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Hi folks, this is the first very big size image i made. The original size is 1900x1200 pixels. The problem is : My machine is a PII 400 320mb memory. RENDERING TIME over 90 hours. Well is this normal?? Any comments?

Yep! Look for an image in the Bryce Galleries called Off Hours by thenodemaster (that's me). That was 45 hours render time on an AMD Athalon @ 800 Mhz with 256 MB RAM. Bryce's render engines is VERY slow, so, the more you put--especially transparency and volumetric textures.

Most render times are in the users control and not solely with the software or the machine. My Byrce renders are not done in fine art mode, nor do I slow it down with 17 added lights and so on. 2 source lighting achieves spectacular effects if used correctly. My average rendering time with an old AMD-K6-2 and 64 megs of RAM is 10-12 minutes. What in god's name are you choking your scenes with? 90 hours? That is simply absurd. If Bryce took 45 hours or 90 hours to do its work I'd have thrown it out and got my money back. Just try to balance your composition with enough elements to get your image done.

I also have had very high rendering times. Some of the scenes I have done,taking upwards of 40+ hours (1gig PIII w/384megs)for a render or 1024X768. That was using a plane black background but I had 6 planets with highly detailed textures, and 3 nebulas. This one is rendering right now on another box of mine (266amd w/128megs) and is at over 90+ hours right now.. But the scene is rendering for a print of 30x22.5 (poster size) at 150dpi so I expect it to take about 11 days or so. I hope that helps

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Wow,, so,,, i c.. its true.. I was just thinking that maybe my computer is not working fine... it was rendered at 200dpi. Anyway i have only one light and the waterfall is transparent.. nothing else. I was just wondering cos one person here told that he/she is rendering a huge poster and it only takes 15 minutes????? anyway.. Thanks for the infos.

I have found that imported models, when used in large, or even medium amounts can dramatically increase render times on any machine. Sometimes if there are enough polygons in the scene the render will appear to stop totally, usually on the last pass, sometimes halfway through. I have made scenes with around 200-300 groups (thousands of Bryce primatives) with full multi-channeled textures, rendered at large sizes, that have completed within an hour...The last experiment I did with imported trees/plants (from the Bryce2 CD ) I abandoned after duplicating the trees/plants few times my computer turned into a slug...

The Bryce ray tracing engine is painfully slow. High poly models and even worse Transparent or volumetric materials force the engine into hyper calculation mode. It slows rendering to a crawl. While I have not yet modeled anything that took 90 hours to render a single frame I can see it happening. Bryce does not utilize hardware rendering available on todays graphics cards, so rendering times are not going to be stellar. Also I have found that rendering times do not shorten appreciably on a 1Ghz 512 Meg 133fsb PIII machine. So the bottleneck has to be in the software. The way Bryce deals with shadows makes multiple lights necessary to get certain effects and quality. Once you render a similar image in a program like Lightwave you see how slow Bryce really is.

Just thought of something else. I agree with the slow render engine in Bryce (maybe something to correct in version 5?) It seems to me also that when I import objects especially ones that are not made specifically for Bryce (ie..3dmax, dxf, etc..) that it really effects render time and slows the machine down in thumbnail update and onscreen display. I have had the screen change to just block representation, because of so many objects being displayed. And then you add any transparency, or volume and you are really get screwed.

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Ok, once we startred to talk about the render time... one more question , [Volumetric enviroment]. Has onyone done any images with this effect on,,?? I did try it once with a 640x480 but the starting did look like it will take one year to render,,, so my question is for what is this effect used for ? Isnt it the same as more fog and haze??? I dont even know how can some one tell in what image is used this effect,,, so can anyone show me a test, cos i dont have the nervs and time to wait a rendering in a stamp size image ;) "" ANYWAY I LOVE MY BRYCE"" ;)

lets all hope the engine gets fixed in version 5...

The standard haze and fog effects in Bryce are very basic render procedures and soon become unrealistic when used in conjunction with lighting. Bryce volumetric materials (and 'volumetric world') are much more complex and can interact with light to a significant degree. Real fog and haze is a suspension of particles, usually water and dust. Light illuminates those particles, and the result can range from a 'whiteout' like in thick fog, to highly visible flashlight beams whenever Mulder and Scully start snooping around a deserted laboratory. ;-) Bryce haze and fog is actually pretty hopeless, and totally fails to acknowledge light, either from the sun or from any extra lights added to the scene. It is basically a band of dead colour that can vary in height and thickness. In this simple set-up I just did, the only illumination is a white radial light placed close to the camera. There is no sunlight at all (disabled). The sky colour is set to black, and the floor and columns are a basic green with no ambient level (diffuse only). This first pic shows a mid grey haze set to 100: Note two interesting issues. First, although there is no light except the weak radial in the foreground (i.e no sunlight), the haze looks the same as if it was applied to a scene with bright sunlight on a beach! In fact, if you put the camera in a completely sealed black cube primitive with no lights at all in the scene, that haze will still show up grey! Second, although the radial light is illuminating the green floor and columns, the haze is completely unaffected. It is not illuminated, it doesn't block the light in any way, and no shadows are cast into it by objects. As you can see, this is not a realistic representation. This next setup is exactly the same, except the haze is set to zero and 'volumetric world' has been enabled. The setting is 100 percent density, 50 percent quality: As you can see, this is totally different, and more in keeping with what we'd expect to see in real life foggy and/or hazey conditions. The dense volumetric 'haze' is being illuminated by the radial light (and only that), and objects are casting shadows into the 'haze-particles'. If I had used a volume slab instead of 'volumetric world', I could have specified all kinds of settings (colour, particle size, varaible density, etc) to the atmosphere around those objects. This volume stuff creates a much more complicated scene for Bryce to figure out. It is simulating the presence of suspended particles, and accounting for them in its ray-trace calculations. The higher the quality setting, the more 'particles' there are for the render engine to consider. More calculations equals more render time. In this case, the scene with basic haze took a whole six seconds; whereas the scene with volumetric world took seven minutes, fourty eight seconds. A big difference. When used carefully, both methods can give good results. But for the ultimate in realism, especially in foreground scenes and with extra lights, 'volumetric world' or volumetric slabs offer the best solution. The price you pay is in enduring weekend renders!

BTW, your crazy render 90 hour time is definitely not normal. I've done scenes with literally hundreds of lights illuminating terrains and imported objects, and had a lesser time with a much lesser machine than yours. You need to check carefully if there is anything in your scene that is causing the render engine to choke (doubled up transparent objects, etc), or if the machine is having to write to disk for virtual memory. Although 320mb of real memory is a nice amount, if your scene file is big and you have other applications open at the same time, then you could easily run out of RAM. If the processor has to use the hard disk as its working space, then everything will take a long time - Bryce renders will take forever. If your scene file is small, and the render still takes ages after a fresh reboot (no other programs or files open), then you need to look at your scene carefully. Check what materials you have set, and try deleting certain items to see if things speed up. There's nothing broken on Bryce's render engine, it just doesn't have a low quality 'setting' like Max or Poser. Bryce renders at good quality, very good quality and extremely good quality. That's nature of a true ray trace render engine. Bryce has been like this since the very early days. Users enjoyed ray tracing, with proper transparency, reflection and refraction before Max even had an incomplete ray trace third-party plugin written for it to do it. I don't mind if they add a non raytrace engine in the next version to provide a speedy option (it's highly unlikely though, due to the nature of the program); but I'd much rather they add Renderosity for even greater realism. I'll just get a faster processor!

LOL - radiosity. It's late here. :-D

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PJF:: Thank u ver much for this lesson( example) now i know..I also had haze and fog on with this volumetric stuff and thats one reason my images look stupid. heheh Thanks you...