Hello all, I'm working on an image and it's turned into a pretty intensive render (time wise). Is there a trick to being able to render quickly just for while Im working on it? The preview window just doesn't cut it for me. I've already taken off all the AA and set it to just default. Is there anything else?

dont use transparencies and refections in materials

To the left of the big render button are 2 more buttons. The leftmost one turns off textures and the othe is fast preview mode.

fast preview mode is a bitch with textures on...seriously, it takes longer and doesn't look nearly as good.

Yea I tried both those modes, textures off made it much quicker obviously but didn't allow me to see what i needed to, and fast preview didn't seem to help at all. Oh well thanks anyway guys!

You can do a couple passes then plop render only the section you need to look at or use the little spray can to just render parts of the scene.

The spray can is a lifesaver. Cheers 8) GG

Wow thanks everyone, that helps a bunch. My regular render was up to about 6 hours now, so I was crying, hehe.

i find if i start a render, when i click my mouse it pauses then i can simply drag a new frame over a spot in my scene (teh plop) the top button is start the render, the second one is to resume. - so, if i dont like what i see in the first few passes in my plop, i hit esc, make my change - then resum and plop resumes. plop good...

That spray-painter is absolute magic! I've been using a it a hellova lot lately on you know what and now I can't live without it.

I think it is one of my favourite tools.

I have only recently started using Bryce, but i've found that Bryce tends to drop itself to Low priority every five or so minutes... this means that it uses a lot less of the processor than IMO it should. Sometime in the near future, ill be making a VB program that will bump its priority up a bit. It was using 30% of my processors juice today, leaving 60% Wasted... WHY??? I couldnt see an option to change the priority in the actual program itself... Hence why i intend to make the app. My current render, on a 1300 processor, was at 24% after 11 hours (Rendering to hard drive, because i thought it might be faster as it doesnt draw the pixels (i think). I will have to look at plop rendering... The spraycan wasnt working too well... am using an imported M3 figure from poser5..

Yeah, I never have much joy with the spraycan either. rotfl, notice how tactful Twisted Symmetry was! He didn't say "You gobshite, you can click anywhere, it has nothing to do with the spraycan". See how diplomatic he was? Thanks TS, don't know where I got the idea I had to click on the spraycan :o| Too much information, too small a brain to hold it all.....

The spray can renders at the setting you provide. If you want better quality from the can, rack up the rez, for speed drop the rez....works for me. It's a great getout when you want an instant view of a detail you're working on.

Even with all your suggestions, and they were all wonderful. I may give up on this image and leave it as it is because the renders are taking so long! I can't even imagine why, I've never had this issue before unless its the amount of glass I used in it, but even there I used the glass with the lowest reflection because I thought that may be a problem. I have a 2600 processor and a gig of DDR ram. When I checked my task manager, Bryce was using 97% of the CPU. My husband had an idea that he may sell rendering space on our server, which isn't a bad idea when you think of it. I'm not crazy about giving up my computer to a single process for 10+ hours. Anyway, I've managed to save my image now at a full default no AA render and now Im going to play with it a bit to see if I can get some more speed out of it, and maybe figure out where the problem lies. Thank you all so much! This is an awesome community.

You might try this....
Load up your render at whatever settings you like.
Hit the render button and leave the machine for as long as you can spare.
Now SAVE your work when your avialable time is up and close Bryce.
When you have more available time, load up you work and hit the CONTINUE RENDER button (the little tiny one to the rght of the main render button).
Carry on rendering...
Repeat as necessary..........until finished. Of course you could jusy leave your machine to render overnight like the rest of us....

Message edited on: 09/16/2004 13:49