So...I put all kinds of effort and months of time into this picture...and I go to render it...and in 24 hours it's only 4% done. Yikes. I went and deleted anything not in the actual final shot and got rid of some transparencies, but it doesn't seem to be helping any. Any ideas? I don't mind loooong render times, but at that rate, it's to take almost a month to render.

The little preview window isn't even keeping up with this image! :/
Nevanna

What are the render settings and materials you are using?

Quality is set to super, rays per pixel 16, no premium effects, TIR is turned on. I'm rendering to disk at 970 x 727--I wanted to do even bigger, actually. The materials are mostly custom...I removed the glass from the windows, couldn't see it anyway. Several are just tweaked presets. The wallpaper is a picture with bump map applied, the curtains do have a really high transparency; I got rid of the transparency on the table cloth. Picture for a background on the clock, with a basic glass mat for the cover. Turned off the sun, so the only light is from my strip of spriraled spheres in the middle. Not sure what else to add. Thanks for your time, though. :) Nevanna

if you are using a lot of reflective textures(metals and glass), lot of radial lights will slow the render down. if you have the render setting set on premium with the RPP(rays per pixel) on 64 it will be slow. try lowering the RPP to 9 if you use the premium render. Turning on soft shadows, the DOF(Distance on field) or anything else in the premium effects will also slow the render down.

Another thing to look at and this is one major problem a lot of people have when doing renders. Make sure you don't have anything running in the background that is not needed. Like the firewall, anti-virus or anything else you may have that you can turn off.

All of the above mentioned i have picked up from what some of the long time bryce users have posted in threads on this forum.

CD
(Shocked i remembered all of that)

Message edited on: 03/25/2005 21:56

Yes, lots of glass and transparency will slow your render to a crawl with lots of lights. Try changing your render settings to the default settings for the time being and see how fast it speeds up. In the skylab, also make sure "soft shadows" is not selected below the sun control (see attached pic). If that is checked, even if you are not on premium render settings it will render like it is, and that can take a very, very, very long time, especially with transparent materials.

You might want to experiment with the optimisations (grid/clustered, minimal/normal/aggressive from memory). Knock the render size down to 100 or so pixels across, and see which one runs the fastest. It sometimes can make quite a big difference (up to 30-40% I've seen).

Also, with what CD was saying, when something else draws attention, Bryce gets left with low priority (in Win at least).

(as basically mentioned already) That looks like a lot of radial lights, yes? When using multiple lights, I try to turn off as many shadows on the lights as possible, all of them if I can, and then use the sun to cast the shadow. This will speed up rendering quite a bit! Each scene is different, of course, but if you can do that it will cut way down on the number of shadow calculations the program has to do. AS

Another point, sometimes lots of groupings can add to file size and render time. Overall, along with what you removed and what the others said, cutting back any type of process will help. ICM

Attached Link: Smart Close

Smart Close apparently works quite well, I haven't tested it myself yet. It will allow Bryce to have just about all of your computer time, but make sure you're not connected to the net if your firewall is off.

Madmax wins! :D It turned out to be soft shadows in the skylab. Which is kind of funny, since I have the sun turned off... Turned that thing off, and poof it rendered in just a few hours. :p

@ICM Didn't know grouping could affects things. Yikes, I do that a lot. :p

Thanks for the help! I want to do some more tweaks before I u/l it. :)

Nevanna