Locate the file entitled "Bryce6 Links.txt" in your Bryce folder. 2. Open this folder with a text editor. 3. Type in a link name as you want to see it in the menu, followed by a comma (,) and two spaces, then on the same line type the URL in quotation marks such as "http://www.daz3d.com" 4. To place a separator between links, type a dash between quotation marks ("-") 5. Save the file to replace the existing one.
You can replace the links that are there, or add new ones.
Getting the camera angle just right is often the making or the breaking of a picture. A good scene can be ruined by shoddy cropping or distracting details or a "normal" camera lens setting. Try this method I picked up in the Real World Bryce 4 manual.
Every image has to have a primary focus point an object or point in the scene that the eye is drawn to towards automatically. I often ask myself what am I trying to say with an image and in most cases this is intrinsically linked to the focus point.
First of all create primitive object that will act as the camera tracking focus. I usually find a simple sphere will do. Name it "focus" and assign it a colour by clicking on the tiny Edit Family gadget next the sphere. (It is coloured grey by default)
Now comes the trick. Switch to the Director's view (the tilde key ~ is the shortcut) or even better switch to one of the orthogonal views. (left, right, top, bottom etc.) Believe me it makes the following step much easier! Now select the camera.
Point the mouse to the camera tracking icon (the icon just above the little black arrow – the Land Object icon) now click and drag the mouse down until the focus sphere is highlighted. (a line will be attached from the camera to your mouse pointer and will remain there once you release the mouse button.)
Now select the focus sphere and click the Object Attributes icon [A] and check the Hidden option. This will make the object disappear when you render.
Now go to the camera view (Keyboard shortcut is 1 – on the top alpha-numeric row on your keyboard) and the focus sphere will be in the middle of your scene window. Now drag the sphere around and the camera will track this object always keeping in the centre of the filed of view!
Neat little trick that has often saved me hours of frustration. Of course don't forget to use the Memory Dots in the upper left corner of the Bryce interface to save potential camera angles. You have 7 slots to play with. …….
Free-standing clouds in Bryce have never worked to me – until recently. I discovered a glaring fact when watching the shadows cast by the clouds on a wheat field in the Caledon district. The cloud didn’t look particularly big but the shadow must have been at least a kilometre across. I realised that a cloud is a big thing.
My clouds in Bryce were simply too small so the cloud material (set to Fuzzy Shade mode) just lacked the minute detail and scale that a normal fluffy cloud would have. I normally create clouds with squashed spheres and apply a simple cloud material to it – volumetric clouds just kill the rendering time, and the dreaded intersection artefacts when two volumetric objects intersect (the image thumbnail enlarges to show what I mean), make the exercise more frustrating than rewarding. This time I cranked up the size and made the cloud colossal (in comparison to the terrain) and it actually started to work. My advice to you – think big!
One of my biggest gripes with Bryce (since Bryce3D) the its inability of the program to resize or configure the all-important Nano-preview. It has remained at its default 80X60 pixel size (at a 4:3 ratio) making it somewhat useless. OK it does render quickly (if you don't have some CPU-killing texture or rendering setting going) but its inability to resize or at least change its aspect ratio for those portrait format images is the main reason for it being useless!
Create a portrait-format image and it will display it correctly in the main editing area, but the bottom third will be cut off in the nano-preview!
Now you can use the Space bar to drag the various palettes all over the screen, but the Nano-Preview remains firmly attached to the top of the left hand palette. Imagine if you could resize and detach the Nano Preview to another place on the screen? Ahh, but I can dream now can't I?
I think the Bryce-loving community needs a blog. A place where we can share our thoughts and get (and make) comments. Not a private blog where the blogger shares trivialities ad nauseum, but a community where people can get help, advice, share opinions and contribute meaningfully to the blog.
With that in mind I present to you BryceBlog. It is no relationship to this blog, this one (heaven forbid) or even this one. In fact Gooooogle'ing through 5 screens of the search results from BryceBlog, Bryce Blog, Bryce Software Blog, Bryce Blog DAZ came up empty. So I think I can presume that Bryce does not have its own blog.
More news from this side of the fence at a later stage.
now click and drag the mouse down until the focus sphere is highlighted. (a line will be attached from the camera to your mouse pointer and will remain there once you release the mouse button.)
One of my biggest gripes with Bryce (since Bryce3D) the its inability of the program to resize or configure the all-important 
I think the Bryce-loving community needs a blog. A place where we can share our thoughts and get (and make) comments. Not a private blog where the blogger shares trivialities ad nauseum, but a community where people can get help, advice, share opinions and contribute meaningfully to the blog.
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