The Bryce List Challenge for September 2005 is to create an image using a light dome, a hemispherical arrangement of lights in the scene which collectively provide a nice even look, with soft shadows.
I started out with a single untextured sphere, while I constructed the hemispherical light dome. Then, I added a couple of additional spheres, and a test of my latest critter. I kind of liked the simplicity and muted tones of the scene, and decided to keep it 'as is' I used the 'Premium' render options of Bryce to prepare this scene. I first rendered it with a quality of 16 rays-per-pixel (which took about 2 hours at this size!), then tried an overnight render at 64 rpp - over 8 hours in the making. To my surprise, there was no additional quality evident in the higher-quality render. I will try a pixel-by-pixel comparison in Photoshop, but there is NO difference to the naked eye. Updated 2005.09.19 : DOH! I've realized what I did wrong! While I had activated 'Soft Shadows' under Render Properties, I had forgotten to tell the individual lights to generate soft shadows. Consequently, of course the renders looked identical, as there were no soft shadows present, in which the differences would be seen! Whew! Mystery solved! For comparison purposes, the original version, with its 'hard' shadows, is shown below:
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