Long renders are a big problem with Bryce and sometimes there is no substitute for high res, however sometimes there is. I hesitate to recommend software, I have no interest in this company or its products but this may be helpful to some. (Or already well known!) The product is called Genuine Fractals (www.lizardtech.com). It is a Photoshop plugin that allows you to enlarge images without much loss of detail. Hard to believe and it really does a pretty good job. My image of Nautical Instruments in the Bryce gallery was rendered to the screen and then enlarged about 2x with GF. (also useful for digital photography) Of course for the money you might just buy a faster rendering program but..... This is the standard disclaimer: you assume all risk, IMHO. yada, yada, yada etc I would strongly recommend their trial version before purchase.

Interesting - I will check that out. I don't know what the software is called, but there is an app that runs on Silicon Graphics boxes, kind of like photoshop, but much more powerful, and this can res up an image considerably with no real loss of quality or sharpness - pretty amazing to see it at work. Given the price of an SGI machine (minimum of 6k upto something daft like 50k) it's not an option for most of us! Thanks for the link!

I think GF is only $150 for full and $50 for LE. Better than an SGI machine but maybe not as useful!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=396920&Start=1&Artist=sailor%5Fed&ByArtist=Ye

If this works here is a link to the image I used GF on. Keep in mind that it was jpeged for posting on Renderosity.

Was looking for a price on their site - at $150 it's a bargain!

That's a great image!! - very nicely done! So what was the original size then? Maybe you could post an enlarged (with GF) section of the original small files as a reference to see the effect!?

I will make up an example. Unfortunately I lost that render in a HD crash I would like to forget.

Here is a quick comparison of render enlargements. On the left is a fragment of a 640X480 screen render saved as a bitmap. In the center is the fragment enlarged 400% using bicubic sampling in Photoshop. Not to bad really. On the right is a 400% enlargement using GF version 2 (version 3 is the latest). Note how the edge sharpness is preserved. Detail doesn't actually increase. GF was really designed to losslessly compress files a whole lot and then reconstruct them at any size or resolution.

I've heard good things about GF. For now its better for me to just set this thing to render overnight. But certainly, if it becomes necessary to slightly enlarge, GF has better reviews than the standard PS image size thingie.

I think it is probably more useful for blowing up an already fairly high res render (from A4/A3 to A1) to save the days of rendering that would require, It makes sense that the more pixel info will bring a better final result.

Attached Link: http://www.conexus.com.au/vendors/lizardtech/demo/demo_lizardtech.html

The pro version got a very good write up in the current Macworld. I had a look at their site and couldn' find a demo of the latest version but you can download demos of version 2 here. Oh and there's a limit on the file size of the original and enlarged versions but they're fairly large.

Attached Link: http://www.lizardtech.com/

Yep, the Le version is limited to 10mb input and 64Mb output. Here's a link to their site.