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