I've been working on creating realistic looking clouds with bryce's volumetric slabs, and here's what I've gotten so far. I put this first one in a scene, and I was rendering to disk, it was 84% complete, and suddenly bryce performs an illegal operation and must be shut down. (*&@#%%^ computer.....) This is about the 6th time it's shut down randomly while I was working on that scene, so I suspect you may never see it unless I post it here.

and here's another. The atmosphere still needs some work, but the clouds are done.

They look pretty good - esp the first one. You've obviously got a decent PC to be trying this. My experiments have gotten about as far as playing with the density parameter for the material. Something I found that works quite nicely is to put the clouds at different hieghts, so that you see one behind the other - looks pretty decent and tends to avoid the problem of the intersecting volume material as well.

You may already be doing this, but: Make sure when you are rendering in Bryce that nothing (absolutely NOTHING) else is running in the background. Bryce is programmed to use every bit of available memory especially when doing memory intensive tasks like volumetrics. If you're getting crashes this often, you might be running stuff in the background that Bryce doesn't like. :^) So remember, when Brycing don't surf, listen to music, etc, just Bryce. :^)

Yep, i agree with tjohn, also, separate computer highly reccomended, i have one just 4 rendering, on the other one are scene compositions and everything runs on less quality settings... :)

do you mean turning off antivirus and firewall? tjohn ;)

I think my computer must just have been in a bad mood yesterday, it's working just fine today. There wasn't anything else running (except antivirus and firewall, which I have to leave running since I'm on a campus network and unplugging computers makes the resnet people unhappy, for some reason). I've been rendering pieces of it at a time today and saving in between--slower, but if it crashes again I don't have to start from the beginning. Layering clouds was the original plan, but I think I'm gonna wait for a particularly masochistic mood to strike me or until I get a faster processor (or the funds for a computer just for rendering, as Kemal suggests), I think it would take about a week to render something like that ;)

Oh yeah, there's the other option, make friends with the people who work in the supercomputer center and borrow some computing power =D ...well, maybe not. Someone would probably get mad.

ysvry: I have to turn mine off (McAffee), it DOES interfere with my Brycing, crashes it, it might not with yours. I don't Bryce while online, and I don't surf without the security system running. I'm on dial-up, so I don't have a constant connection to protect.

Wow those look great!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=682410&Start=1&Artist=haloedrain&ByArtist=Yes

Vile: thanks! I uploaded the finished render of that first image to my gallery, if anyone's interested :)