Let me see if I understood you correctly. You want to create a CGI landscape (something that Bryce 6 does well) and use it as a greenscreen background? If you do have access to Bryce, and know how to use it, you should be able to generate outdoor (as well as indoor) landscape of any kind without too much trouble.

The (much) bigger problem for a beginner is integrating the CGI background with your live shots. The most serious challenge there is lighting. In order to achieve anything that is remotely decent, you must have a proper shade of green (or blue) as your studio background, and it must be lit perfectly. Your talent must be reasonably far from it, so that it doesn't cast any shadows on the green(/blue)screen, and also so that you don't get any green (blue) bounce on the talent him/herself. Most importantly, you must figure out how to match the light on your talent (direction, difusion, etc) with the light in your CGI landscape.

If your shots are static, that should be moderately difficult. If your camera is expected to move (dolly, pan/tilt, zoom, arc, etc, not to mention steadicam), that will dramatically increase the level of difficulty for you, since you will have to animate your CGI background to precisely match camera movement of your live shot.

Thanks. I'll look into bryce. Thanks for the blue screen tips.

If you are making your own greenscreen in your basement/attic/garage (or an actual studio!), some people have done tests with common wall paints and the ultimate result was that Benjamin Moore's Neon Green and Traffic Light Green (2032-10 and 2032-20) were most effective at reflecting green and absorbing all other colours (when lit by normal white light). Although Benjamin Moore is a bit more expensive than some cheaper brands, it is still much cheaper than professional chroma key paints. ( http://www.hdmom.com/forum/789539-post12.html)

I installed my copy of bryce, and it's not what I really was thinking. I want to make something like this.
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Sorry If I wasn't very clear before. I don't want to make a landscape. I want to make an interior and an exterior of a castle, and then render it from different points. I wont have to have the camera move, pan, etc.

I was thinking maya, but that costs a lot of money, and is hard to use. Any suggestions on what program.

Sorry if I sound so uninformed.

You said your camera will not have any movement. That means that interior scenes are shot separately from exterior, and there won't be a transition shot from inside to outside. That means that you can design landscape using whatever tool you need (I still think Bryce will give you what you need there), then design separately, maybe even in different software, the interior of such castle, perhaps in one of those 3D Home Designer packages (if the rendering quality is acceptable).

You also have the Blender project (Open-source 3D software), which may give you some of the Maya functionality without the price tag.

You may want to storyboard your movie, in order to figure out what kind of shots you may need. Based on that, you can go designing your digital set and taking screenshots from various angles, as needed by the storyboard.

If there is no movement you could use a still photo. If its onscreen a long time you'll want to plop real sky footage in there to ensure clouds move and give a sense of movement a photo would lack.

RJSchwarz