I must be in a posting mood today or something. :- Anyways...is it uncommon for Bryce files to grow to 50 MB or larger? My computer seems to become more and more unstable as file sizes go above 45 MB...any insight on this? How big our other's file sizes? Regards Once Again, MadDog31

Well, I've got a couple of files that go over 100Mb in size, but my system stays stable as a rock (Mac OS X). Josselin

Sure MadDog, very common in fact. The average file size for most of the works I do hangs around 200 to 300 megs. Some push well over 400 depending on the complexity. The point at which Bryce becomes unstable with the file your working on really depends on your total available RAM and how tempermental Bryce is that day. I've had it go unstable on me on files as small as 50 megs often. PS. Thanks very much for the nice plug posting on my articles, I do hope you found something worth reading in them :) I do look forward to seeing your work. :) Thanks again.

I have a lot of files that are 200-300MB in size as well. Things seem stable. The only times I've had troubles was with files was when there was a big texture in it.

Yes, agree with Flak, same here. Very stable even with 200 Megs files (my maximum so far), but a little tricky when there are some complex textures in the image. Hm... just discovered a little trick. I'm always in search of free RAM, and yesterday I happened to open Photoshop while rendering. Ooops... everything freezed, my free RAM counter was to zero. So I closed Photoshop and... bam! My free RAM rocketed to 50Mbytes, against the 12 I was having before opening PS... so, from now on, I'll always open and close PS before start or resume a render :-) S

More RAM can help with larger scene files. You can never have enough RAM, lol. Big textures in Bryce; Import a picture texture into Bryce and it will use it uncompressed, meaning a 1024x1024 .jpg that is say, 350kb, turns into 3.1Mb in Bryce, and in turn, uses up more RAM. That's just the nature of Bryce, no way to change that, unfortunately. So beware. *Offtopic - Well, lets plug again. If anyone here wants more insight on nature in Bryce, go read DryFly's articles. (they are on his artist page). They aren't a-b-c, 1-2-3 steps. They are more the theory behind making more natural, and realistic settings. Worthy reading. DryFly, write more, and then write some more. Thank You. AgentSmith

Just recently upgraded from an overclocked athalon 700 to a 1200. Before the upgrade, I was limited to about 70meg files before it became too cumbersome.... I'm curious to see what it can handle now, but I haven't gotten around to trying another overload scene. Sure renders faster, though. An image that took 7 minutes to render now comes in at just under 3 minutes.

!!Feel the Power!!

Also if you are not animating anything turn Autokey off. My default.br5 file is set up this way so I don't automatically create frames. If you accidentally had autokey on and you don't want animation in the scene try this easteregg: hold down ctrl/alt/shift (on macs it's cmd/opt/shift and click the minus keyframe. You'll know it was sucessful when a message comes up saying "what're you up to?" click ok and all the keyframes get blown away. Now re-save the file and the filesize will shrink. Of course if you want your keyframes don't do this easteregg - because it is NOT undoable ; ) When autokey is on Bryce is keeping track of EVERY change you make and all of this can bloat the filesize. Also having autokey off will prevent those weird jumpy things that can happen while making a scene. Also even when animating it is better to explicitly create your keyframes by just pressing the plus sign for the attributes you are animating. Whew! enough about filesize! Scott : )

:)

Excellent, little known point you made there. AS

My files are often larger than 50MB. I've had filesizes of more than 1 GB. But that's probably because of my obsession for complex and detailed scenes. Lot's of projects my projects get files of more then 100MB.