30+ hours into a render, maybe 80-90 done, and Bryce crashes... I noticed it can resume from the last save, but I haven't seen an autosave feature. That would help on this one. As is, without that I'm not going back and trying again on this one... Going to use less intense render settings next time around. Gives me a chance to tweak the composition just a little. Staring at the same screen for 2 days on the main machine here, I kept seeing things I might have wanted to move just an single coordinate point here or there... :p

I tend to stop it every few hours (if it's a really long render), save and then resume. Sorry, it's not much help to you now though. I ALWAYS see things I would change. Normally on the final pass. You see something not quite touching the floor. Sorry for your loss.

Erm.. I'm on a P4 overheating laptop. I mean I have it put on a teflon thingie with 2 fans, and it still crashes. For my last render, I left it on the balcony overnight (-5 degree weather). Right now it's toasty on my wrists. All that said... autosave would be great, but it would kill the processor if you're trying to render and save a 250mb scene at the same time. drac

Towards the end of my laptops life (I haven't actually told it it's dead yet, it's resting in a corner), I couldn't go more than an hour of a render without it crashing. I had one of those thingies with 2 fans. Kept it going for an extra 5 minutes. In the end I butchered the fans out and stuck them straight onto the air intake. Last a few more hours like that. Hey, Drac, you said you have no hot water? Maybe you could rig up some heat exchanger on the laptop. You can render and then take a hot bath. Two for one.

draw is wise lol

I hear about all these people killing their computers! What gives? I have never had a problem. I did a volumetric world render of one of my posts and that thing ran for a week solid and then I got tired of waiting. I didn't know you could run multiple instances. I just modelled some things in wings to pass the time. I hardly ever hear my fan kick into the highest speed. Most of the time in a long render the air coming out is just a little warm. Maybe it's the cooling system. If you look into the back of mine you can see a half-inch tall 3-inch wide copper wire network. I'm not sure if the air gets sucked in there but it can get a tad warm.

Yeah, I've never had the problem either. The longest render I've ever done was 53 hours straight through, on my old Win98 pc, and at the time I was too ignorant to know that it might cause problems. lol, I just thought it was the pc's job and it should get on with it.

I've had an 11 day render, if you render to disk, when the thing dies you will have a half complete bitmap that you can load and plop render the rest........ (This assumes your render is less than the 4000x3000 bitmap limit....) BTW my 11 day render worked with out dieing you may want to re-assess your PCs cooling system.

Never had a problem? On laptops? or desktops? I've never had a problem on my desktop machines. Ran a 7 day render once without a problem. But laptop heatsink and fans don't seem up to the task. (Not the laptop's I've had in anycase). But mine was a compaq which was well known for overheating.

Attached Link: Blue Elf - first try at Bryce

Nice enough. Great work for a first render. I'm not a fan of the naked vicki stuff (or poser in general). I'm really surprised it took 30 hours! You have a few volumetrics in there? Have you tried rendering without them, just for comparison? And what setting did you render at? AA or one of the premium renders?

My word, those are perky nipples 8^) ROTFL

• drac make some hot coco on ypur laptop - i run win 98 and i have the sidesoff my computer, in my basement (60 degrees all the time perfect) and with my longest (render 3 days) nothing happened. all was good

HA I HAVE ALL OF YOU BEAT! RASA #@#$% I am rendering as we speak I am at 41% it has been a week now! This will be the longest render I have ever done. I like some of the results but geez there had to have been a better way!

I don't understand why Bryce is telling me it will be done in 24 hours on a premium render with nothing but reflective and/or transparent materials.

Perhaps we should focus on optimization for a bit...? I recently did a 10-second animation for a customer. At 29.97 FPS... Originally, it took over 50 hours for the AA-quality render. I brought it down to 17 after some tweaking, and guess what...? The optimized version looks better than the original!