I can't figure that out from the manual...

huh? You want to render the same little part of every frame? No, can't do that (not that I know of anyways). You can click on the film icon and the nano preview window then will show the animation. I use it to make sure I'm not moving the camera through solid walls or anything.

Thanks. I wanted to render an animation where only a small section of the scene actually did anything, and thought perhaps there was a feature that would help me do that and speed up the render.

AH! with you. Good idea. I don't think it's smart enough.

Hmm, what I'm thinking of would require some high end video editing program, but you could render the large scene as a still and then render just the small little animated part. Then you could nest the two together in a video editing program. I honestly don't know if all that work would be worth the difference in render time. Depending on your animation settings you would probably also see some difference in the animated area's background and the still area. If you can email me the files I could probably do this at school (have Adobe After Effects there) but I'm on break for the next three weeks.

Thanks for that offer, but frankly I just set the animation render going and went to bed. I keep finding hidden abilities in Bryce...you know--press "cntrl", "2" and "F6" while clicking on this or that icon. I just didn't want to be sewing up render time in the future because of a feature I wasn't aware of.

Now that I'm thinking of it, there may be one way to do it. Render the BG image once, load it into Bryce, move the time slider to the next frame and plop render the one small part that actually moves. Do that for each frame of the sequence. Save each image out in numbered order, and then put it all together in a video editor frame by frame. Mind you, I haven't actually tried it, but it sounds like it will work. ;-) If it does, let me know! And if you need a better explanation, IM me. HTH, Mike