I apologize if this subject has been dealt with recently. I did have a cursory look at the content and didn't see anything dealing with this. This is more of a Windows system question than anything else but........how does one go about increasing the resources available to Bryce for rendering? I currently have a 933 mHz system with 512 Mg of RAM and 1.4 Gig of hard drive space, and have shut down practically everything to render a project, without success. I've allowed Windows to manage Virtual Memory.....I've rendered larger projects, but this one is about 40 Mg and I'm running out of memory. The weird thing is that when I save, the system behaves as though it is actually saving the .br5 file, (clocks, and the HD light is on) but when I go in and re-open it, it's empty. Any ideas! - I'd be so grateful, I'm at the end of my freakin' rope here......

Sounds like you corrupted the file. When saving wait a few minutes AFTER Bryce says save 100%. This means don't move the mouse, click anything, nothing. After a couple minutes move the mouse to the top of the screen and if the menu bar appears it's safe to continue. Another problem could be one of the objects has a texture applied with a real long name or larger than 4000 x 4000. That's about all I can think of now.

I don't know how you guys have your version of Bryce setup, but My tool-bar only appears if I mouse-over. So, when saving, my counter gets up to 100% and then I have to wait until the toolbar DISAPPEARS before carrying on with my work. Also, remember that your nano-preview window takes time to render....to speed things up, try switching it to wireframe-preview. This helps alot when you are working on a huge or complicated piece. Hope this helps.

Texture names and sizes seem to be one of the main reasons that I've found for file corruption too. Long texture names, big textures - mine seem to get a bit dodgy when they're over about 2500x2500, and really extreme texture scales (like 5000%) seem to be things to avoid. Out of curiosity - how long does it take to open up the file? Some of my files can take a few minutes to open as well, so don't mistake "opening very slowly" for "opening empty".

Clem, I have about the same system as you, and I have similar problems, although I can open and save files ok. My big problem is working on large Bryce files. I recently tried working with a 100 meg file, and it was just too much for my system. Lowering your poly count might save you grief in the future ;-) Doug

Windows 98 or Windows 2000/XP? No way to increase resources to Bryce. Windows should automatically assign as much ram as possible to the operation at hand. Obviously, try not to have anything else running, ESPECIALLY anti-virus runnig in the background. That can instantly turn your 933Mhz perform to half it's capability/speed. But, I DO know it's becoming harder to FULLY disable anti-virus, I myself am getting way fed up with the newest Mcafee. *But, to restate something said above, after you clicks "save" and Bryce gets to 100%...It's NOT finished saving...do NOT mess with it until you can either make your toolbar appear or until it dissapears (auto-hides) And, yes, don't be fooled, long opening of scene files or closing can sometimes take a LONG time. Your task manager will even tell you Bryce "is not respoding"...it's usually a lie. The task managaer will tell you that on long render also. Shut dwn Bryce before it is fully done saving a file, it will most likely corrupt it. AgentSmith

I've had scenes that took over 10 hours to be at 100% 'saved' and then another 15 minutes for the toolbar to appear or dissapear. As with almost anything in bryce, it's all about waiting. I must admit though that those 10 hours were kind of an exception, usually I don't put 13K primitives in one scenefile. When working with big scenefiles I'd always advice keeping a back-up of your old file before saving the new one, just in case it does go wrong.

Hello all, thanks for your considerate replies.......in most cases this seems to happen with any file, and I'm shutting down everything concurrently running except Explorer. It's not just this file either........Quite often I "save" the file, and go eat dinner or even go to bed, and since I can pull down my task bar and the HD light is off, I can only assume it's saved. It's been taking about 5 minutes to open/save the file. I make incremental backups of it at various stages, and am able to add to the scene. The funny thing is that Bryce is quite capable of rendering the entire scene without problem - only it won't save the finished file and I can't even export the finished graphic! That is the really frustrating part. I'm no Windows whiz, but I assumed that the Virtual Memory would swap out to the HD, where I have ample space. I'm running ME actually.......

Running Win ME could be part of the problem,.......you could try breaking the scene into different layers then composite the layers in an image editor like Photoshop or such.

Aye, ME and Bryce are eternal, infernal enemies. I would switch to '98 or XP, when possible. '98 if you don't have XP already sitting around. This would be your main issue, as NO computer, even my Pentium 2/266 with 96MB RAM should have any issue opening a 40MB .br4 or .br5. With as much RAM as you have (512), it should be very quick and painless. Not to terribly counter our resident MasterSmith, but Mcaffee is horrible and almost useless, when it comes ot the way it hogs resources. Norton Antivirus uses almost NO RAM, and will only hit the processor if you tell it to, when setup properly. NAV is the big-dog of Virus protection, short of doing things by hand of course. Hopefully you'll be able to get your hands on XP or XP pro, Clemenceau. With it, you can specify how much priority the processor diverts to each program. I usually set Bryce to 60% when I'm devloping a scene, and to 90% when I'm finally rendering. This way, it doesn't matter HOW many programs you have running, as long as you have enough RAM to deal with it all. As a general rule-of-thumb, a given Bryce file should be less than half of your total system RAM, in filesize. So, with your 512, you will be able to easily handle files up to 256MB, and in many cases beyond. Sure, your hardware isn't the newest, strongest stuff out there, but I still render every day on an old Pentium 2 at work, and have far, far less resources on this machine than you do. This, aside from a few other issues, leads me to beieve it's your OS that's causing the problems... Hope things work out, get back to us soon!

I switched from Norton to Mcafee when computers at my brothers company kept getting viruses no matter what, for years. They all used Norton. Since switching to Mcafee, no viruses, period. But, it's all different for everyone. I'm ready to switch from Mcafee because it digs in and runs in the background no matter what options you choose, no matter what start-up you disable, no matter what anti-start-up up program you use. I HATE that. Nothing will make me stop buying a program faster than that kind of intrusion. Norton rocks too, it just wasn't not working for my brothers company for some reason. (it was most likely user based problems, but no one will admit to it) (here endeth the mcafee rant, lol) AS

Yes, Windows ME is problematic. Even if you can pick up Windows 98SE, you will be far better off in performance and stability of your PC. I always/use suggest Windows 2000 Pro. XP, imho intrudes too much and uses far too much resources for gui video effects and whatnot. It's still a very good OS at its base though. AS