Anyone have any issues with volumetric clouds and crashing. Im guessing that the problem, but only happens on the final render pass. I wake up and check and bryce is no longer running, no errors on screen, just gone. Most disturbing on a pic thats very finished.

If you are using Windows, do you have all power management disabled? Other questions that come to mind are "sufficient RAM?, A recent scandisk for possible bad sectors?"

Its only at about 550megs of 1gig memory in use. Just reinstalled bryce from stratch and starting a smaller 800x700 render (dont have patience to wait for a 1024x to crash).

Real long shot but maybe try rendering to disk?

I imagine your running XP /OS judging by the 1 gig of ram? I recently had an issue with XP-home, after researching I found that my problem was due to video open-GL. The long lines of rendering were too big for the zbuffer, they have upgrade patches for windows and issue resolution tips on the Micrsoft site. Yeah my system would render most of an image, but towards the end when the calculations became too much it would just freeze. The reason I thought it was weird was during a normal crash windows would post an error or reboot with a scandisk OP. Not this, it would reboot like nothing happened. Seems ok now. Hope this helps, Good Luck.

I guess if i had too id render to disk.. but even at 800x its stating almost 2 days to finish. Ill give that a try after ummmm IF it crashes after this fresh install, seems like it wants to crash only in the final pass, probly wont know until tomorrow.

Also make sure no screensavers are running.

I had a render that did the same thing a while back. I suspected a memory issue. My solution was to render until the AA pass then save, close , reboot and open it to finish the render, using resume render option. Open/save image option has to be enabled to do this.