We hate Bryce too sometimes, but this is actually an error i havent seen before. Guess i could congratulate to the discovery, but i wont... Something must have gotten really screwed up when saving the file. One tip for future reference is to ALWAYS make multiple copies of the file and/or never save over the last one. It really sucks, but at least you got to keep parts of the image, instead of having a corrupt .br5-file. Love the structures btw.

I thought something like that had happened to me, but it turned out that since I'd been using the timeline to create paths all of the changes I wanted were on frame 3 and it had somehow gotten to frame 2, where everything was totally off. It caused a lot of hairpulling before I figured it out though.

I dunno..I come at it from a different angle (Wings..the cube gone made)..so my problem was trying to figure where 2,000 cubes went (what a great band name..2,000 cubes..;) into the pic. Not sure what happened here, but the pic shows promise. Maybe some variety on the mountain mats..but that could be an effect of whatever went flippin' on ya..

I've seen it before. it happens when you get a lot of booleaned objects in your scene. You could try renaming and/or ungrouping and regrouping.

I've had this exact thing happen when the saved image's alpha channel gets messed up, since that's what Bryce uses to remember where it left off with the render. Same thing when restarting a scene render with sun soft shadows or light gels (they're not saved with the file). Don't suppose that that's a render restart? One thing that may help is to solo just the buildings or the cubes or the mountians and do a render and see if it still happens. Sometimes this can narrow things done to something specfic that's causing a conflict. Since soloing dosen't effect lights, if you've got any additional lights in the scene trying contol-X ing them - if the lights are Ok Control-C them back into the scene. Don't know that this will help; Dan

Had a scene, altered it, then tried to save it (as a new named file)... and I got a "generic error in bryce" message. However... bryce didn't uncontrollably crash out and shutdown the way it normally does when you get that sort of save error (but it also didn't save the file). Bryce was still open on the desktop and the file was still in bryce and everything in bryce still worked fully functionally ... it just wouldn't save the file..... 0_o Never had that before.

Flak and I had that particular mysterious problem independently but concurrently. : Bryce has a lot of limitations and frustrations, but then again, so do I. shrugs Looks to me that you've got something worth trying to resurrect. You never know, maybe youll have some great epiphany during the rebuild and itll end up being your Mona Lisa... Dont dump this one yet.

The clear and re-render button didn't help, huh?

Thank you guys for your compassion... ;) the strange things is that the image I had is a mix of my WIP: The mountain material is the first I put on terrains (but I changed it 4 savings ago), camera setting was one of the first I had (changed 5-6 saving ago), all the textures and windows are gone (last save: 2 savings before) but there are the Brycemen (inserted like the windows 2-3 savings before). Sky settings comes really out of the blue, but the saved skies settings button are still there so I can recover the last settings (strange..) Other strange thing: there a 4 wood beams after the bridge, when I done those I copied the main beams of the near tower... than I rescaled that cubes in order to have the pillars of the bridge. After the strange incident, they returned to the first dimension settings but in the position they were after I moved and resized them.... strange strange.... Some report of U.F.O. sight in south Europe recently?

Well there was an eclipse recently....

Naw, it was just Venus passing by the Sun.

nah..it's just in transit..;)

Aye, it's a combination of things, but I'm saying that you CAN get a handle on the situation. Both things stated were true, but one thing was wrong... So, you're running into a boolean problem? Do you still have your model, itself? Did you save it to your library? Booleans can become really complex in Bryce, because they aren't true booleans, but you can still re-group them with a little effort and a lot of patience. Just lock down everything but the top piece (where the errors are), maybe even set everything else to "Show as Box", to cut down on the clutter, and re-group that piece together? As for your render itself, I think that a major part of it might be lighting. Are you using any lights other than the sun? Radials or Spot lights? Bryce 5, anyway, has this ridiculous bug where if you insert a gel into a light, ALL lights become gel lights when you re-load the scene. This could be responsible for why everything looks so dramatically different. If you are using lights other than or as well as the sun, the fix for this bug is to make sure all of your lights ARE gels before you save it. Merely set the lights that aren't SUPPOSED to have gels with a blank white material in the Material Lab. Piece of cake. I'm dying to see this one finished, so don't give up! If it gets too frustrating, merely put it away for a while and come back to it... But I dont' think 2,000 cubes are the issue. You could use ten times that number and you'd be fine, as long as you had enough RAM. Good luck, hope it works out!

shadow.. thank you for the big support.. Boolean and lights are not the tru problem.. I have few booleans and 3 lights with no gel, but they are syill there, the problems are the object missing... the material missing and moreover the camera settings, personally I'm not so good in positioning camera, and I was really happy on the result I had on the original render. NOw I have to try to redo it.. sigh... Today is getting much better... my frustration is lowering and I'll start again this evening... regarding RAM are 256Mb enough? cheers to all, thank you to all, I hope to come back soon with good news... and.. no it's not true... I do not hate Bryce. (maybe ;) )

well, I have 256 on my 'work' machine, and the render times are double what everyone else gets (we had a contest rendering a stock picture, I came in 2nd [longest] render with 26 minutes to everyone else's 4 or 5..;) Memory's fairly cheap nowadays, might look at getting some more..;)

Seriously, I think 512 is a minimum amount of ram. I have 320, and once the textures become large, thats not enough.

Sometimes Bryce has a fit. Like the buildings. Where did they come from. Did you create them?

yes markk, I created the buildings, tht's why I have more than 2000 cubes in the imge :P

As a general rule, your scenes' file size shouldn't be more than half of the physical RAM which you have. So, if your scene is 100 MB after you save it, you should probably have at least 200MB (256, of course, there are no DIMMS set at 200MB!). SO, I would say that 512 is a good minimum these days for a complex scene, although I've used and grown and learned from Bryce at 64MB all the way to today's preposterous mass-RAM work conditions! Don't let RAM limit you, just create workarounds, and then remember how you WOULD have done it for later on, when you do have enough RAM? Good luck, hope this scene works out for you.

thank you shadow, 94 megs till now... One think is sure I have to buy some dimm ram