Hi. I was just wondering how many polygons bryce can handle before it crashes. Right now I'm creating an island in Bryce to be used for my computer game and it is heavily forested with decidious trees. Originally I had started foresting and the program crashed after about 30 trees, so I created my own, not as good looking trees and am very slow moving at around 624000 polygons. Is there a limit to the number of polygons that bryce can handle? I will try and post an image or two when I can. The whole Island does not fit even when it is set to render at 4000 by 3000. Gosh and to think this is the smallest of the countries I will be making. lol :) p.s. I signed the petition and was # 58 :)

Mostly it depends on the machine, and try zooming out, or scaling the island down. If you increase the resolution, it just scales your image up and makes it higher quality.

It also depends on polygon complexity... I built a small world in bryce a while back which I believe totaled 300 million polygons, or more.

On the right side one of the icons will change the wireframe resolutions, The higher it is the more power your computer needs (mostly graphics card). Reduce this if it's getting sluggish. It's more a limit of objects and your graphics card and RAM. I've seen millions of polygons before.

Ornlu, you must have a computer that says "GOD inside" or something...

Aye, Ornlu is dead on, although Aldaron is wrong about the graphics card. Your GPU has nothing to do with your max poly count, only with how quickly it draws the wireframes onscreen. I've pushed over a billion polys through Bryce 5, using only 512 MB DDR on an Athlon XP 2500+. It depends more on the object TYPE than anything. For example, if you try and multireplicate 1x256x256 Metaballs, it will probably crash before the second operation is ever finished. But metaballs themselves don't really have many polygons... I think this has more to do with Bryce "renaming" the objects than the actual polygon count.

That's what I meant about graphics card. If it's not up to par you'll start getting sluggish because the card can't push the polys fast enough if you move things around. It won't restrict the poly count per se but it will limit how much you can move around thus it's an artificial limit.

Here is the first low res test render of 1/6 of the island. I think that part of the problem and the reason that it takes so long is that each individual tree is made up of 14 semi transparent spheres with the foliage textures. There is no AA done yet. It is still heavily a work in progress. I'm using a G4 533 with 640 ram built in. All comments are welcome. Ornlu I would love to see some pics of this world you built. :)

Well, first thing first, go get yourself an AMD setup. Sell your G4, to your grandfather or perhaps a mean uncle, and get like two AMD XP 2000+ rigs. It will be very cheap, and cut your render time to 1/10th of what it's at now. To cut your render times down, try making a different kind of tree perhaps? Check to see if Tree Lab trees render faster, although I doubt that would be true. 624,000 polygons isn't really a big scene, necessarily, although polygon count has less to do with render time than your light setup... Just some ideas! (don't get offended about my fruit-based PC comments, you'll live my friend!)

It isn't the G4 that is at fault. I have a G4 and it does a lot better than that...even when it was a G4 500.... it is now a G4 1.2 GHz. That's equivalent to at least a 2.4 GHz PC. Macs are made for graphics.

Yeah, the semi-transparent spheres are the culprit. Lots of (semi-)transparencies and reflections will slow your render to a crawl. Lots of radial lights, too. My "When the music's over" won't render in less than four hours at Normal AA, even if it's only 800x600. All because of that heavily refracting lamp and some thirty radial lights.

Have you tried using 2D-images with transmaps for the trees? Just render one in the right angle, and use it for the forest.

I've been up to 683 million poly's and it didn't look like that was the limit. If you want your wireframe to load quicker just reduce the object resolution. As for the crashing with 30 trees. If you replicate or drop trees to the ground try doing it in small batches of about 20-30 trees at a time. That is much more stable then moving hundreds at the same time. I've build a scene with 3128 brycian trees once, so it should work.

Thanks for all the advice everyone, and if i could aford to buy a new computer I would get the new G5.

Attached Link: Bryce world top view

Yeah, nm the images in my gallery are 81 million poly's, the reason it's so much is that they're all HIGHLY complex polygons, surfaces are "original" meaning there are very few side by side polys. Since then I've had images using bryce primitives that have had 500 mil or more and there wasn't a huge problem. For referencing my machine is an Athlon 2600+xp with 1024 megs of ram and a Radeon 9600 pro (which matters in ogl or d3d modes)

Attached Link: Bryce World detailed

Here's a detailed angled view of a section of the world. Sorry to say that the links to other images no longer work. Maybe I'll just make a web page of them at some point.

Pedrith, I agree with you, to buy a G5 - however, instead (and much more cheaply) I upgraded my G4 and it runs nearly as fast as a G5 now. I do also own a PC that is a p933, which is as slow as molasses! haha...

My uncle has a 3 G5 server at his house, I've played with bryce on it before. Pretty fun, but I still love my Athlon. There's just something about a mac that's...impersonal almost. Hard to explain but I just don't like them.

So I was a die-hard PC user for over 7 years. Learned I could not go into professional graphics without knowing the Mac OS. Got a Mac just so I could keep up with the professionals....and to know both systems. After using the Mac (Classic) OS 9 for two months, fell in love with it. Now the PC gathers dust, and the Mac is my main computer. Now I'm upgraded to Jaguar and love it even more. To each his own...but don't knock it until you try it for a few months. My computer has as many warm fuzzies as yours does...but that isn't the reason I like it. I forget what a system crash is....

huh? I'm not knocking it... I just said I don't like it personally... hence "I just don't like them"... I never EVER said it sucked, it's unbelievably powerful and awesome for rendering. Don't get so personal here...Frankly I don't care about warm fuzzies etc. And yeah, with windows xp I haven't crashed yet, my computer has been running for 3 weeks now without a restart. And hasn't crashed in a year.

The 'warm fuzzies' I was referring to was the 'impersonal' discription you made. I'm just telling you that I was certainly like you at one time, a die-hard Windoze PC person. And I wasn't trying to get 'personal,' just informing you how it came about that Macs changed my idea of how a computer should be. I do graphic designs professionally, and it is a fact the Macs dominate the graphics world. They won't even give you an interview for a job unless you know the Mac platform. Graphic design companies will charge more for PC files given to them for a job than a Mac file. It is because PCs take longer and more of their time to the job. I'm just stating my experience in the graphics field. I know people seem to get attached to their computers, and their favorite OS, and their favorite style. Real world graphics is the Mac. I'm happy your XP hasn't crashed, and hopefully Microsoft has improved it a great deal, but my Mac hasn't crashed in over two years. When it did freeze up, it was because of some software that I had installed. When I got rid of that problem, the trouble vanished.