please help, i need to make an animation in bryce, but the scene must be pretty big, because 30 frames is takeing 17 hours to render. how can i make my machine render faster, harddrive, ram, graghics drive? what is it that will make my renders...rendered! any and all advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks

You need a renderfarm. Find as many computers as you can get with the fastest processors and most RAM possible, buy a copy of Bryce for each one and use netwrok rendering.

I don't know what your idea is but if you can simplify ANYTHING do so.Any additional lighting!-don't hold your breath.

RAM and a faster processor are pretty much what'll do it for you. Stupid Bryce processor-based render engine...lol

The only thing I know of is to keep the frame sizes small. You can make the animation in a larger size, and then diminish the size of them just before rendering. Even small animations take a long time.

use the simpler mats. if you cant see some objects delete them. turn of super antialiasin (if turned on) in the end try to render scene without antialiasing (not recomended).well thats it oh yes go in the render options and try to tune something there. best of luck.

thank you, thank you all, and when i'm rich and famous you've all got a job.

17 hours doesn't sound too bad!

If you don't go with network rendering then all you can do is get a faster processor since Bryce has a processor-based render engine. Also Be carful of whitch materials and features you use. If the nano preview gets noticably slower when you make change then you can bet that the main render will take a really really long time. If you do go with network rendering. I'm almost certain that you dont need a copy of bryce for each computer, you just need to install "Bryce Lightning" on each computer. Network rendering, which allows Bryce's rendering clientBryce Lightningto aid in the rendering of still images or animation files across a network, including the Internet. All you have to do is run the client on a networked device (regardless of platform) and enter the client's IP address in the network rendering setup dialog. Each client can also be set to render tiles of a single frame so that even still images can benefit from additional processors.

@superman32965 - people like you and me are probably not used to rendering stills that take 3 days to render (like pogmahone and the others here who know what they're doing are familiar with), so when an animation takes 17 hours we're pissed! Someday i'll know enough about Bryce to make it take 3 days to render an image, too... someday. LOL.

Blog, you don't need a copy of Bryce for each comp in the render farm, just install Bryce lightning on each one. Bryce lightning you can freely distribute as it's part of the liscense for Bryce.

Oh and instead of rendering the animation as an .avi/.mov file all at once, do a .bmp/.pict sequence then put it all together into an animation file with another program that can do that. This way if Bryce crashes/power outage or whatever you don't have to render the whole thing over again, you just start from the last frame that rendered fully.

you can set a range of time or frames to render in the render setup. don't HAVE to render as series of singles.

or use an actual renderfarm that charges like $.25 per GHz hour. Might be the quickest way to get your animation done.. Other than that faster processor and more Ram (Slakker, almost every render engine is CPU based but most are much quicker than Bryce's)...Beyond that, do what the others said and use simpler mats, less geometry, less transparency/reflectivity etc...Beyond that use a different program :-p (J/k but Bryce and animations are like oil and water...dont mix)

I've had renders over 11 days per frame, as Aldaron said, to renderfarm you can use Bryce Lightning for each of the farm machines, no need to buy extra licensed versions of bryce, you only need your single licensed client. Ditto with using single images, means you can also do tricks like batch processing photoshop filters on the image set etc...