Aye, but I hardly consider this one a polygon monster! The little glass house above has way more polys than this castle... There are no bunk polys, no errors, and no lost edges. All the surfaces are sealed. There are no booleans in poly mode because it came from a NURBS model. The only curved surfaces actualy ARE the tower shells, so there are 14 curved surfaces (10 and then 1 each for the central-top-tower sides). And these few curved surfaces generate very, very few polys indeed. The Rhino file is only 30 MB, much like the Maya file. It's Bryce itself that is a memory-hog, not my model in this case. But I do understand where you're coming from when it comes to optimizing. This is certainly not my first castle, but it's the cleanest and leanest one I've made to date. Here's my render stats from just now, on a flat-shaded render using an 18 spotlight array and "soft shadows"... Starting Rendering C:/Documents and Settings/Skye/My Documents/maya/projects/default/images/Fortress in Maya_perspShape_tmp.iff. Constructing shading groups. Rendering current frame. Frame triangle count: 145845 ==================================== Resource Usage At End Of Frame ==================================== 138253 Page faults 358.074 Mb Peak total size(Estimated) 128.533 Mb Peak arena size ==================================== 364.930 Mb Current 53.936 Mb Arrays 1.000 Mb NURBS AG 31.250 Mb MEL 0.703 Mb Pixel Map 0.094 Mb File Texture Mipmaps 40.848 Mb Render Cache 0.007 Mb Render Geometry Arena 0.125 Mb Transforms 0.938 Mb Data Blocks 0.125 Mb NURBS Surface Shapes 0.313 Mb NURBS Geometry Cache ==================================== Postprocessing rendering result. Time For Tessellation (hh
ss): 00:00:00 Time For Shadow Map (hh
ss): 00:00:00 Time For Post Process (hh
ss): 00:00:02 Time For Frame Render (hh
ss): 00:18:35 Finished Rendering. 146K polys aint so monstrous, is it?!? It took much longer Bryce to do a similar render, posted in another thread here awhile back. But it still wasn't equal : equivalent shading would mean a "premium" render, may she Rest in Peace, and hours of downtime... I usually just settle for light arrays in Bryce. Maya lets you seamlessly blend the two on a per-light and per-object level... Anyway, I think I got my point across : Bryce 5.5 is a silly "upgrade" for me, I simply can't justify spending more time and energy worrying over ridiculously long renders and unfinishable scenes...
