My scene files run around 150-250mb. My Current WIP is 130 objects and about 30,000,000 polygons. Only useing DOF with 144x anti-aliasing. Some volumetrics but no volumetric world... 720x480 for animations and 1440x960 for picture... Its the kinda of quality that "kromekat" has in one of his bryce landscapes, maybe a little less... Check the bryce "whats new" gallery on thursday or friday...

I take that back... Its a lot less then kromekat's quality...

looks really cool. but mind you, the render times bryce estimates aren't always exact. in fact, in most cases, they're far off for 'long' renders. drac

Still, two days for something with lots of little transparent thingis like the pine needles, plus the volumetrics like the fog is not something to be surprised with. Yeah, the pic looks great.

volumetrics, multiple transmaps, DOF...and probably other processes running on the compy making Bryce a low priority. Yeah, I'd expect 1 to 2 days. Although it probably finishes sooner.

I can make most things out from the preview window. I don't see anything that sticks out as a big processor user. Are any of your bark textures really busy? I mean when you open the material editor are you using multiple channels and three or four material sets? Unless you are planning on zooming the camera across the lake you can render the whole far side of the shore and put it on a flat plane instead of the current 3D version. When your processor goes to calculate the light rays it will be bouncing rays off flat surface instead of round trunks and through leaves. Your times should drop if you do that. Looks like only natural sunlight in your scene. If you stuck lights in the mushrooms to make them glow take them out. Instead use the diffusion and ambience set high. When the total values are greater than 100 objects appear to give off more light than they take in. You are rendering large files. I'm guessing the video will come in at about 10mb/minute at 15fps using mpeg4 codex2 at about 85%. Quicktime would be about 4 to 5 times that and it will not like the odd aspect ratio you have chosen for the screen size. I tried a landscape scene with the window scaled and premium renders set as you describe. I'm running a Pentium 4 2.4GHz on a 100 bus with 1gig memory. A single frame on my machine takes 1h 58m 32s to render. At 15fps it will take 5 hours 38min to do a second of video. One minute will take 14 days 20 minutes to render. If you drop your rays back to 64 it will take a quarter of that. Whatever you do I suggest you render video with default no AA settings. You can make sure you dont walk the camera or object through an object or into the ground.

A few things for optimization purposes... 1. Depth-of-Field - With Bryce's current optimization techniques, the Premium DOF settings are useless. Try the same scene WITHOUT DOF on and you'll see a dramatic, nearly real-time in comparison difference. Nobody in their right mind would ever use Bryce 5.01's DOF setting for animation. Postworking it in After-Effects would take you minutes instead of hours... For stills, nearly any image editor will let you use the "distance mask" option from Bryce to create a more realistic DOF, at a mere fraction of the time... 2. Lighting - I can't see anything in your scene that requires a volumetric lighting setup. No sun-rays, at least not at this point in your render. Turn the volumetrics off if you're not using them... If you're doing volumetric lighting, you should only have one single volume light in the scene. Any other lights will interfere and cast their gels and colors onto the volumetric rays, even if you don't have any gels applied. It's part of Bryce 5's light-gel-bug. 3. Materials - If you really NEED to use volumetrics on this scene, go into the Light Lab for your light. Set volume to "On" before you go into the Gel (Material Lab) setting, as every time you turn Volume Visible to "Off" it will reset your gel material. Brycean volumetric lighting is ALL gel-based, so once into your volume light's Material Lab, you can adjust the volumtric "Quality/Speed" setting to optimize your render. It really never needs to be over 50, I've got a demo of the differences if you're uncertain about it. And if you're test-rendering, and aren't worried about artifacts for the moment, set it to 15 and save yourself some time... 4. Objects - It appears as if you're using many non-Bryce-native objects. Are they imported? Did you model them? Either way, you can cut down on memory and processor load by reducing their polygon counts in a modeler or in a program like PolyTrans. I'm certain there are free programs around that will help you with this, I mostly just stick to PolyTrans and Rhinoceros, which are certainly not free, but very powerful. Remember that Bryce can do some internal smoothing, and so you don't always need those extra polygons at all. Hope some of this blabbering helps you, good luck! (another note on volume lighting - unless the quality is up very high, Brycean volumetrics will not respond well to alpha-based transparencies...)