Started an image rendering at 10pm tuesday, it's now noon friday and it's at 30%, I'm dying to see this render in all it's glory, I've been doing all sorts of patchwork plop renders while working it, this is the first full render and I'm really frustrated coz I wanna see this piccy :-(((((((

I do wanna see too what kind of image take a week to render!

Ther eare many, amny ways to optimize such things! If you're using volumetrics, try rendering a particular material on a blank sphere in a blank scene, and get a feel for what level of "Quality" slider you need. For skies, well, if you can optimize volumes skeis are a piece of cake. But the real optimizing come in on the lighting. Are you using LOTS of lights? Are any of the set to negative? Are they all at linear falloff, or are some at squared? Coudl a light array, in a certain situation, be replaced by Bryce 5's softshadows? You already know all this, Gog, I only post it for reference...

Or do you have volumetric world turned on? :^)

I just finished a 7 day, 14 hour render. I re-rendered my "confusion" image at more than double the size of the original so I could get it large enough to print for my portfolio i am working on. The original took a bit over a day and a half, and the findd ended up being a day and a half (rendering to disk).I was rendering premium at 64rpp with DOF and blurry reflections, with TONS of volumetric lights. Shadows were also disabled! I don't even wanna know the render time if i had left shadows on....seesh.

Damn!.. and I thought it was far too long when my renders are more than 1 hour!!!!!

I almost never go over 10% quality or density on Volumetrics. I'm too darn impatient to wait that long for any image. Especially when I am starting to re-render them for printing posters. I also make sure I use the most aggressive optomization and set it (most times) for clustered scenes. If I use plop render, I plop out the easy sections first. Makes me feel like I've done something. And then I whittle away at the edges of the hard stuff (clouds, lights, etc.) till it can chew them pretty fast. I hear your pain Gog... been there, done that, have the tee-shirt, want to see the slides? :c)

I've had renders of daaays :) I did a poster at 6K of 13 days and a 675x900 of 19 days (I think...).

Over an hour? Wow, I haven't had any images under an hour in a long time... On average my renders take about 8 hours. The longest one I did was 5 days, but my computer is pretty able. Since then I have learned to optimize, using propper RPP's and compensations for TA which usually more than doubles render times. Anything that will be out of focus can be rendered once in a standard render all alone, then added in as a 2 dimensional plane. Or simply added after. Volumetrics I try to avoid like the plague. Bryce is just no good at them. levels of lattices with alpha maps usually suffice the task. Glass or transparent materials can greatly increase render time. Glasses and true ambience even more so... Lights, if any single light does not change the effectiveness of an image, get rid of it. It's just wasted space. In my most recent realism render I only used 5 lights and no True ambience. But you can achieve a similar effect. Shadowdragonlord is right, it's all about optimization. Usually I render a single pass, and sometimes it starts out at 3 days. However, I am usually able to get this down to 5-10 hours. (I do all my renders overnight so really it makes no difference to me if it's 1 hour or 10.)

Heh, my impatience kicks in is usually at one day. Aka, I start the render in the early evening, go to bed, get up, if it's still rendering, I hope it's not too much longer, go to work and if it's STILL rendering, then I get grumpy. I've gone 3 days before I finally said enough, and reworked the piece to go faster. My challenge image last month was potentially a 1 week render... Sorry, I'll fake the volumetrics first. Does rendering to disk work faster? I can't remember.

Rendering to disk is faster. Less than 1% faster mind you, but it's still faster. The problem is you can't save it halfway through. IE if something's taking a week to render, I'll probably do a system restart halfway through.

My last picture (of the Gallery) I have 18 or so radials and I set them to soft shadows and started the render on saturday and by tuesday evening it had just started the antialiasing, cool I thought, but by 8am the next morning... 8%

I saved it and then turned the soft shadows off and rendered again... 44 minutes!

Until I get my Cray, I can live without softshadows.

Soft shadows, oh my, those will kill your render time. You can render with soft shadows, just don't turn it on in the advanced render settings.

Aye, Drawbridge I don't know what you're running, but ALL of my computers are faster than a Cray... It's 2003, my friend! It's often faster to run a couple of radials instead of softshadows, at least if you're Premium Rendering. And when possible, set the lights to Ranged falloff, it takes the least Rendergy. But on some kinds of renders, of course, you NEED crazy lights. At times when impatience kicks in, grab an old Pentium-2 or AMD K6-2, those things are still good for rendering. You can leave 'em running for weeks, and it's a good thing too, because that's how long your renders will take! But it leaves your main rig free to design on. Finally got my personal Benchmark scene down to 35:32. AMD 2500XP+ running at 1.5, 512 DDR, Radeon 8500AIWDV, although the graphics card doesn't do anything in this case! So for my test benchmark to render in real time (realtime = 60fps, in my book), the projection so far calls for a 15GHz processor, RAM amount in this case makes no difference. I just clocked it up to 1.8, and I'm off to run my benchmark again!

I use separate systems too, probably would have gone mad if not (not that I'm sane or anything as it is). Just set it to render and slag the render time once in a while every two to three days, it's almost like a game now. :)

shadows are the largest contributor of render time. Period. Have as many lights as you want but only leave shadows enabled on about two of them. If possible disable cast shadows all together (fine if you are using blurry reflections methods to simulate radiosity shadows)

Shadow, all I can say is WOW!
I'd love to see what comptuer you're running at home.
My P4 curently can handle about 2.7 Billion calculations per second, maybe a few more, I haven't counted for a while.

The new Cray is gonna run at 40 trillion calculations per second. So it's a little bit faster.
I heard that IBM are working on one that will run at 49 trillion!!

A while ago there was a company that linked 233 PIII's together and created a computer than could run 122 billion calculations per second.

It might be 2003 but Cray has moved on too.

Good point about using old machines for rendering. I've tried network rendering too, but without much luck.

Aye, you're right about people moving on, Drawbridge! I was slightly exaggerating. I've been into CPU's since the 1-Mhz C-64s. I run AMD processors now, which are faster (for rendering, not clock speed) than Pentiums, which I will never use again. The fastest non-holographic computers I can find, on a consumer level, are merely series of Athlon 64's. I found one rig that runs 128 A-64s, clocked at 2.4 apiece. This is the fastest non-holographic, BUYABLE, setup on the planet. AMD is not a contender, they are the rulers of the CPU market at this point, not an opinion but a numerical fact. Intel makes great chips, but echelonic market decisions. AMD will release robots much sooner, and so far they have the market savvy to know what to do with things when robots DO arrive. Of course, this could flip, much like the NVidia/ATI wars going on in the graphics industry! Sucks, you used to be able to go to Sun's webpage and see phenomenal machines, now they just sell rigs with multiple AMD's! My point is, Draw, not to prove my choice processor is better, but to state that there are no SINGLE processors available that outperform the AMD Athlon, in terms of cycles-per second-per dollar. I don't run just one, but my rigs float as my computer company Dragon PC expands, and I have as many as eight and no fewer than three AMD rigs running at "home", these days! Too bad Lightning is so tedious!

But you know what would be REALLY cool? If, instead of relying completely on CPU load, if the renderers took advantage of Graphics Cards. 3D graphics applications? Not really, they are just 2D, even the BEST of them (Lightwave, Studio Max, Cinema 4D) Granted, not every computer has a graphics card, but you'd think that Rendering programs would take advantage of the ridiculous power behind the Nvidia and ATI cards. Direct-X 9 controls could, and SHOULD, be easily incorporated into renderers, with just a couple of options to turn their benefits on or off. There's simply NO excuse for preview modes that don't equal Unreal, or Unreal II quality. Silly, but a good GeForce or Radeon these days is more powerful by itself than a Pentium 3 ever was. Ever!

I've never used an AMD chipset. People get stuck in their ways. I heard they are much faster, like you say. I think on floating point calculations especially, so 3d engines will fly on and AMD. I really shouldn't be so stuck on Intel. Try a bit harder to convert me. ;-) I agree totally about 3d graphics cards. When you see what games can produce in real time it makes you wonder why 3d apps are so slow. I use my laptop more than my clonky desktop and the LT has a decent card (for a laptop I'm guessing) ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 and I really like it. I can play Tron 2.0 on it, so what more could I possibly want. I'd like a bit more RAM though. I'm thinking that would help quite a bit. Anyay, with your home PC's do you use network rendering? That must help a lot. I just haven't had much luck getting it to work.

Aye, Drawbridge, on reason that games are so fast is a simple fact : They don't use Ray-Tracing. They use shadow maps, and scan-line rendering. Up until Unreal II and Doom 3, something as simple as self-shadows has never been a reality. Ever noticed that? That in ANY video game, a character NEVER casts shadows on itself! I'll stick to ray-tracing, for now, or hybrid engines like Lightwave.

He he, now to cap it all, I just overwrote the file.... Was rendering to disk, thought I'd changed the name from default, closed bryce to go look save changes ... yes watched in vain as the date on the file changed, now it'll have top go again :-( Ok this scene has about 8 radials, about 24 spots, I'm rendering on superfine, becase there are some very fine ladders and things that lose bits on a standard render, rendering to disk. I would have network rendered at work, but I've been really busy so not had the chance, left it going at home, plenty of ram but only a 1Gig pIII :-( Got to say even hybrid engines are too slow for games, raytracing is just too intensive, especially if you're looking at ta or high reflection count.

24 spots!! I can almost smell the burning coming from the CPU. Mine shuts down after ten minutes. I have to rest a desk fan on the laptop pointing at the air intake. Can't wait to see your final picture. Next year sometime. ;-)