I actually only post on the Terragen Boards, because I hardly know a thing about using Bryce/3DSM and whatever else have you. I wanted to ask a quick question about creating boolians or complex objects in bryce. Suppose you have a square (positive) with two cylenders cutting a negative boolian out of it. You now have three shapes apearing as one. When you want to make large creative, object filled scenes, how do you stack the boolian operations into one object, rather than 3? Its eating up my RAM, and makes my render/processing tines outrageous; even in wireframe mode. I have hypothesized about using my limited skills with 3dsmax to import it, stack the operations, and then export it back to bryce as the complex object, but I haven't tried it. Anyone else here have some techniques for this? (I hope to god you know what I'm talking about!)

'Tis the sad part of Bryce that it doesn't create true booleans, it only renders the results of boolean operations, all of the objects remain. However, Bryce primitives are pretty low RAM intensive... it's only when you do bools on imported meshes that you really start cranking the RAM. Your render times are probably more a factor of texture or material than the boolean-ed objects. Transparent, glass, volumes all eat up render time...

I use Rhino for modeling because it does true boulean operations. Its native format is nurbs. When I convert objects over to a mesh format that bryce can import the filesize of objects can get huge and eat up my ram. I agree with Nukeboy. One of my simplest meshes in my gallery is called temple of raskalon. The mesh is sort of like a set from doom and is all flat plains. The entire object is only 55K, less than an average 2d jpg, but it took 1 day to render. That's because most of the textures had three components and all the ray bounces because I stacked lights inside bumpy glass. You will get more bang for your buck if you upgrade your processor first and add ram second. It's a couple of hundred bucks for this verses at least a factor of ten for commercial cad type modelers. There are some pretty good apps like metasequoia or xfrog that do one or two things extremely well. None of these will do as much to affect the render time in bryce more than getting more speed and space.

Like they said, basic answer is Bryce does not perform a complete boolean and take the 3 objects and turn it into just one, it stays as 3, always. Booleans can increase render time somewhat in Bryce, since it does not perform booleans completely and it has to compute all the positives and negatives, in addition to all the normal attributes. Remember to decrease the resolution of your wireframes, that will help with screen refresh times. AgentSmith

Anyone who says booleans don't increase render time must never have tried an intersection of two symetrical lattice objects. LOL... No fancy lights, transparency or atmospherics either. Of course the 400MHz K6II on my standalone laptop doesn't help either...

Try a robot made out of 952 primitives, most of them booleaned, lol. There's a lot of number crunching going on.