As I work on some tutorials, I'm wondering what some typical render times are? I'm using a 2.2 Ghz Pent, 512MB Ram, Win2K. I did a tree tutorial with a LOT of user leaves using textures, bumps, and tranparency maps. Render size was 540x405 and its taking about 50 minutes. Is that typical?

Yep, and the more lights, volume materials, transparencies, reflections and premium settings you use the higher it will go.

renders can take anything from a few secs to more then a week. All depends on complexity. Things that can greatly increase rendertime are: -more lights -volume textures -transparent textures -reflective textures -high AA settings -Premium effects -volume sky's -more imported models -more on-procedural textures. -soft shadows -AA sensitive textures.

GOOD GOD - A WEEK??????? I guess thats why Bryce is kind enough to show you the expected render time at render start? :-)

If only those estimated rendertimes where accurate... My record is 19 days I think, not 100% sure though, could be 17, but I'm almost sure it was 19 days. But I'm sure I've had one of 13 days and one of 11 days. And an animation of like 625 hours in total and an animation of a week.

oh man, what am i getting my poor pc into?

You can of course pause a render,save it and render it from where you stopped later (like when you are sleeping) as long as you don't use "render to disk". A lot of the time anti-aliasing is what takes the longest and that isn't taken into account in the render time estimates. I had my "Seadragon's Realm" render in like 10 hours but it took 5 days for it to AA (on a 900 Mhz machine) Some people have said that they created scenes that would take years to render. :)

When using premium effect AA i find that the estimate displayed after the second pass if very accurate, as in within a half hour of the final time.

I've been using my own personal benchmark file for over a year. The file runs through the basics of visualizations, Transparency, Blended Transparency (alpha), Volumetrics, Reflection, and A solid. On my old Pentium 3/600, the file rendered in 57 min. On my newer test AMD2200+/1500, the same file was done in 35 minutes. Nice curve, and there are a lot fo in-betweeners... When this time becomes 1/60th of a second, I will have realtime-rendering on my test file. Which will rule. (laughs at self!)

Amusing thought..for the exhib I had this year..I had to use two friends' comp for rendering. One has really high speed/end comps, since he owns a 3d product designing company..and they do all their work in Maya. Rendering time took him more than 3 days per image. The most complicated images they do in Maya normally takes max 2 hours! The other had a lower speed comp (he owns a web design company) ..rendering took 2 weeks to 3 weeks... and after 10 images.. (I had 27 this exhib..and another 23 for an ongoing one now)..that comp gave up on him!! :) : ) Another fun story..one photographer..professional..well known here..decided to experiment with Bryce. He got a bit wild over the things he cld do..so he went on ahead..added transperencies, (spelling? it's 7 am here..haven't drunk me coffee!) lites, stuff..etc. Finally.. he had to render to disk.. 300dpi.. etc, etc. He put it to render. Thought it would take one day. ONE WEEK later..he went off to malaysia for the hols, came back two weeks after..and found that bryce was still anti aliasing! : ) This guys has not touched bryce ever. Got the picture now?? : ) : )

My worst so far - 5 days 6.5 hrs. Layered transparencies, highly reflective surfaces with serious bump to blame. (my Ripples image)

When I see that it would take ... a long time, I just take it down to a lower setting. :-) Although there's a picture I'm working on now that would take 11-12 hours to render at 3000x2000 pixles at Premium with soft shadows, 32 RPP and 2 Total Ray depth. And that's just the scene, without figures. There's another that takes 5 hours at the ordinary AA. OTOH, I noticed that Fine usually takes more time than Premium, even with the effects.