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This may be a stupid question, but is there a way to render in stages? I've read posts where people say it took 32 hours or 48 hours or whatever to render a pic and I'm wondering do they mean that they actually let their system render for that long or is there a way to let a pic render for a couple of hours, pause it/reboot/work on another pic then resume render? Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Bryce has a resume render button beside the main render button

I have never used it I just knew it was there... but what's it good for if you still have to render without stopping?

heya, The render will resume if you use this button but if you have altered the scene in any way it will start the render over again. Regards Eshal

Here's how the "resume render" button works. If you start a render (NOT using the "render to disk..." option in the menus, but by using the big round button on the interface), then Bryce starts its initial passes rendering, and saves the result in memory as it goes. If you click the mouse while Bryce is rendering (unless you're switching to another application) or press escape, then Bryce stops rendering, but it keeps the image it's already rendered in memory, INCLUDING a map (in the 4th channel) of the render progress. If you then click the "resume render" button (or choose it from the menu), it will pick up where it left off. But that's not all. If you quit Bryce, it will save the image AND the progress map, so you can quit, shut off the computer, whatever, start Bryce back up, and resume rendering just by opening the file. Two things to remember: (1) you must select the "save image with file" option in the preferences. it's selected by default, so if you turned it off, you need to turn it back on. (2) in older versions of bryce, if you double-clicked on a scene (.br4) file, it started a new render once Bryce booted up. I haven't tried this in awhile, so it might still behave that way. If that's the case, then you need to start Bryce from the application, then use File/Open to open the image. Then just hit resume render. Of course, some of the people who do really long renders just either (a) forgo the use of their computer until it's done (b) use their computer with Bryce running in the background (which really slows down everything, including the render) or (c) have a dedicated render machine that they do their renders on. --flick

I'm generally one of the (a) people... on extremly long renders, I windup forgoing the use of my workstation until it's finished. A non artist friend of mine who own a more powerfull system than mine recently offered to let me use his for a renderplatform while his isn't in use - when he's at work or whatever. This neccessitates buying two copies of Bryce, but if you know a friend who would be willing to do that, I'm finding it speeds things up considerably... now I can use my WS to build scenes on and render them seperately. Only problem I've seen is you lose the fine tuning ability you get from being able to watch the render in progress.

Hey Flickerstreak, When you're rendering and you click to interupt it, the message asks if you want to resume rendering or stop. Do you then press any of these choices then exit in order to resume the next time you open this file? I assume if you press stop, there is no starting again at that point, and resume just resumes. I'm not able to check this out (one of MY long renders), but I think what you're saying is that there is an option you can then select when you start up agin that gives you the option of continuing. If this is so, does this work with rendering an animation of sequenced BMP files? I would check this out for my own, but I'm about 9 hours into a 17 hour rendering of an animation (to BMP files).

Attached Link: http://www.weirdass.net

On the Mac at least, Bryce4.1 will allow you to restart a render as part of the batch rendering. (select a group of files, drag them over the bryce icon, make sure the first one starts rendering, turn off the monitor, good night) Mitch

Oh man, I forgot to mention from my last post that I'm using Bryce 3.1. Does your explanation still work with this, Flick?

Flick? I have to admit, I never tried that with Bryce3D... I discovered it by accident with Bryce4. I suppose I could reinstal Bryce3 sometimes and experiment, if that would help? Have to free up some drive space first...

yeah, it works just fine, all the way back to Bryce 1.0 The resume render feature has always been a part of bryce. When I originally got Bryce 1.0, I was running on a Mac '030 at 33MHz... most of my renders took over 10 hours to complete, so I got very familiar with this feature :-) When you use the Render To Disk or Render to Animation features, resume render doesn't work... because Bryce isn't smart enough to figure out where the partially completed files are. It only works when you just use the regular Render command. As for rendering an animation.... you can easily render it in chunks by selecting a "working area"... that little green bar that fills up part of the animation area. So select just a partial working area, and in "Render Animation", select "render working area" instead of "entire animation". If you want to interrupt a current render, just interrupt it and click "stop"... delete the last BMP frame, and render from that frame forward later. Details of the "working area" are in your manual, under the Animation section... or maybe it's under the Rendering section, I don't remember. There isn't any way to resume a "Render to Disk..." command, to my knowledge. This poses a bit of a problem, since render to disk is the only way to render really really high resolution files, which are the ones that take forever anyway.

Thanks Flickerstreak, I actually already knew about the stopping, starting, and working area tricks. I guess I was just getting lazy and wanted it to happen automatically when I started back up. You're right about it being a pitty that it doesn't work with render to disk, but if you wanted to use this feature you could always adjust the document setup to match the output you want. When I want a scene rendered at say 8.5" x 4.5" at 400 dpi, I setup the document at 3300 x 1700 pixels. It then renders at 3300 x 1700 pixels, 72 dpi and 45.8333" x 23.6111". I then go to PhotoShop and adjust the dpi to 400 and look to make sure the pixel size remains the same. Thanks again for your efforts! 8)

So stuie, how large is that printed? and whats the dpi of the printed image? I need to start another post about printing....yeah, thats what Ill do.