Flat 2D cloud planes
This is one of the biggest giveaways, because real clouds are 3D. This is especially marked if the camera level is close to the flat cloud level. Experiment with volumetric clouds and use spheres instead of slabs.
For really great skies, you'll have to turn to Terragen.
This pic just screams Bryce.
The clouds at least look a lot better with volumetric spheres...
Empty Horizons and Infinite Oceans
The real horizon is curved, albeit almost imperceptibly, and unless you're staring out at the Atlantic or Pacific, there's often some land in the distance.
Put a few terrains in the distance and make sure you've got a reasonable amount of haze to fade it out. If you've got Bryce 4, turn on the atmospheric colour casting in the sky lab. Try increasing the cloud height too.
Planetary Traveller really suffered from this. There's only so many archipelagos one can believably stuff onto one planet....
Look- we're living on flatwaterworld!
Default Textures
Once you've seen one pic with the default Bryce textures at default scaling, you've seen them all.
Read Susan Kitchens' chapters on the material editor. Even if you just use Bryce as a toy, learn how to fiddle about in the shallow texture editor to change the scaling factors a bit. Play with the diffusion, ambience and specularity. Add just a little reflection. Add some bump froma different channel. Anything.
Nice texture- the first few times you see it. Use the default ones sparingly.
Lifeless Deserts
Bryce doesn't do vegetation. It can do green, but it doesn't really do plants. But how many places on earth are totally devoid of vegetation? Try to add the occasional organic thing unless your scene is on Mars or the Sahara. Even a blob of moss or a dead tree branch can break the perfect sterility. Get hold of Plant Studio or some model libraries.
This is a desert picture, fair enough. But look at the earlier pics on this page- why are they all deserts? How many of your pictures turn out sterile like this one? Does everyone live on Tatooine? Especially if there's water around, there should be some signs of life.
Low-res terrains
Bryce has got some pretty good tools for sculpting realistic terrains, but if you stick with 128x128 they're going to look crap. Come on, give your computer a workout and try increasing the resolution to 512x512 for anything near the camera. Trust me, it'll help.
Yuch. Same pic as above with low-res terrain and crappy scaling of textures.
Pointless Perfection
Look, everyone does it the first few times they make a Bryce pic. It's so easy- click! A mirror sphere. Click! a marble torus!
But... what are they they for? What are they doing? What are they supposed to make you feel?
By all means use abstract or geometrical elements but think before you click! Never just plonk them down in the scene for no reason!
Beware the mirrored doughnut of doom!
No Sense of Proportion
Bryce makes terrains too small by default. It's so bad it's almost worth reporting as a bug. When you make a mountain, the next thing you should do is immediately scale it up by at least a factor of 5 or 10 and Zoom out. Volumetric cloud spheres should be HUGE.
Bryce needs room to make use of haze, fog and atmosphere effects. If everything's right in front of the camera, it'll never get going.
You also need to pick the scales of the textures very carefully so they fit in with the rest of the picture.
These terrains are default size, and the texture frequency is far too low. There aren't many clues to the scale of what we're looking at and the whole thing looks awful.
These are the same terrains, just scaled up by a factor of 5 or so, with the texture scaled up by about a factor of 20. I increased the haze a bit too. It's not going to win any awards, but it is definately progress.
Bad Ambience
Many programs only let you have a single ambience setting for the whole pic. Bryce gives you the freedom to have each object respond differently to ambient light. But if you aren't careful that freedom can come back and bite your ankles.
If you're using other people's objects or textures, beware of the ambience channel- if the settings are radically different for different objects or textures in the scene, it will look very unnatural.
I generally pick a low value of ambience (0-10) and use that for everything in the scene that isn't supposed to be glowing.
The ambience in this scene is all over the place. Note how the shadow of the petrol pump is totally black on the road, but quite pale on the sand... and how the petrol can seems to be glowing?
Doesn't this version look more sensible?
That same old aspect
Why are 90% of Bryce pics in the ratio 4:3? (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024). Are *ALL* these pictures to be used for Windows backgrounds?
Try varying the composition by using different aspect ratios- long and thin, panoramic, square, or even irregular with a bit of post-processing.
Who hasn't done a desert island sunset? (OK- see how many of my "Bryce sins" you can spot in this picture).
It's the same five objects, just rearranged for a different aspect ratio. This is a much stronger picture, even though it still all the other faults of the original.
Bad Waterfalls
Look, Bryce isn't perfect. One thing it is really not much good at is waterfalls. Unless you are really a master and willing to spend hours on it, Bryce waterfalls look shit. Sorry, but there it is.
Do some post-processing- or find another subject- or cheat and use a scanned photo.
Spiky Trees and Conical Grass
Did I say that Bryce isn't good at everything? Middle distance vegetation is the other biggie. The classic Brycers workaround is to use a terrain with spikes for grass or trees.
This can look great if done properly, but it looks a whole lot better with some extra models in front so you can't see those nasty smooth cones.
Let's hope Bryce 5 (if there ever is such a beast) finally addresses this one, or we'll all have to grit our teeth and buy World Builder or Vue D'Esprit.
Bright and Shiny
Few objects in the world are perfect, even if they've just come off the production line. A little bump, even at the 0.2% level, goes a long way to making things look less plastic. Never put the diffusion at 100%, either- nothing is ever that bright and new.
Not Enough Hollywood
Lighting is a whole art form, so it is hardly surprising that people tend to stick to a single light or pure white sunlight.Trouble is, that's very dull after a while. Coloured lights and lights to emphasise certain elements in a scene can go a long way towards generating a mood or emotion- and who wants to make art that doesn't stimulate some sort of emotion?
Even landscapes benefit from creative use of extra lights- put a soft spotlight on your main subject or foreground interest. The effect will be barely perceptible but it will tend to emphasise what you want to show.
Oh- and try black and white occasionally too. It can really make the mood.
The light here is a single white point light in front of and slightly above the model. Yuch. Looks like a snapshot from a disposable camera.
Here we have exactly the same scene but with a point source to the right which is a warm orange, a point source to the left which is half the strength of the other and is a cool cyan, and a white spotlight above and behind the model to pick her edge out of the background a bit better. This is a classic glamour photography light setup (although rim lights for making halos around the model's head don't work with nasty solid poser hair so you have to use an angled soft spotlight pointing at the hair from above and slightly behind instead).
The Dark Side of the Moon
The moon is really big and really far away. So it shouldn't have shadows cast on it by objects in the scene!
There's a simple solution- make it really big and really far away.
Magical Water Repelling Rock
Things near water get wet, especially if that water is in constant motion, like the sea or a river.
So why is it that the rocks next to Bryce oceans are always bone dry?
Even Susan Kitchens missed this one: look at the rocks on the cover of Real World Bryce 2. It's a great pic, but why don't things near the water get wet?
To make things wet, reduce the diffusion and whack up the specularity. It's that simple.
The Dreaded Instamatic Camera
Bryce has almost infinitely variable camera focal length / field of view. So why do 90% of pictures seem to have the same one? Every photographer on the planet knows that certain focal lengths are better for certain types of picture- wide angle for landscapes, telephoto for portraits (it gives a flatter perspective which is much more pleasing for people's faces). Of course if you're a photographer you'll know all about breaking these rules to be creative, but to do that you've got to play with that focal length.
Bryce doesn't have depth-of-field so one of the tools in the photographer's toolkit isn't available: Bryce renders everything from foreground to background in perfect focus. This is OK, if anyone could design an optical system that did that in the real world they'd be a billionaire.
But don't ignore the creative possibilities of concentrating attention on certain parts of the scene with a smaller depth of field. Use Bryce's distance render mode to make alpha channels to help you with this. It is hard to do, and the results are not always worth it, but give it a go.
There is a risk though- overdo it and everything looks like the special effects models in 1950's B movies.
Ultra wide angle means heavy distortion, but at least it isn't dull.
A more neutral perspective using a smaller field of view and moving the camera a lot further away. Believe it or not, this is the same scene- I just moved the camera and changed the field of view. The lighting is horrible, isn't it?
An slightly narrower field of view is more flattering (so's the glamour lighting setup)... now she's ready for the Bryceworld edition of Vogue.