I'm working on a new bryce scene. It has over 6-thousand objects & over 1-million polygons. I went to copy this group and my pc seemed to hang up much longer than usual. I thought for sure that it had locked up. I did the "alt,ctrl,del" thing and brought up the task manager in Win XP. It showed that only bryce was up, but "not responding". OK - at this time I figure for sure that it is locked up and I'm going to loose my work if I click on the "End Task" button. For the heck of it I went to the processes tab and noticed that bryce was still processing that "Copy" command and using 99 percent of the cpu. It was working but way slow. I decided to wait and watch the processing for a while and I'm glad I did. It took over half an hour to complete the copy command. I knew this when I saw the cpu use drop to "0" percent for bryce. I then went back to the task tab and saw that the status of bryce went from "not responding" to "running". Great! I thought. Went back to bryce and did the "paste" command. Same thing happens exactly, only taking more than an hour this time. Went back to bryce and there was the new object. I didn't lock up or loose a thing. I saved the work and all is great, to my surprise. Has this happened to anyone else? And is it a common occurrence? Also is there a way of tweaking the pc to quicken this up? I'm running a 1800+ AMD processor with 512meg DDR ram and tons of hard drive space.

Saw someone did a picture called "Siege" and he had to chop up his picture and render each part separately. Check the old posts, might find something.

All you can do, if you are running XP that is, is open the task manager and go into Processes, right click on Bryce 5 and set the Set Priority to high. This gives Bryce full charge of the CPU and it will cut some time off the render. It's nice to keep Bryce happy. 8) Cat

It can be common. I have similar things happen where the task manager says that the program is "Not Responding", but that isn't always the case. It just means the OS isn't getting a response from the app because the app is too busy.

I have found it common in different times and areas of Bryce. When I had Bryce on my ancient slow cpu, sometimes the rendering would look as if had stalled, and the task manager would report "not responding", but If I just let it go, it would eventually finish. Bryce teaches patience better than a Shaolin monk. AS

That's why copy & paste is not good to use unless it's a simple object. If you plan on using a complex object several times (or even just twice) it's better and faster to save it by itself in a scene file then merge the scenes together.

Thank You Everyone! I learned something new from this experiance today. Normally I would have trashed it like I said in the original post. SevenOfEleven- I'll check it out. catlin mc - I didn't know about the right click, Thanks. jcleaver & AgentSmith - Right on the Patience. Alderon - I'll give it a try. Thanks Again: Rich Z.

Rich I forgot to say that after you have set priority you must only minimize Task manager not close it, otherwise it just goes back to default. Cheers Cat

I do bryce on a p3 450. This is pretty common for me to have it apparently lock up, but still be working like crazy in the background. Normally for me I go by the sound of the hard drive being used in the cut/paste as an indicator that all is "well" (only have 320 ram).

Happens all the time with me. Bryce doesn't like it when windows asks "Are you still working". Bryce ignores it untill it finishes one task. Do what Aldaron said. Merging can save lot's of time. I use it very often. Sometimes copying takes 30 minutes and merging takes 2 minutes. In that case it's better to merge.

I have a similar configuration of Flak's PC (PII 300). He's right, all you have to do is to wait till the HD light stops flickering. With large imports and/or copy/pastes, I've found this is the only way to know that Bryce is working. Stefano

My HD light doesn't work so I go by when the task bar finally goes away. Cat

Aye, I use Bryce 4 (on the side, at work) on a P2-266 with 64 MB RAM, and even so it rarely actually crashes all the way! This under Win 98, on top of that! Of course, if a file reaches over 32 MB I can't open it, but I just do all of my texturing at home in Bryce 5... Sometimes it's tedious, but it's kinda like (for me, anyways) using Lightwave's Modeler and Layout, with the "Hub" being my 64MB SmartCard!!!!!

Another method is to work on individual objects, add them to your object menu then bring them in for the final scene, this way you break down the objects into parts and stick them together like a kit at the end. It's also useful to have if you want to use these again in future projects.

Except you'll lose them if the library becomes corrupt which has happened to me several times. As long as the object is saved in a scene file (without the ground plane) it'll be around for other projects too.