Okay, I have a large scene (70megs) that I worked on for a long time. It doesn't look all that complex, but it has a hell of a lot of objects in it, a lot of glass and reflective metals, to the point that I reached a point where it took ten minutes to try to move anything or resize it. It's rendered up to anti-aliasing, and antialiasing has gone about 20%. But now, when I set it to antialias when I go to bed, I wake up in the morning and the monitor is black, and the only way to restore it is to cut the power to the monitor and turn it back on, and the anti-alias hasn't gone beyond where it was. No, power management is NOT turned on, nor is sleep mode. I've rendered other scenes overnight with no problem. I really need to finish this scene. Anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

Double check to make sure that your machine isn't sleeping after a certain amount of time, say an hour. It won't render when the machine is asleep. Just turn off the monitor at the front and let the thing render away. Another possibility is that the scene is so complex that the machine is still thinking about how to render that next 1%. I had one project that took about 2 days to render. There were many times that I thought Bryce had crashed but it hadn't. Try taking out non-essential things or try turning down the transparancy and reflection on non essential things. This will help speed things up.

Everything's pretty much essential. It's not sleeping, as I have another scene rendering overnight on alternate days and it does fine. I'm thinking about changing it to render to disk, but does that mean I have to start the render all over, or is there a way I can get it to continue the render from the point it's at?

You must start over. And you should always render to disk if you can. it's faster.... or thats what I have heard.

have you installed a screensaver lately? if Byrce was just thinking, that doesnt explain the black screen. Hawkfyr

No screensaver, no power management, no problem except with this one scene. Only change I've made lately is to replace a dysfunctional keyboard with an exact duplicate. There's no explanation for this at all. But this image took almost two weeks of rendering to get it to the point where it's at now. I'm damned if I'll give it up. How much faster is render to disk? I don't want to incapacitate my computer for a damn week while this thing renders.

I think it is only marginally faster .. Like cut off an hour or so on a six hour render ... Have oly used it a couple of times. My advise is think about ways to reduce the thing. For example if you ave a ton of grass that is further back in the scene you might make that a texture and then have a medium grade grass in the front and a really nice grass right in the front ... Anyway ...Not sure what else to do but render in sections. Had to do that before. Would render a simplifed scene with part of the objects saved to another file. Then add bits and render that section, add different bits and render that section and then different bits and render that. Only way it wouldn't take a few days. Combine in photoshop ... hope that helps but not sure if it will. Some scenes can't be done that way ... Later and good luck

no, this scene, I couldn't actually composite. I could get the glasses in and such compositing, but it wouldn't give me the reflections and light sparkles from the glasses impacting on the environment. There has to be an explanation for it that I'm missing somehow.

Have you inadvertantly selected "Volumetric World" in the sky lab? or unintentionally set your lights with volumetric falloff? I still keep wondering why the screen goes black. My Image "Time"took over 3 days to render .But never blacked out. Hmmm. Thats a mystery. Hawkfyr

Nope, no volumetrics. Aside from the glass and reflective objects, there are about, oh, 30 to 40, like glasses and plates on a shelf, there are no volumetric objects, no volumetric lights, in fact atmosphere is turned off, since when I do an interior picture, I make all 4 walls and ceiling and completely eliminate atmosphere so I can control the lighting totally. There are two radial lights in fixtures, one radial light for ambient lighting, and two radial lights to emulate candles. There's one poser figure in the picture.

You might try doing a sectional render, not quite like Ghostofmacbethis suggesting tho. I've got something I'm working on that I wanted to change the lighting on. So I did a sectional render to see the difference. I was just doing simple renders for speed so I don't know if this will work for you or not. I rendered the whole thing with quick render and no antialias. Then I plop rendered half of it so I could look at the differences side by side. Could you do something similar? Render it with quick render so you have an image saved then plop render sections of it. Say plop rendering the top third with full render and antialias, then plop rendering the next part so they overlap slightly? I don't think I could tell where on render started and the other ended on mine, maybe it could help you.

Memory. Try starting over and rendering to disk. manowar

it may be memory for whatever reason. I curse my computer daily for it's nasty lack of sufficient memory

poo... what video card are you using? Bryce does not like ATI cards (for one) and several others cause really wierd crap like you are mentioning here... the only partial fix that I have found is to download the latest updates to the drivers for your video card AND download the latest dll patches from www.microsoft.com for the particular OS you are using (I assume you use either win95 or win98) also look next to the clock..count the number of things you see there...if you can, turn off as many as you can (right click and exit or disable)..things like norton repeated insist on grabbing the processor and if Bryce has it, it isnt pretty (Bryce doesnt play well with its friends). you can also do other things to make ram come back...for instance, reduce the resolution of your monitor or even cut it down to 256 display mode (bryce will still render the 36million color image) then simply reset everything back to the way you like it when the image finishes. I have scenes that require me to do this or they would never finish...images that take 6 or 7 days to render...and these eat ram, processor, and cause windows to lose track of dll's necessary for display and even mouse movement. good luck oh, and I never "render to disk" ;) BT

All my tsr's are already turned off. I hate that crap. I have no video card. I have the onboard AGP video that sucks up 8 megs of my memory. I'd give anything for a good video card and to reclaim that memory (I only have 64 megs to start with) but my problems with money are well known here and I just can't afford anything at all. I wouldn't mind the screen going black, but the dang thing stops rendering. You're right that I'm short on memory and video card, but there's nothing I can do about it. I'd kill to get more memory and a decent video card, but I ain't got the energy for that either. I'll try what you suggested as far as turning the resolution down and see if that helps. Frankly I wish I had a second computer I could network just to do renders.

My advice: Get Rambooster. I dont recall now the URL for it, but it is a must when working with Bryce. Bryce manages memory poorly and with large files you must clean your ram. Make a new window profile for Bryce, without any task bar "resident" programs except video, sound and Rambooster. Before rendring call Rambooster to free all the RAM you can.

Here it is (freeware): http://www.sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/index.htm By the way bones, I had a similar problem rendering one of my pics which file was well over 70Megs (Eve:Desire at Renderotica). Rambooster fixed my problem.

Okay, I know what the problem is (99% sure). It's a bug. It happened to me when I was working on my optical illusion. Surfaces can reflect forever. That's right, if you have two mirrors, they can reflect onto each other FOREVER (I think), thereby causing Bryce to have a heart attack. This is my interpretation of what happens. I'm not positive, though. My new image under the challenge arena has two mirrors that reflect upon each other, but there is a cutoff. I tried to add an infinite plane that was reflective, but Bryce seized up just like you described (without the black monitor. I think it's a built in thing in yours that switches it off if there is no movement on screen to prevent burn-in). Okay, that about sums up what I think the problem is. I don't think any amount of ram can help this. If this is the problem, then you can press the esc key and mess around with the scene until it works, then continue render. Hope I was of some help. - Albedo

nah bryce has a limit to reflections, some say 6 some say 12 (depends on how you look at it)

Bones, I assume you've checked all thing loaded via Ctrl-Alt-Del, BUT have you tried the MSCONFIG command? Click Start, Run and type it in. Then select startup and see just how many items are actually being loaded / run in the background. Check / uncheck the ones you want or don't want to load. - Art -

Thats a Great memory saver. Hey Art. Long time no see. Hawkfyr

I'm having this same problem, my scenes only 60 or so meg - and ive left it rendering for ages - 2 days... it just doesn't go past a certain point... and im on a beast of a machine - bryce 4 - apple G3 server with a 128 Rage graphics card - 256 Meg ram..... Are there any plugins for the mac to fix this???

My utility program lets me confifure what programs start on start up. The only thing that starts, besides windows, is my sound card configuration and my mouse. Just the necessaries. My guess is the problem is my lack of memory, and I'm not sure even reclaiming a bit of it is going to help.

Bones, You never mentioned which version of Bryce you're using for this render. 3 or 4? Patched or not? Is it possible to save your file, zip and email? I be interested in taking a crack at it if need be. Always willing to offer a hand. BTW, you can use MasterSplitter to break it down into smaller parts if need be. - Art -

I'm using Bryce 3, patched. Wish I had Bryce 4, but my financial situation is not good. It's horrible actually. I only have Bryce because a kindly soul that upgraded to 4 sent me their 3. I don't have master splitter. Never heard of it actually. At 60 megs it would take me all day to email it.

how bout Driveway Or whale mail? Hawkfyr

whale mail possibly, but gad, at the 26400 connection I usually get it would still take a few hours, but I'll certainly think about it. I'd like to see if anyone else has the same problem with it. It's a much more complex scene than it appears because there are a lot of glasses and plates and stuff on the shelves

Bones, MasterSplitter is an app that allows one to either split apart a large file such as a video into smaller parts. It also lets one join those parts back into the original file. It is a free download! I think ver.2.1 is the latest.