I've been trying to experiment with using ambience to illuminate a scene with very poor results. At first I didn't think it was working at all but when I brought my sphere (which I'm using as my ambient light source) very close to my subject and zoomed right in there was some very slight illumination. I have ambience set at 100 and white all other surface attributes off. If I could turn ambience up to 1000 or something I think it would work but if I enter a figure over 100 it isn't accepted. Is there any way to enter a higher value? - Baz

The only value that can go over 100 is bump.

A sphere for one thing, does not make a good ambiant light source. As in, if the sphere is outside of the object. Try this. Put the object inside the sphere + make it a little larger. Also, it's best to have SOME form of light =P (bryce does not utilize a luminance chanel so you can't actively light an object with another object) a single omni set to 1 with no falloff is good. Just make sure you have falloff set to none. A nother way to light (which I have used in many of my images) is to not use ANY direct light source, but instead Make an inverted dome of spotlights pointed out at the white sphere instead of down at the object. Just make sure that none are actually facing the object and you will get some very fine radiosity. (with true ambiance on)

Sweeet, sekrats of teh trade.

For ambience to light another object, both objects have to be ambient. What bryce does is multiply the ambience of one object in with the ambience and color of the other object, with an algorithm based on distance. So if your other object has no ambience, you'll have to turn it up a bit (a dark grey at 25 ambient should work well)

Excellent! great tips there, thanks a lot! I actually started out with my subject inside the sphere and couldn't see a damn thing lol! so I moved the subject outside the sphere just to try and figure out if I was getting any illumination at all! Time for some more experiments :o) - Baz

I gave a basic step by step on how to use NO lights in Bryce, working off a render of a bear I did.

Link to finished pic;
Image Based Lighting

Link to mini-tutorial; (scroll down `til you see the bear)
How to do it

AgentSmith

Yep. I did a render of some mechs a while back using no lights. But it comes out fairly grainy.. It's better just to use a couple lights. And as with the bear pic. That's not really lit by ambiance as much as it is just reflecting other brighter objects. You can however fake it by turning blurry reflections on and making the specular halo of the bear materials completely white. This changes the angle of reflection to (approaching) 180 degrees. Whereas without it it reflects a direct line based on the angle of the camera. This is the best way to "fake" radiosity, however unless you render it at 256 rpp, it will appear extremely grainy. (which some people like)

Actually, the reflections don't have anything to do with the lighting in the bear pic, actually. It's all based upon ambience of the objects and using the True Ambience option to drive the lighting, it doesn't rely on anything else. But, the reflections do add the realism, imo. Above is the bear pic with the reflections turned off. The color banding on the bear is due to it's low polygons, it couldn't be smoothed out anymore. And, I don't care too much for the blurry reflection look, myself. Useful in some case, though. AS

Thanks a lot AgentSmith, more excellent advice :o) Cheers - Baz

Thanks people, I'm starting to gt some decent results now! :o) - Baz

Wow, my head is spinning from the possibilities of using these techniques! Thanks for the advanced tut's.

No prob. :o) AS