Used just positive and negative Metaballs with four colors.

*As ususal, my renders are best viewed with a dark background...and, after at least a few beers. ;o)

AS

nicely done :)  Your Bryce didn't crash mine always crashes even when I don't have much in it .

Looks good, even without beer, AS. ;-)

Corrie

looks good with a toke as well....from the "dry"contingent

Odd coincidence, I'm about to see if Bryce works on my 64bit pc.

Neat! Looking good!

Though meatballs render far too slow for my limited patience and remaining lifetime.  ;)

Cheers to (shiny) Spheres
Hubert

I appreciate light & slide subsurface,

by the way  how to do it 

yes, you can let us share render steps .

It's a simple setup with a lot of tweaking until I got it to look just the way I wanted (colors, reflections and levels of light, etc.). This is pretty much the norm for me with any of my Brycing, in fact I think I like the tweaking part the most of all.

The basics; One main Metaball colored red, one main negative Metaball in blue to cut out the middle, the six (skinny) Metaballs that cut out the top, bottom and sides are white, and the six (really skinny) Metaballs that create the grooved cutouts are black (to make them look darker/deeper and to try to give some separation of the blue and white areas.

That's the cool thing about Metaballs of different colors/materials, when they intersect in any way, their colors/mats will fade into one another.

And yup, Metaballs render kinda slowly and booleaned Metaballs render even more slowly and then you activate an HDRI for reflections/lighting and it can take a while, that's why I kept the render dimensions small. I think this took something like 20-25 minutes for me to render. I don't have what is considered a fast pc anymore but it is a quad core so that helps. (running on Win7, 64-bit)

Beyond that, the best explanation would be the scenefile itself, gimmie a minute and I'll upload it to my site and provide a link to download.

AS

Here is the scenefile for you all, created in Bryce 7.1 Pro.

Do whatever you want with it, enjoy!

www.kirkdunne.com/files/metaball_2014_08_e.zip

AS

Quote - Odd coincidence, I'm about to see if Bryce works on my 64bit pc.

Has always done fine on mine....

Quote - Here is the scenefile for you all, created in Bryce 7.1 Pro.

Do whatever you want with it, enjoy!

www.kirkdunne.com/files/metaball_2014_08_e.zip

AS

Brilliant! Something to play with, thanks AS.

Bobby, got it up and running. Yup! Works just fine.

Yeah, I haven't noticed any (bad) differences at all between my Windows XP 32-bit and my Windows 7 64-bit, as far as running Bryce, Poser, Studio, etc.

AS

This time, a booleaned group within another booleaned group.

AS

They're beautiful!

Corrie

Nice work, I like the ability through pos, neg, metaballs to make cool looking objects. And I do my renders using an emulated legacy Mac OS on a notepad sized portable. I have been quite pleased with how fast the renders conclude thus far...

Wonder what displacement on a metaball will do?  I see a crash coming for sure.

Quote - Wonder what displacement on a metaball will do?  I see a crash coming for sure.

Apparently nothing but if you hit convert, the converted item displaces nicely.

Thanks for answering that Bobby.  Did you try to add displacement prior to converting?

I added the displacement to the converted mesh as it (the displace setting) didn't travel with the conversion . It was on the metaball model in the same settings but no joy there.

nice AS

also extremely nice to see so many old hands still here. I havent been here in forever.

hope all of you are well.

:)

Who you calling OLD ?????? 

Old Soul? lol...;o)

@MalenySteve - Metasaurus!! (cool)

@bobbystahr - yeah, no displacement on a metaball but cool idea to get it on there further down the pipeline!!!

AS

AS...I will not be defeated by software, heh heh heh

brycetech...long time indeed...I still worked here last we saw you...

Lovely stuff AS.

Good idea using displacement on the converted mesh, Bobby.

MalenySteve, does the material survive okay on the converted mesh on those doodled herbivorous dinosaurus balls of yours?

Alas Fran, mine remained metaballs and twas not converted to mesh.

Quote - Alas Fran, mine remained metaballs and twas not converted to mesh.

Ah, what a shame.

OMG, Fran. I read your post as ".....my meatballs were not converted to mash..."  

Well, they wouldn't, would they?

You can't turn meat into tatties...

Tsk tsk, I dunno, trust the Bryster...

Lol!

I knew that

Without my glasses on I always see the metaballs in the title as meatballs and go WTF's up with Bryce now...LOL

Deliciously 3D Brycian Meatballs. Yum!

LOL!
You guys and girl are silly!
Keep it up. ;-)

Corrie

No garlic, please!