"still not as slow as Bryce but as an example the car scene linked takes about 30 seconds - 1 minute to render with no raytracing, with the water rayraced it takes about an hour! (in Max)"

Well, there's tons of different ways to get faster results in your raytraced water in Max. That's the beauty of a powerful render engine... options and tweaks. I'm sure those knowledgable about Bryce could tweak it's renderer to move faster too, but there's simply not that many options.

Max's renderer is a hybrid scanlineraytrace engine. It's really not the best render solution out there either. I use a plugin renderer when working in Max. My renderer of choice is Vray, but Brazil is also very good. Both of these plugins for Max will blow away the rendertimes benchmarked with the standard scanline hybrid, and also the engine in C4D. I'll bet you could render your scene with true GI as well as raytraced water in one of these plugins in under 30 minutes at 1600x1200 standard resolution.

My point is, Bryce is VERY slow, and if indeed someone takes it over, that should be the very first thing they address... the render engine.

Message edited on: 06/23/2004 06:20