Howdy, I've been considering throwing down some cash for Bryce, but I've heard (and read on a few places) that the rendering time is terrible (Digital Blasphemy for instance has one image where it says just adding volumetric lighting would kick the render time up by many, many hours). So basically my question is this: is it really that bad? If I have to wait 5 or 10 or 30 hours for an image to render, that's just obscene. Right now I'm running a Celeron 400 with 128 megs of ram but that'll be a P3 800 with 384 megs of ram soon, so will that help much? It looks like a great program, but I don't want to have to wait a day while an image renders before I can use my computer. Thanks for any info folks.

Attached Link: http://carteron.only.at

sorry my english. The times for rendering with bryce are very different. You work with little pictures for trying (render 1-5 mn), and you make a very big one when you are completely satisfied. Don't be afraid. At the beginning you don't make very complex scenes with many lights, many objects, many transparencies which can terribly increase the time of computing. But never forget: your computer never sleeps and it is not afraid by night job. And you, at the morning, look your beautiful picture. Come to my galerie 3D. I am only a hobbyist. hello from paris and happy new year

Just let it render overnigte as carteron suggested. You can stop the render if you need to use the computer and save what you've done so far, then reload it later and restart the render (provided you haven't made any changes), and it will pick up where it left off. With a P3/700 and 128 MB RAM, the longest render I've had lately is around 8 hours, that was because I had more lights than I normally use and objects with high polygon counts. I general I see about 40 minutes to a couple hours for an average render. TL

Yes, carteron and tonylynch are right. I have Bryce 4 on a an Anthalon 800 with 256Mb RAM and it still chugs for between 16 and 36 hours depending on what it is doing. The last one I did (Women in Lingerie in the Bryce User Gallery) was a 36 hour render due to all the flass used as well as each outfit having 4 or 5 transmaps and then the hair having transmaps. Transparency and volumetric stuff seriously jacks up render time. but, render small as you build and then do a big (I usually do 4000x3000x300 DPI) final render. Good luck!

There are three main causes for slow Bryce renders: a-) the texture/material engine CAN be slow (but isn't necessarily slow, provided you choose your textures wisely). Volumetric textures and multi-channel, multi-component textures with a lot of phase variance are the primary culprits. b-) High polygon counts of imported objects. Poser figures especially, due to their high quality, can slow down render times. If you stick to Bryce's native objects (which are very versatile), render times don't degrade that much c-) Numerous numbers of lights can cause Bryce to choke up pretty bad. IMHO, Bryce's light rendering engine is significantly behind-the-times: it's not terribly efficient and it doesn't allow for effects such as soft shadows, etc. If you keep these things in mind, you can achieve perfectly acceptable render times. As I work on an image, my renders are very rarely loner than 3 minutes - I just get bored. There's a trick to this, too: Bryce renders in a unique "increasing resolution" mode, unlike most other renderers, which are line-renderers. Bryce renders the entire picture at a very low res, so it looks blocky. Then it progressively renders it 7 more times, and it gets sharper with every pass. The advantage of this is that you can very quickly distinguish form, composition, & color elements during a test render. In addition, Bryce has two wonderful render tools: the so-called "plop-render", where you can re-render a selected area of the screen just by drawing a marquee around it, and the so-called "spray render", where you can use an airbrush-like tool to literally spray-paint on the new image, for irregularly shaped areas of interest. So, when I'm doing a test-render on a complex scene, I'll usually start a full render (to get overall form/composition/color info) and then cancel it after 2-3 passes. Then I select the detail areas that I want to check and render those a few more passes. As the other folks said, when you're finally done with a project, you can just set up the render and leave it overnight. Or if you need to get into your computer before it's finished, you can stop the render and resume it later. Bottom line: Bryce renders slower than some other products, but it's because of its highly involved materials -- the material/texture generator is simply the best thing out there. It's got kind of a goofy interface, limited import/export support, and a few missing features, but you'll find that it's the renderer of choice for many people who use Poser, Ray Dream, Carrera, etc. because of the quality of textures & materials. It doesn't compare to LightWave or RenderMan, but then again, it's about 1/4 the price, too. Hope this helps. --flick

Rendering as such does take time, but anti-aliasing is even worse. What I often do is, in document set-up, make the image size larger than necessary, disable antialiasing, do the render and than scale down in Painter to the required size. Final results is as good as an antialiased picture, but often in half the time. Cheers, Kees

Attached Link: http://www.planet-3d.com/garage.htm

I have a benchmark so you can get an idea of how different machines compare. http://www.planet-3d.com/bmark.htm I also have some pages that will show you what kinds of things will affect the render time and how. http://www.planet-3d.com/garage.htm Basicly is supports what everyone has said. I just present a few numbers to go with it.

wow! your info is very thorough on the 'garage' pages. Unfortunately, I got a "file not found" error when trying to access the "benchmark results" page showing what the render times should be for various computers. That's the kind of testing I've always wanted to do on Bryce, but never gotten around to. --flick

Flickerstreak pretty much nailed it, the only thing i would add is that you should know that there is a render options tab in bryce that you can click that will let you adjust the rendering quality settings for several things or turn them off. These include antialiasing, spatial optimization, gamma correction and 48 bit dithering, turning this stuff off considerably speeds things up for test renders. You can turn it back on for your final and go to a movie or whatever... I also use Roobols strategy of rendering large without the extras and then downsampling in photoshop and it seems to work pretty well.