Attached Link: Render Comparison

Cool. The scenes are similar, but not the "same". Are you comparing anything in particular? Render quality? Time? All the above?

I knew that Bryce was slow, but at 22.7 minutes that's just ridiculous.

Slow ain't the half of it L.D., but I wonder if there are differences in lighting. For example Poser uses 3 "local" lights with falloff by default while Bryce simulates a sun with no appreciable falloff by default indicating an incredible amount of raytrace calculations in it's default settings - even so, Bryce seems incredably slow; I hear the higher end progs can be as slow as Bryce but I have no experience with Max or Maya. - TJ

Intresting.

For me the comparison is render quality, & speed, but more important ( to me ) is set up time. After modeling the scene ( and creating the textures ) I imported them into the programs, set up camera angle and textures, then rendered. Well, Bryce does have the longest render time, but if I added set up time to it, Carrara takes the worst billing. It is so far the most user unfriendly program I used.

"I hear the higher end progs can be as slow as Bryce but I have no experience with Max or Maya." Well, 3dsMax is my application of choice. I've been using it since version 2. I now have version 6, and all I can say is render speed is professional-grade when done with the Mental Ray engine that comes standard with 3dsMax 6. What I mean by this is that a scene like the one you have set up, with reflections, and minimal number of objects and simple spot lighting would probably take just about a minute or two at most, perhaps less since there are "endless" tweaks that can be done to speed up rendertimes. Max's default scanline renderer would probably be a little slower, but nowhere near how long it takes for Bryce. Applications like 3dsMax (and Maya) also take advantage of plugin renderers like Brazil and Vray. These renderers are two of the fastest raytrace engines in the biz today, and could render that scene even WITH true global illumination at a resolution of 800x600 in just about 3-5 minutes. That's with global illumination. With just the lighting setup you have in those test scenes, it would only take mere seconds. Vray and Brazil are so fast, even large FX studios are seeing their benefits and using them more often now. Animal Logic, for example, takes advantage of Vray's speed quite often in their commercial works for film and television. So basically, Bryce's speed compared to any of the high end render engines that are used in 3dsMax and Maya is a complete blow-out. Bryce simply can't do all that they can do (true caustics and photometric lighting for example), but more importantly, it can't do it faster either. ;-)

If you would like to participate in this little endeavor. The scene is now available in 3 formats 3DS, OBJ and LWO2, the default texture maps are also available. Any logos will have to be added to the texture maps. Texture maps http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/scene/bb_scene_tex.zip Lightwave Objects LWO http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/scene/bb_scene_lwo.zip OBJ http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/scene/bb_scene_obj.zip 3DS http://stevesartgallery.bryce-alive.net/scene/bb_scene_3ds.zip Any images rendered can be emailed to StevesArtGallery@comcast.net Please put Baseball Scene, as the subject, and attach an uncompressed image at 1024X768, with a brief explanation of program& version, render setting & options, and render time. PS...let me know if there are any problems with the files.