2-sided figurine project

[cycollins]

This is one in a series of attempts to do figural art with CW machine. It is a two-sided project executed in poplar. The character is taken from a 3D figure program called Poser, known to some of you I'm sure. It was exported as an .obj file and brought into Carrara (now owned by daz3d - www.daz3d.com), a low-cost 3D modeling/composition program that has the useful feature that it can render to a height-field (i.e. a CW pattern). The figure was rendered in an orthographic view from the front and back, producing two CW patterns. It was then carved on one side of a very well-milled 1 1/4" thick piece of poplar, with extra features intended to act as support structures during the reverse carve. The piece was turned over, carefully registered with the opposite side, and carved with a separate CW project for the back. I couldn't see any up-side (no pun intended) to using the two-sided project features. The preview looks distorted and I don't think it helps with the matching of front-side to back (does it?).

Despite the fact that the figure is a female nude, this is not intended as digital, wooden pornography. I have a low-end 3D scanner and I plan to record antique figural art and reproduce it in wood. Much of that art consists of classical nudes. The pose is very abstract because anything more elaborate would require 4-sided carving, something I'll be attempting next.

Some of the images show an early attempt, where I was still experimenting with the "height" parameter (and hadn't gotten it right yet), but it shows the support structure, holding the figure in place during carving.

The furriness is just the poplar, which is a good cheep wood while I'm practicing, but needs some buffing to look good. I had one that was nicely finished, but at the risk of sounding like a grade-school student, the dog destroyed it. It is after all a stick.

[rjp736]

WOW !!!!! Nice job!

[liquidguitars]

yea thats it! good work.

LG

[Bill]

Very nice, well done http://www.carvewright.com/forum/images/icons/icon14.gif
Link to daz3d is http://www.daz3d.com/

[forqnc]

Wow, that's taking things to a whole new level.

[kyeakel]

Great work, I love it. I really like your idea about reproducing the antique figures in wood. There's alot of art deco stuff that would make fantastic subject matter for this.

[rjustice]

Simply incredible....

Just goes to show you, the capabilities of this machine is only limited to your imagination.... Mine has just been stretched a little bit more !!

Ron

[JamesB]

Cycollins - that is a nice piece of work and good ingenuity too! As has been said its not the machine/software that limit what can be done just your imagination...

[cycollins]

...but I'm afraid this still classifies as a "trick" rather than a technique. I'm just about 2 for 7 in my record of getting good figures out of the system. The problem is getting the front to align with the back. The failures are quite comical. A figure with the front substantially above, below, or to one side of its front is very goofy-looking. Maybe I'll post a few. Even the one in the picture had its front a little less than a 1/16" above its back, but that kind of error goes away with sanding and buffing.

With a good piece of wood (nearly perfect in its milling with right angles everywhere), it's a no-brainer, just center both projects. This tends to waste wood though, since the end-pieces afterward are generally not of a very useful size. Also, a truly perfect piece of milling is pretty rare to find and hard to produce without an army of bench equipment - joiners, planers, etc. - which I don't have. If anyone is the greater Silicon Valley area, there's a place called Southern Lumber in San Jose that has three or four Costco-style aisles with rare and exotic woods, all milled to about 1/32" tolerance. I'm completely spoiled. But ideally, I'd like to be able to use salvaged lumber and whatnot, so I'm trying to things the hard way, in order to perfect the registration process.

rjustice knows that I've been battling with the drill tool. I thought that if I could drill very accurate holes that are placed by the CW machine at precise locations relative to the carving on one side, then I could finish drilling the holes through with a drill press (this project is a little more than an inch in thickness so the software doesn't let me drill through), and then I'd have a perfect reference for jogging the cut to the right location. Didn't work out though because CW drill holes are too sloppy. It might just be my machine, but I've heard pkunk say he has to specify .24" to get a snug fit for 1/4" dowels.

I tried using a laser level to make reference marks that can be traced from one side of the board to the other. My first experiment didn't work out too well, but I think there may be some possibilities there. The trick with this technique is putting some kind of reference into the basic project on which to sight the laser.

One of the basic problems with the CW machine for projects of this kind is that the coordinate system is based on the wood as opposed to some fixed reference. It's also a bit contradictory. In the software, the origin in the X-Y plane is upper-left as viewed by the user. This would correspond to the lower right as one viewed the board in the carvewright, facing the LCD pad. However, when jogging or placing the cutting head, the origin is the lower LEFT as one views the workpiece when facing the LCD. To do the conversion, you have to know the precise length of the board as the CW machine knows it. So, you have to use the "measure" function, record the length, do a bunch of subtraction, etc. Bear in mind that the length of the board and the length that the CW BELIEVES the board is can be significantly different if the board is even a little out-of-square. You could use the CW to square the board, but it won't square any board of thickness greater than 1". Anyway, you can see I've been chasing my tail, trying to nail this down.

Ultimately, I think the answer lies in using a sled. Let the CW measure the sled, fix work-piece on the sled and then the sled becomes the frame of reference for all operations. On the other hand, using a sled can also confuse the machine and requires prep work for every carving.

If I sound a bit discouraged with all the issues, I'm not. I find the this kind of challenge fascinating and the output very satisfying, so I'll be posting progress as I go. And I'm learning more about the CW machine than decent people should know.

Cheers to all,
Cycollins

[Gman_Ind]

First let me tell you this is a great project, nice work!
Just a suggestion, make the board properties (size)the same as your actual wood, then center both front and back. also are you using 2 mpc files to make this? why not combine into one using front and back, the tabs are created for you when you use the cutout tool.
The 3d fish posted here is carved both sides with success.

[rjustice]

Cy...

I think i have a solution for you.... if you made "sled".... that is long enough for you to measure it and leave it in the machine when you take your stock off, and flip it, (without raising the head)... the machine keeps its reference.

So, If you drilled 2 holes out of the machine, and had 2 dowels in your sled, you could use them to fixture your part. Your stock would no longer have to be precise at all... just the spread between the two holes. You could put 4 screws in from the face of your stock, with counterbores so they are below the face of the wood and wouldnt interfere with the rollers...

Voila !!

Ron

[cycollins]

The project itself is 13" or so. I did a test recently that revealed that unless you are under the rollers at all times, jogging back and forth does NOT produce repeatable results (rolling on out from under one of the rollers seems to "bump" the board sensor by 1/16" or so). So the entire sled would have to be under both rollers while it is rolled out to flip the project. I'm just hand-waving here, but I'm estimating that it would have to be about 40". Not so bad I guess. I started to build a general purpose sled with holes for pegs and sides with holes for pegs, etc. (I wasn't planning on 40", but why not?) By no small coincidence, it is for this reason that I started the other thread that you and I and some others are participating in concerning accurate hole drilling over in Troubleshooting. Since my workpiece is a little more than an inch (1 1/8"), I can't drill through it all the way. So my plan was to drill most of the way (.8" or so) and then follow that drill hole through with a proper drill to get the hole for pegging down the pieces. Unfortunately, as we've discovered, the cutting head is not properly aligned on my unit, and the hole on the other side is not sufficiently close to the entry hole along the x-axis. However, even having said all that, I think the approach you describe is basically the one that is most likely to succeed.

DCC

[rjustice]

More stretching of the imagination... i love it... I hadnt considered the possibilites of putting the dowels on the side boards of the sled... that will easily do your 4 sided carvings.... so you could in theory you could possibly do a part that is maybe 3 or 4 inches in diameter.... that would be a pretty substantial piece!

My gears are turning now...

What if if you took your stock, and made a sled that just fit snug between the side rails, you could actually pin it from the sides and probably wouldnt need screws to secure it. So if your parts are 13 inches... maybe make your carving stock about 15 inches and about 3 inches square. It takes 11 inches in the machine to stay under the rollers plus about 4 inches to stay under the roller when at the oppisite end of the cut.... so...30 inches would get it. If you are doing several pieces, a drilling jig would be nice to get the 2 holes drilled in center of your stock 90 degrees to each other 3/4 from each end.... This would work really well i think. If you are only doing the 2 sided carving they wouldnt even need to be very precise since you are flipping the part over to the same centerline...

Anyway,
This is really cool stuff... keep us posted!... the software your using to create the full 3d shapes is very impressive. Do you know if there is a demo version of this?... It would be fun to play around with this sometime

Ron

[SevenCubed]

I have to say, this sort of work is the reason why I got one of these machines. Congrats on pushing the envelope here! This is a great piece for sculptural work, and it's cool to see this stuff being done. Have you uploaded your projects to the forum anywhere so's that folks could take a look at what you've got? The more heads we have smashing against the registration problems, the better. =D Looking forward to seeing future work! Congrats on the progress so far. =)

[cycollins]

Hey, back off man! That's the "secret sauce" you're talkin' about! :-)

I might post them at some point, but they're in flux all the time. Let me work out a few more kinks. There are actually two projects and an Excel spreadsheet. "Why," you ask? The spreadsheet is because the requirement that a CW project have no more than a 1" cut depth means that a project like this can't get much larger than it is (because the difference between the highest relief and the lowest gets larger as the figure gets larger and at some point not much bigger than its current size, the difference goes beyond 1"). You also can't use wood any thicker than about 1.25" inches to carve the project (same reason - cut depth). This tricky balance is programmed into the spreadsheet, along with my crazy formula for "height" parameter to real world z-coordinates. You input the desired total thickness for the project, and the thickness of the board you're using to cut it. The spreadsheet calculates the Designer "depth" and "height" parameters for the front and the back (which are not the same). I made it harder than it has to be on this first project, but I've got some others in the pipeline that make the support structures do double duty, both to hold the figure during carving and as a reference for 0-depth in the rendered height-map. I'm also experimenting with a non-flat background surface - i.e. one that follows certain contours of the 3D shape to prevent >1" drop-offs in any local region. I'm such a geek for this stuff. I could play with wierdly-constrained 3D constructs all day. It's a wonder I ever married and reproduced.

cycollins

[VtBlues]

Great work! You say that you can't use stock thicker than 1.25 ". If the machine can cut 1 inch, wouldn't doing a 2 sided piece allow you to use up to 2 inch thick stock? My mind only works in simple logic. The stuff you guys are doing would make my head explode :-)

[Jon Jantz]

Very nice work, Cy! I've got a couple similar projects in mind but have been too busy to play with them, this inspires me. Keep posting pics, it's thought-provoking.

VT, you could carve on 2" if everything was perfectly centered down the centerline (thickness wise) of the design and you didn't have to dip below that 1" mark to carve out some areas... for example, her hands... if they only 1/4" from the surface on one side, you couldn't carve deep enough from the other side to get them nice and thin. So the bit has to be able to reach down past the center point of your material to carve out those kinds of areas.

Say you were carving a perfectly round ball... it's center could be right in the center of the material and then you could carve it out of 2" material...

I don't know if that made any sense, I understand why he's saying what he said, but can't explain it too well.

[cycollins]

...I can see you've been thinking seriously enough about this to have encountered some of the subtleties. Warning: the following discussion will probably get me banned from the forum until I wash my mouth out with soap. If you look at the figure from the front, the nearest point to the viewer are the nipples (see what I mean?). The farthest point that is visible to a viewer looking at the front is the top of the shoulders near where they meet the base of her neck. The z-axis plunge between these two points is about .8" at the scale I used (which I think is about the max to avoid cut-depth restrictions). So when the front is carved the bit goes well below the mid-point of the board depth (.5625"). Looking at the back of the figure (here it comes again), the nearest point to the viewer are the buttocks (oh, I'm going to forum Hell for this post). The shoulders that were the far point in the front cut are now one of the nearer points and the farthest point away from the viewer are the tips of her toes. The total plunge here I believe is actually the limiting factor, being almost the full inch of cut depth. So again, the bit goes well below the depth mid-point during the rear carving. The entire depth of the figure from nipples to buttocks (there goes my pg rating). is 1.125" because there is some thickness added by the areas that are parallel with the viewers light of sight, all around the outline of the body. So even though the front and the back have considerable "height", each amounting to almost an inch, there is so much z-axis overlap that the total thickness of the figure is only a little more than an inch. Just try to imagine the figure as the CW carving bit sees it and it will all become clear.

cycollins

[rjustice]

So, if you thought about what your model would hit while walking forward into a wall.. it would be...ummmmm.... uhuh....

And if she backed into the wall.... hmmm.... yep... ok got it...

LOL :D

Ron

[Ropdoc]

That must be hard to do. How long did it take you to creat? And is that something that you would be willing to creat a tutorial for and post on this website. That is auwsome work. What do you do with the figures after you carve them?

Just magnificent work.

[cycollins]

I've been holding off on doing a detailed tutorial until I can make the process a little more repeatable. As I mentioned, it's a bit hit-and-miss right now. I've done quite a few experiments with sleds now, and I think it's the way to go. When I'm done, I'll throw together a tutorial on the whole process.

cycollins

[Ropdoc]

Cool, Thank you.

[BobHill]

Cy,

Would it be too much to ask to post the MPC file for both sides of the figurene?

Bob

[liquidguitars]

Bob,
This 2 sided 3D project I made a few months back shows how it works... ;)


http://www.liquidguitars.com/HartR005.mpc

LG

[BobHill]

LG,

Did you use Poser and DAZ3d on your hearts?

Bob

[liquidguitars]

Bob,
Any 3D rendering program will work, some better than others. He used poser for the 3D model "auto makes human meshes" and rendered it,
The hard part is to get the thickness and Z mapping scale we need to carve it.

LG

[BobHill]

I know what Poser is (I have an early version of that), but isn't the DAZ3d program what he said made the carving forms?

Bob

[liquidguitars]

Bob,
I have never used the DAZ3d program ..

LG

[BobHill]

Thanks, LG, neither have I, but if that works, it sounds like it might be better than the CorelDraw method ... particularly if it'll turn out the model as shown by Cy.

Bob

[liquidguitars]

Just open's up what can be done with this fantastic software and little CNC.

LG

[cycollins]

Bob is referring to the fact that I made mention of the program "Carrara" which is now owned by the company daz3d. Here's a link that will take you right to the product page: "http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/carrara_5/-/?". LiquidGuitar is quite right about any 3D software being usable to produce CarveWright patterns, however Carrara does have one feature that makes it especially nice for this purpose. 3D Studio Max and Maya and other programs have ways to extract the z-position of a 3D render, but Carrara does it as a natural side-effect of rendering. All you have to do is specify an orthographic camera (you don't want perspective for this application) and then tell Carrara to output to a .psd (that's Photoshop) file or any file format that supports layers (Photoshop is the only one I've tried for obvious reasons - I work for Adobe). You then tell Carrara that you'd like a separate channel (which corresponds to a Photoshop layer) for the z-position of each pixel (you can also ask for an item buffer and all kinds of other cool meta-data). Another thing that's sweet about Carrara's particular approach to this problem is that it makes the best possible use of the 0-255 range of values for representing depth. In other words, the closest value to the camera is 0 and the furthest visible point is 255. This means you have to do a fair amount of arithmetic to specify the "depth" parameter for each side of the figure (it won't be the same value in general), but it also means that it will minimize the effects of aliasing (the stair-stepping phenomenon) that occurs when you try to compress large scalar values into small integer ranges (like 0-255).

An amusing side-note: I work right across the hall from Larry Weinberg, the guy who wrote Poser originally. There really isn't much money in writing cool graphics tools, so such authors typically have "day-jobs" at places like Adobe. Anyway, he tried to convince me that I could go right from Poser to a z-buffer render by using Poser's powerful material editor. After twenty minutes or so of hooking up a network of material nodes to produce a material for each object that placed the z-value on the surface of the character AND after screwing around with the camera focal length to allow for the fact that Poser doesn't have an orthographic camera, we finally got such a render but it didn't know how to manage the range of values to make best use of the 0-255 value space. I'm not saying this to denegrate Larry or Poser. Larry's a smart guy and Poser is a cool tool, but every tool has its strengths and weaknesses (I'm starting to learn this to be true in the area of woodworking as well). It just happens to be true of Carrara that for historical and accidental reasons, it does the right thing for making Carvewright patterns with a few mouse-clicks. I'm sure Max and Maya have their paths to getting this done as well, but because it isn't what they were intended to do (as in the case of Poser), I'll bet it takes a fair amount of wrangling. Even though Carrara ALSO wasn't intended to do this, serendipity has decreed that it is a very good tool for this particular task. That's why I plugged it in my first e-mail. Add to that the fact that it's relatively cheap, not horribly difficult to use, and has a few other editing tricks that make it pretty useful for managing model data, and it starts to look like the right tool for the job. Just IMHO.

cycollins

[BobHill]

Cy,

Although compared to Maya, of course, Carrara is "cheap", but for list price of $449.95, it's not in MY "cheap" catagory. That's for Carrara 5 Pro full version, of course. Is there a much less expensive model that will work?

Bob

[liquidguitars]

other programs have ways to extract the z-position of a 3D render, but Carrara does it as a natural side-effect of rendering.

Hi cycollins,

Natural side-effect? this sounds cool, are you talking about the program rendering out a 8 bit alpha image?

LG

[cycollins]

To Bob - there are two fallbacks from Carrara Pro. Namely Carrara, which is $249.00 and Carrara 3D Basics 2 for $99.00 (which may or may not have the rendering features that are desirable). I did say "relatively" cheap. 3D design content programs are not for the feint-of-heart or the light-of-pocket-book. However, it should be noted that I didn't pay anything like $549.00 for Carrara Pro. And no, I didn't steal or crack it. Every once in a while, someone at Daz3D goes completely bananas and holds an insane promotion sale. I bought the Pro version on one of these sales for around $100.00. My recommendation: put yourself on daz3d's mailing list. You'll get one or two spams a week from them (probably fewer than you get from penis-enlargement offers). Read and discard them as you see fit, and after a while, you'll see an announcement for one of these off-their-rocker promotion sales. When you do, strike while the iron is hot. It's not a very satisfying answer I know, but in the mean time, you'll get hooked into an interesting world of online 3D content. Just my two cents.

To LiquidGuitar - yup. Whatever kind of rendering you do, Carrara let's you get the extra channels of rendering data for free, including the depth-buffer and the position (packed as an rgb tripple) for each pixel (as well as normals packed into an rgb tripple, object ID (item) buffer and other good stuff if you want). For an orthographic render, the depth and z-position buffers are effectively the same thing, although the z-position will be inverted from the depth buffer for the back-side render. I just throw the color channel away when I'm making a CW pattern. In Photoshop, I turn off all but the channel (layer) with the z-position, do a "Select all", create a new document that is pure grayscale and the same size as the original, copy from the original and paste into the new document. Done. Then as I said there's a bunch of arithmetic I do in Excel to derive the "depth" parameter for the pattern to convert it back to real-world values (see my posts in the "Software" area about the depth parameters for some details). Trial and error works pretty well too, given the accuracy of the depth parameter.

My specialty is 3D engine programming, which is quite different than 3D content production. To be honest, the big packages like Max and Maya scare the daylights out of me in terms of user-interface (not to mention sticker shock). But friends of mine who are experts in each say that there are paths to getting the z-buffer out of a render (it's important for various kinds of compositing done in profesional applications), but it's not as straight-forward as in Carrara, where you just have to say "please" and it hands you what you would want. Plus Carrara doesn't suck as far as simple scene composition and minor mesh-editing tasks. It has one other characteristic that makes very targeted for the task of producing CW patterns. Every mesh in a scene is tracked in an object-hierarchy panel (this is pretty common) and its bounds (width, height and depth) are shown numerically at all times. This is very useful in finding the proportions of the figure from which you will derive the depth. For example, let's say you want the height of your figure to be 12" in the real world. You slap the pattern down on the wood, orient it, and scale it proportionately until it's 12". From your Carrara display, you can see what the Height and depth are, divide them to get a ratio, multiply the ratio by 12" and you know what the real-world depth of a 12" figure should be. Then you can play with the "depth" parameter until the feedback on the CarveWright design software tells you that your figure has the desired depth. It's a little more complicated than that, because you have to distribute your total depth between the front and rear carvings and so forth, but you get the idea. Experimentation is your friend and I will give up what few secrets I have left when I put together a tutorial on this figure. My new sled contraption hasn't yet had its maiden flight, because I've been busy with a torn traction belt, but when it has, I'll put something together.

[neverfall]

I've been subscribing to 3DWorld Magazine for a while, and the most recent issue included a full version of Carrara with a link to register for a fully licensed serial. The only catch I found in it is that it's Carrara 5, and you are encouraged to upgrade to 6. You can register for the free software at www.daz3d.com/c5pfree . I installed the software from the disc included with the magazine, but it may be available from the daz3d website as well. If not, it should only be $20 or so to backorder Issue#100. I work with Maya and Z-Brush, so I can't say how well Carrara works, but if it's free I'd recommend it for anybody looking to use a little basic 3D in their carvings.

[TIMCOSBY]

if you used the desiner front and back option you could see any missalignments by tilting the board a little then tweeking the position by eye.

[deemon328]

This was a fascinating discussion. I'm glad this one got brought up from the depths.

Was there ever a resolution with drill hole inaccuracies? Did the author ever continue with a tutorial for a special sled and post results of his trials?

[TIMCOSBY]

I've been subscribing to 3DWorld Magazine for a while, and the most recent issue included a full version of Carrara with a link to register for a fully licensed serial. The only catch I found in it is that it's Carrara 5, and you are encouraged to upgrade to 6. You can register for the free software at www.daz3d.com/c5pfree . I installed the software from the disc included with the magazine, but it may be available from the daz3d website as well. If not, it should only be $20 or so to backorder Issue#100. I work with Maya and Z-Brush, so I can't say how well Carrara works, but if it's free I'd recommend it for anybody looking to use a little basic 3D in their carvings.

the two bookstores by me only had issue 98. i'm gueseing the subsciption people get theirs sooner or do they number the issues backwards?

[neverfall]

Issue 100 may not be available yet for a single issue order... sorry about that, I wasn't thinking entirely. They may have a link to download somewhere though. Here's the link to their latest issue website... I'm checking into whether or not they have a download link for the software dvd somewhere.
http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?catname=/Latest%20issue

EDIT: Here's a better link for the issue with the option to order it. http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=b_3d_world_100_now

[neverfall]

It looks like the Issue DVD is required for the software installation... I wasn't able to find any link for downloading the software, but for anybody who's seriously interested in the 3D software, you can order the issue for £10.00 (About $20) from: http://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/store/displayitem.asp?sid=418&id=8991&custid=01@11@200742783@551469385

Another option for those interested would be to download a free trial.
There's a link for the Carrara 6 free trial HERE (http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/carrara/-/?)

I personally prefer sculpting software over standard 3D applications for creating CarveWright content. I do a lot of work in Z-Brush, which has a free trial version at http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/trial/download/

One last option would be the Maya Personal Learning Edition. It's essentially a full version of Maya 8.5, minus the ability to save or render, but it's a really great way to learn some basic 3D techniques. There's no trial duration for Maya PLE either, so there's not too much rush to use it. There's a link on Autodesk's website Here (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525)

Feel free to shoot me a message for any other 3D info.

[TIMCOSBY]

showed up today at the bookstore so i quese about feb 10 or so issue 100(febuary) will be there. subscription guys must get theirs early. it was $15.95 at barnsandnobles.

[Amonaug]

I was just reading this and it's great. Another program that Daz sells and is much cheaper is Bryce. It basically does the same thing by selecting a depth render or from a top down view a height render. It also only costs about $99.95.

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/catmain/-/?cat=326&_m=d

Here's a sample of the output of a height render

[DocWheeler]

Amonaug,

I have a question about Bryce; can you import a picture into it and manipulate grayscale or heights of areas more easily than PS or CD?

The link had extra characters, this works better.http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop.../?cat=326&_m=d

[Amonaug]

Amonaug,

I have a question about Bryce; can you import a picture into it and manipulate grayscale or heights of areas more easily than PS or CD?

The link had extra characters, this works better.http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop.../?cat=326&_m=d


You can edit the greyscale image in the terrain editor (you would apply the picture to the terrain then use the editor and can then copy from there) BUT I wouldn't say it's easier. You have much more accurate control in Photoshop or Corel Draw.

I mentioned it simply because it's cheaper than Carrara and does the same thing.

[TIMCOSBY]

cheaper than $15.95? if issue 100 is gone from bookstores by now then you could get a back order from the publisher. $15.95 is a deal for a $600 program and you could upgrade to the newest version 6 for $127.

[Amonaug]

cheaper than $15.95? if issue 100 is gone from bookstores by now then you could get a back order from the publisher. $15.95 is a deal for a $600 program and you could upgrade to the newest version 6 for $127.

Yeah I wasn't considering the free versions in magazines but you can also get older versions of Bryce for free too and they are just downloads if they are still available somewhere, I haven't checked lately.

[Kenm810]

I just registered my copy of Carrara 5 Pro form the 3D World Magazine couldn’t beat the price. (FREE)
While I was at it I down loaded and registered a copy of Bryce 5.5 Cnet also (FREE)
Thanks for the heads up ---- Looks like I have a ton of reading to do,
while I'm waiting for my Machine to get back. http://www.carvewright.com/forum/images/smilies/icon_razz.gif

[Amonaug]

I just registered my copy of Carrara 5 Pro form the 3D World Magazine couldn’t beat the price. (FREE)
While I was at it I down loaded and registered a copy of Bryce 5.5 Cnet also (FREE)
Thanks for the heads up ---- Looks like I have a ton of reading to do,
while I'm waiting for my Machine to get back. http://www.carvewright.com/forum/images/smilies/icon_razz.gif

Well there you go :) Can't beat that.

For Bryce, just a tip. To get the best greyscale map Bryce's height render seems to do a better job thatn the distance render. So you place the camera directly above the subject model looking straight down at the ground. If you are doing a render of a human figure for example, lay the figure on it's back on the ground and sink it about halfway into the ground. Make the model fairly large too.