Ok probably a rookie quetion here but I have come to the end of my solution rope. I have a render intensive picture I am working on, a city scape with lots of glass and metal. Add to this about 15 poser figures and my render time is up to 16 hours plus. Also at this point I cant even edit the project anymor because just opening it takes about 15 minutes, then each click of the mouse causes another 10-15 minute delay. Just trying to rotate the view can take around an hour. Any suggestions? Also what is the difference in hi-res and low-res models, and how do I make one or the other. Thanks

Heh, got the same problem here (takes 15 minutes just to render the freakin thumbnail)...I think the solution in my case is a bigger processor. Too bad bryce won't use openGL, that graphics card of mine sould be good for something besides games....scenes considerably more complicated than bryce scenes render on the fly. Now if you happen to have one of these friends/family that spends $10000 plus on upgrading thier computer each year.........

Wow,15 poser figures,no wonder it it taking ages to render thats gonna be a huge file to work with.I have a 900 athlon with 256 meg of ram and find if my file size goes much above 70 meg it grinds to halt much like yours is doing. Your video card wont make much difference(I have a Voodoo 5500 and it still slows)its all to do with processor speed and ram,if you are paging to hard disk then that will really kill your speed and need to buy more RAM,also avoid volume materials amd lights in your scene as these are killers also. One trick I use alot to reduce my load is to use picture objects rather than actual Poser meshes particularly for the distant figures.Just pose your figure in Poser how you would like it to appear in the scene (adjust lighting angle to same as your scene),render it with no ground or background and save the image as a .tif file.Load picture into photoshop and create a mask(black background,white figure).Now create the figure in Bryce as a picture object,it will render almost instantly and take up a tiny amount of room.

Another trick I've heard about is to do things in segments. That is.. build part of your scene.. save the objects off, then remove them. Once your finished with placing all the objects and such.. load up the ones you removed. This final step will take a lot of resources.. but.. if you 'have' to model everything.. it will allow you to get them all in there. Then I suggest a nice long weekend somewhere while it renders.

Yes RimRunner is on it- When merging scenes, each will keep the parent sky, and you can build different parts for a final render. Showing objects as a box instead of mesh also helps. Susan Kitchens compares platforms and hardware in the new book, and it would appear that Mac takes it as far as speed goes...

Yes, for graphics work, the Mac has been ahead of the IBM clones. The Amega was a rocking system in it's day though too. Now.. before all the IBM guys start to flame me.. I'm one of you. Just admitting the truth. Mac's have always handled graphics a little better. But that is changing, if you have the bucks to slam into $1200 video cards, Multi-processors & OS's that support them, etc. That said.. I agree, if you can build the objects, then show them as outlines, or boxes, this will allow you to place them in the scene without a lot of the system choaking you're going through now. And.. if you can shell out a few bucks.. RAM, RAM and more RAM. I have 256 megs in my system, but after around 1 mill pollys (on a PIII 600), well, it reminds me of my 286 10mhz system. laughs

I render in segments a lot of times like Rim Runner suggests ... I have the base scene with everthing set and saved and then I add parts and render them. Don't save. Add more ... I also have a set of markers set up in another scene to get position correct. One or two obects that the characters are interacting with. Put the people there, make sure they are the right size and in about the right position and then copy them into the main scene. Tweak position and render. Repeat over and over ... It is kind of a pain but does get results without killing the computer or others about you. I had to use that process for this scene. http://ghostofmacbeth.posermail.com/Tolkien.jpg

you can significantly decrease load time by UN-checking "auto-key" in the animation palette menu. Then you need to delete all the keyframes -- hit the minus sign next to the key picture. This is, of course, assuming that you're working on a still image and not an animation. The auto-key option is turned on by default: whenever you create an object, it allocates a big swath of space to track the changes that the object might make in the future. Since you're not doing an animation, this is just useless garbage. The behavior of the auto-key function is wacky... turn it off (and delete the keyframe it's already created at time 0:00). Turning off auto-keying can save over 50% of the time it takes to load up the image: in some case 90%. Your file size will shrink, too. Another technique for editing quickly is to work in Solo mode. Select only the stuff you're interested in, and then hit solo mode: your re-draws will be much quicker, and you won't be distracted by the rest of the stuff on screen.

everyone has given really good suggestions, however I didnt see this one... when doing large scenes, its a really good idea to change display for complex meshes to "box" display. This will significantly speed screen redraw. If you can change the poser figures to box display..any imports to box display..and stones...and any other object that has lotsa polygons, then you will see a quicker redraw... merging scenes is the best way to get a quick placement...you just put em all together in the end... and that suggestion about autokey...sounds very feasible! Id never thought about it, but Im gonna test it ASAP to see if that does indeed produce a quicker redraw. Flickerstreak, that was a great suggestion! BT http://www.brycetech.com/

I don't think it will produce a quicker re-draw, but it will produce a quicker load when you open a large file.

Thanks everyone for all the great suggestions. I was working in solo mode most of the time, but some of the other suggestions are really going to help out in the future. Thank God this project is finished, and for those who are interested, the final render time was 32:05:39. Thanks again to all that responded.