Ok, I know MANY of you must have some really funny/strange/entertaining stories about a render times with Bryce. At this very moment, I am in the midsts of rendering the LARGEST file with the LONGEST render time I have ever heard of. I'm rendering out a scenes which uses full volumetric lighting and major polly count.. So far, the rendertime has been 17.5 hours!! Funny thing, The image is fairly simple to look at. So out with it!! Share some of your funny/sad/entertaining stories about the horrors of rendering with Bryce!! (ps. I'll post when its done... lol) -dash

When I first started using Bryce I remember 17 and much more, was putting the scenes together with lots of reflection,glass,volumetric,lights-lights-lights. also premium settings maxed out. Experience brings a balance of quality pure Bryce along with post work.

17 hours? Bah. Anything above 60 hours is something making me sweat. ;-) J.

I haven't actually tried to benchmark the render times, but it appears that grouping all the objects in a scene before rendering can reduce times noticeably, especially if there are a lot of Bryce primatives. I noticed it when I was rendering the Scorpion I made out of mostly spheres. Anyone else notice this?

I never tried it, Tjohn... it's a good tip, I'll surely try it. Dash, 17 hours? heheheh, I'm more in Derjimi's company... I'm happy (and I mean HAPPY) when the estimate rendertime is under the 24 hours. In my gallery, the longest rendertime was for "Waiting", I think it was about 4 or 5 days. But then I still had my Old One. Now, with the New One, the longest is "Interior Study 02", which took 3 days. If you consider that the NewOne renders about five/seven times faster than the Old One... it's scary! ;-) S.

My longest was 24 hours, until recently... The Renderosity magazine said they wanted to use one of my pics, but needed it bigger....3,000 pixels big. And, while I wouldn't have to do any post-work to it, it was going to take a while to re-render the scene that big. The scene was a thick piece of glass with 11 radial lights behind it, no volume, and just normal render settings...61 hours. Glass can be a pain. Unfortunately, they notified me only like a day before they absolutely needed the pic, lol. Needless to say, I didn't make their deadline (no thanks to Bryce's little ETA timer, it lied to me the whole time). But, they were nice enough to promise to use the pic for the next issue. 61 hours. Nearly killed off what stores of patience I had to last the rest of my life, lol. AgentSmith

Record I've heard of was whomever did the Captain Nemo submarine a few months back..8 days..;)

My "Seadragon's Realm" took 7 days most of that was the AA.

I did an image that used fake GI, massive reflection/refraction and it took 16 days (thankfully the power never cut off) :-) That image was "rings" /gz

I had a render running for 40 hours before the power cut out and I lost it. :( MD

Whooaah!! 40 +hours!! WOW! Thats just impressive!! :P -dash101

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=432784&Start=1&Sectionid=2&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsNe

The shadow does: I could be wrong, but to me shadows seem to take up the most time. Even I've surpassed 35 hours for a render using soft shadows and volumetric world without even using premium render.

Just a little more then 48 hours of rendering, and ive got a one-second powerbreak, thanx to a thunderstorm. Invented quite a few curses that day...especially since the file got corrupted. I think the longest render was about 5 days or so. Still trying to beat that! :)

"Who knows the evil that lurks in the minds of long renders?" Oh, I almost have tears running down my face I'm laughing so hard at that.... AS

This is in a different category-animation rendering. I did an approx. 5 minute animation based music video in Bryce 3D. Total rendering time for the project... 1 year. (Didn't realize what I was getting myself into when I started it, that's for sure!) I used a second computer strictly for rendering, and programmed the animation on my main computer. (The animation was divided up into scenes typically 5-10 seconds long each). Since it took me a total of about 1 year to do all the programming for the video, the rendering worked out OK, since as one scene was rendering on my second computer, I was programming the next scene on my main computer. It was an extremely tedious project though, I must say... -Jake

Im sure all this talk is frightening the life out of anyone just starting out in Bryce so for their benefit Id like to point out that it isnt always necessary to wait a couple of days for satisfactory results. My entry in this months challenge has received some very complimentary remarks, often about the lighting and general atmosphere, all those things which seem to add to rendering times. Well, at 800X600, normal render with AA, it takes about 45 minutes. There is a little postwork, an overall soft focus filter along with some spot filtering around the candle flames but thats about it.
BTW, is this thread going to develop into a "Mine`s bigger than yours" macho thing. If it does, I would just like to point out that my short render times bear no relation to my physique. (Does this count as spam) LOL

longest render 26 days (yep..thats days) and it was only at 640 x 480 pixels the picture used to be at brycetech, but when I did the revamp, I took it down. What made it such a nightmare was that it had multiple lights and it was a view from inside a house looking out a window into a rainy courtyard (so lots of reflections..and everything first had to be processed through the window the characters were looking out of) :) BT

hmm..I got 90 minutes as the longest render I've ever done..what does that say about me?..;) of course, I rarely use more than 3 lights, and always turn the shadows off..;)
you just look at them and say...'what will miss?'
-Frank Zappa..;)

I rendered a 2 min movie in ten seperate chunks, the longest of which took 6 straight days to render, and overall the other 9 chunks took 2 weeks. The movie shows a WWI air battle showing British Forces taking down a Zepplin and two German airplanes. i'm using a G4 533. The film ended up being 320 by 240. I used this movie to convine the computer teacher at the High school I work at to buy 5 copies of Bryce for the school. :)

3 months and 5 days on a 14 second animation, using 4 G4s networked together running lightning. My boss actually went on vacation to Hawaii twice before the render was done LOL!!!

That's insane. :o)

Tell your boss you now need four G5's...;o)

HAHAHA!! He lives in Silicon valley, and has a good freindship with Apple, he's already looking into the G5s :-) Hope he sends me one, ya know since I dropped 3k on this new one a few months ago and everything...sigh.

17, that's all!? I've had millions of images I wanted to do, but the render times were in the days, not hours. One was of a bunch of bottles with simulated radiosity, premium render. The estimate was 27 days lol...needless to say I nixed that idea.

I am such a infant in this area. My longest was also bottles and took only 4 hours, since I am stingy with lights. I, unfortunetly, have one cat who is addicted to walking on my keyboard (and no door to my office) so often my renders need to be restarted over and over. Diane

laughing Well, I would put that cat into the closet while I render... ;-)

One thing you never want is a pissed off cat in a closet!

Thanks, you made me so much laugh that I hardly could catch breath. :-D A pissed off cat in the closet would do only one thing at my home - stay in that closet. ;-)) J.

holy crap clay!!!! 3 months!?! is there any chance you still have the image somewhere?

Aye, Clay, 3 months is a LONG time, especially for Lightning... Methinks you'd benefit from some AMD's, if only for rendering? Bryce scene files are, as far as I know, cross-platform compatible... Longest single image for me was a mere (in light of all of your atrocities!) 6 days... Back before we had Lightning to work with... Makes me feel like a weenie now!

bknoh, Tell you cat to get his own computer. BTW: Reminds me of the story of how 'the cat Fugue' was written: A composer's cat walked across the keys of his piano(?) and the composer whose name I forget liked the riff the cat played so much that he introduced it into his composition.

holy crap, three months clay!!!!!!!!??????? and i thought my 5 second animation that took 3 days was a long time, now i just feel like i have no story to tell. also, bknoh, couldn't you just diconnect your keyboard, or put a box ontop of it, or something? i could just imagine what my cat would be like if she was kept in a closet...