Alright, I've got a question about that time display a few inches down from the big Render button in Bryce... I'm rendering an image now, with a few reflective things, and 6 radial lights, 4 of which with gels... The thing isw displaying 3:01:32:03... now, does that mean I'm gonna be waiting 3 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes, and 03 seconds for my render to be through?? That thing down there doesn't seem to be a good indicator of the time (if it even is one) because the time displayed there has never matched up to my Render Reports.. Anyway, I'm obviously wondering how to decipher this thing. Oh man I hope it's not gonna be 3 days!!!!!! Thanks for any help. Cory BS

yep lol...3 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes, 3 seconds. The render estimate usually tends to exagerate, but if it says 3 days you're probably looking at at least 2 and a half :-(

Radial Light increases render time, especially 6. The timer works like this Days:Hours:Minutes:Seconds What Resolution are you rendering on? The Higher the res is, the more time it will take to render.

Plus, if you have volumetrics, increased rays per pixel, these all increase rendering times exponentially. AS

Oh shit is all i have to say... well, actually not all. Thats disappointing, because Ive never broken 36 minutes... If you check my gallery and see Abstract 1, that took 36... What I'm trying to render is exactly that image, but with two more lights, these w/o gels, and some transparency in the metal, should it really take 2.5 days?? My machine is running fine, I test renedered another file, one that takes no time, and it was running at normal speed, then back to this other one and the first pass took longer than i could sit around and watch. But since 30 min ago when it said 3days1hr. so forth, now it says 2days 6 hrs. Plus I'm on pass5 I think.. just this one, another regular, then AA (if Im correct) so maybe my computer is exaggerating like you said. It's ALWAYS been off by a lot, never have trusted it. Its only 10:45 now, Ill leave it overnight... I bet the AA pass alone is gonna be what makes it take a day.. I'd tell you the resolution if I could, but not in midrender here. It's set standard with my size at 720X640(720 for sure, but whats the height that matches that, I think its 640) Anyway, thanks guys, I post and ten minutes later youve replied! Cory BS

720X540... sorry about that

enter the skylab, turn off shadows, and watch rendertime speed up about 100 times over.

also, sometimes when rendering glass and reflection, it is faster to render under fineart at 4RPP than default, because the default AA pass can be slower in these scenes.

Thanks for the reminder madmax.

Reflections and transparencies increase the rendering time greatly. Max, thanks for the reminder.

Make sure Bryce is the only thing running and if left overnight turn off screensavers and power management, otherwise it may freeze and you have to start all over. If you don't have the time for a straight render, stop the render (small button to the right of the big render button) save file and click the small button again when you are ready to continue the render.

Are you serious Aldaron??!! Im glad I learned that, but as of 7:15 this morning I had 9 hrs. left, I should have done the skylab shadows thing, especially since it's an abstract.. thanks for the tips! I guess Ill let this render finish and use the tips next time!!! I'll post my new version (which better be improved haha) and put the URL in here...

You better, I've just got to see what could take this long to render, lol, good luck. 8)

LOL...yeah cory, that time piece only approximates time depending on how long it took for the passes before the approximation is given. Dont you just love playing follow the white progress line until your eyes dry up? Almost as good as watching the grass grow.

haha, well I ran into a problem... This one's for Mac guys. My computer will pop up a dialog saying "Indexing In Progress" every so often, and I always just click cancel, but of course I can't be there for 20+ hours to wait for it to come up. Well of course for some reason it froze my render, one pass and AA away from it too. What is Indexing and how the hell can I get it to go away??!! Oh well, I'll give it another shot, and try out some of the ideas here Cory BS

Well, I turned off everything in skylab, so that's not gonna be a problem if it was, and I have quality at regular, and unclicked Shadows under Optics in the render options section, and the speed has definitely increased. I'm gonna tweak it a little bit, as I saw what the render looked like at about pass 6, so I'll give it another shot tonight.

Well, in the end, after grouping my objects and turning off all possible shadows, then taking out one radial light, it took LESS than the original at 17 minutes, I may post it, but I think i want to change some things first. Thanks for the help! Cory BS