I'm fed up! I think its preposterous that I have a P4 3.2GHZ with 1mb of cache w/HT and a 1G of DDR3200 ram and it takes days to render anything worth while... Not to metion my new PCI express ATI Radeon card. I need help, I think the problem is that I'm not very efficent at managing my scene files... maybe some tips on cutting render times? I'll be posting an image in the gallery but- o ya its still got 28 more hours to go... Holy crap! I was planning to animate it into a 30 second movie clip... Maybe I should just go and buy a Mac or something... Or get a copy of Cinema 4D... Not to be rude or anything, I'm just a little irritated but whats going on...

getting a mac isn't going to change anything. you have an impressive system, but all you need is a little patience. there's really very little we can say to you until we see what you were working on. details. did it have volumetrics, soft shadows, a hundred lights, detailed textures? how big is your scene file, both in terms of pixels and mb? are you trying to render it at maximum settings? what are your render settings? no render should take more than a maximum of 2 days unless it's something truly epic and you're rendering everything in one go. try doing a bit of postwork instead of volumetrics, render things in two or three layers instead of one, etc. drac

Using volumetrics? Transparent and or reflective materials? Tons of polygons? Render options cranked up? Many things have an impact on render times. The more complex the scene, the longer it takes to render.

Yeah, what drac said....

Did you see pirates of the Caribbean and watch the credits? It takes about seven minutes for all the CG people to scroll across the screen because there are hundreds involved in live animation. I came into graphics from a drafting perspective. If there were buttons on the shirt of that person 200 yards away with his back turned then they had to be done in 3D and the threads too! Ive since learned to cheat. Use images instead of objects for anything that is far away. Don't include anything that isn't in the visible scene. Premium effects are great but if your final film is only 320x240 what are you really going to be able to see? Its hard to know exactly what the problem is without some more information about your image. There are tricks and fixes available for many problems.

Post or explain your scene in fair detail, guaranteed the input from this forum will give you alterantives for saving time.

Electroglyph mentions one of the biggest time savings, stuff far away should be low poly or 2d images. We all know Bryce has a slow render engine, it's one of the reasons many of us are waiting for 5.5 with extreme enthusiasm!

Allw hat the above say..and my deepest sympathies..

C4D won't help(other than the fact it'll use dual processors if you have them), the render times in C4D are quite high when you start using advanced render options such as radiosity, heavy raytrace elements, high anti-aliasing quality, etc. Heck,....I have a Bryce render in progress of a room with 1 volumetric spot coming through a window made of "Light Glass", rendering on "Normal" setting and the first pass render time was 23:17:40 ! Rendering really has not much to do with the video card or RAM, it's processor intensive. So,.......if you're using alot of high quality render elements, high render times are just the price of doing business, so to speak.

i heard blender has a fast renderer try that its free :P and forget about macs they are the not so power pc's imho.

C4D does have a fast renderer. But, and this is always the way, you expand your work to keep the rendertimes up there! (I had one going for 8.5 hrs (overnight)and the radiosity prepass was about 23% done.)

First image I rendered in MAx I thought yeah this is fast, first image that used raytrace mats it was oh well back to the coffee machine......

The wonderful thing about Bryce is that it gives you time to relax, meditate/take up yoga, get on with a hobby, read a paper/book, consider you next render. Now what other prog can give you all this? ;-)