there has been a statement released by the corel manager... she said she hopes to have an answer for us this week.. (a patch for a patch??)anyhow, Im waiting to hear what she means. and also Brian Wagner released a rather lengthy explanation to the increased render times for volumetric materials. So there ARE increased times in volumetric renders...Ive read some posts of 18x longer! for the same picture! ********************************************************** Just thought you might like to see this commuication from Brian Wagner at Corel. Good news I hope you agree. "BRYCE 4.1 FIXES/CHANGES Volume Materials The problem people have been having rendering their old volume materials with the latest Bryce patch is really not a bug at all. In fact, it's a nasty side effect of fully implementing a feature that was never finished. Let me explain. In order for the Edge Softness control (seen in the Material Composer with a Volume Material) to be fully effective, the underlying object should have a feathered starting density. What this means is that the center of the object is the most dense and it becomes less dense as you get closer to the surface. The purpose of this is to allow you to blur the edges of the object in the hopes of hiding the base shape. This is useful when rendering clouds or other gaseous shapes. The Edge Softness control is meant to raise or lower this starting density pattern. Well, the only object that properly defined its starting density pattern in Bryce 4.01 was the sphere. Therefore, lots of people started using volume materials with other object types and were unknowingly relying on this flaw/bug. So, when we fixed the starting densities for ALL the objects with the latest Bryce patch, many people saw major rendering differences. Keep in mind, this should only have occurred with objects other than spheres. Why you ask? Well, because now objects are less dense near their edges by default. This not only means they won't look the same, but they will take longer (MUCH longer in some cases) to render. Less density means the ray travels further through the object, and this takes longer. So what's the fix? There is now a new option in the shading mode menu (Material Composer). It is called "Uniform Density" and it will ensure that the object's starting density will be uniform throughout its entire shape. This is good for two things. One, it provides a way to go back to the way it was (and fix the problems people are having), and it also provides a way to make objects "harder". This is good when trying to build "Full Shaded" volume materials. So, a general rule of thumb is this.use the "Uniform Density" option if you want harder looking objects/materials, or if you want to fix the "problem" described above. And guess what? There's a bonus feature for those of you who had to deal with this mess. There's another new option called "Sky Integration". Simply put, when used, it will evaluate all of the sky effects while rendering volume materials! That's right, no more clouds that stand out instead of blending nicely into the haze/fog! Cubic Mapping Modes The two new mapping modes, "World Cubic" and "Object Cubic" had their scaling effects reversed. This has been fixed so that their scaling will behave like all the other mapping modes. To be specific, lower scaling factors should increase the frequency of the texture while higher scaling factors should decrease the frequency." ******************************************************* anyhow, please get some more input in here so that we have a good showing of support to send to corel! thanx Brycetech