Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=308624&Start=1&Artist=bigbraader&ByArtist=Yes

I've built a (small) forest using my "dense foliage prototype" texture. The image posted here has about 100 trees. In the gallery you can see a better picture (IMHO) with 164 trees and a different POV (the link included). You'll notice in this one, that the texture doesn't work perfectly: The twigs are too regular and give the closer trees a "strange" look, this is a question of designing the texture properly (this is still a prototype). But nevertheless my technique has proven to be very promising in terms of building forests from Bryce trees. Each tree is down to about 14.500 polygons, and the file size is about 4 mb in this one. My only explanation for this incredible small filesize is the fact that the trees are duplicates. AND though these trees are very easy to handle, Bryce DOES behave like they are individual objects: Slowly beginning to drag as I poured group after group of trees into the scene, but not alarmingly, and NO crashing upon "Save" ;o) Rendering this image was surprisingly quick, 2,5 hrs., but then again I've had to learn how to render these complex scenes. With "Optimization" set to "Aggressive" render time is almost decimated compared to "Normal", according to the Bryce estimated render time. The new image in the gallery was rendered in two steps, one that was horribly heavy (+20 hrs.), and which I stopped after a while, then looked at the render options. Accidently, while experimenting, I've set Max. Ray Depth to 10. I turned it down to 4, and the new render took less than 3 hrs. The twig texture will be available in the freestuff area some time today. Happy rendering!

Agressive optimization is always a good setting. Except for when you are using very complex metaball objects, because that can cause polygons to get lost. I made a forest with hundereds of bryce trees (I think it was more than 2000) and it rendered in 2 hours and 43 minutes if I remember correctly. No saving problems at all. Nice image BWT.