hi there, can bryce use both of my pentium3 units to render, and/or the chip on my grafikboard (elsa gloria2) like 3dmax does? do i need a special dll-file, or can i use the heidi6.dll like for max, and where would it go? any help apriciated to shorten rendertime, 'caus it kills me to see my pictures getting build line after line....

Bryce does not use the graphics card to render. It only uses the graphics card to draw the wireframes (and OpenGL shapes, if you're using that mode). As far as I know, Bryce is not multiprocessor-aware. It is definitely not multiP-aware on a Mac, and I don't think it is on Windoze either. This means that it won't take advantage of your dual-P3 setup. Depending on your version of Windows, however, the OS is multiP-aware, so you could render in Bryce and then use another application at the same time without really reducing render time in Bryce. Those of us with single-processor setups have learned that trying to render in Bryce while surfing the web is a painful experience. Bryce renders slower than most other 3D apps. That's a fact of life. This is because it generates much more interesting textures and terrain shapes than other 3D apps. That's the trade-off. Supposedly, rendering will be sped up significantly in Bryce 5, but we have yet to see any evidence of this. Here are some things you can do to speed up rendering: - use fewer lights. Lights are a killer to rendering time. - make sure you have enough RAM. having more RAM doesn't really speed up rendering time, but having too little will slow rendering way down, because of the inefficiencies associated with virtual memory. For small renders, 128 megs is enough: for larger scene files you'll want at least 192 to be comfortable, and more than 256 if you can get it. - Imported meshes (.obj, .dxf, .3ds files) tend to dramatically slow Bryce down, especially if they have a lot of vertexes/polygons - Reflection, transparency, refraction, and bump are real time-killers. If you're concerned about render time, then limit the use of the first 3, and pay careful attention to your bump heights - more bump height = slower renders. - Volumetric materials are the #1 killer for rendering time. I'd suggest not using volumetric materials until you really know what you're doing, because they're not intuitive, it's hard to get good results with them, and they absolutely destroy render times. This goes for the Volumetric World setting in the sky lab too. That said, if you use these effects you can get some really cool renders. They just take forever. - If you're playing around in the Deep Texture editor, there are lots of things you can do to make textures render faster... most of them have to do with reducing number of octaves & frequency, and avoiding some of the costlier noise types, like Vortex Noise and some of the Voranoi noises. One thing about Bryce: most of the really good pictures running around on this site took many hours to render. Bryce is not fast. 12-hour renders are not uncommon, and I've personally had some renders that took more than 30 hours for a 800x600 still image. Animations take even longer (although usually you use a much lower image size and render quality for animations) --flick

hi flick thanks a lot for this allaround answer. although the message is bad (that bryce IS slow) it helped me to scale my rendertime-expectations. 30 h+? holy shit! i build this machine espacially to render (512 mb ram, 2pent3 866mghz, expensive! graphics card and enough storage, windos2000) and was really disappointed when it was only about twice as fast as my older machine (single 200mghz pentium2) when using bryce. in max it flies. but nevertheless i'll keep on using that superbe programm because of the fun within! thanx for your listing of timekillers, it made me aware of some things i didn't consider so far. marcel

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I have had renderings take up to six days at the default size in the Bryce 4 demo, that was on a Amd k6-2 500 with 64 meg of ram with a S3 trio 64 with 2mb video card on Win 95b. I have upgraded to 128meg and a 4meg 3d acelerator card. This improved renderings a bit but not enough. Renderings still takes hours for very simple scenes or days for more complex scenes. What sould be done is comparisons of different setups running the different versions of Bryce using the same scene file to give poeple an idea of what sort of system to aim for. Truspace 3se crashes on startup with the new video car (Aopen PT80 with SIS 6326 agp drivers) They had only 1 update driver that didn't make a difference. Using Nortons Crashguard to revive and continue Truspace 3se. Some of my early work using Truspace 2 & 3SE to make opjects and then Bryce 3D to render the scenes. http://communities.ninemsn.com.au/GalacticGraphics/homepage

I have a dual 350 Mhz PII setup under which I run both NT 4 and Win 98. There's not much benefit of using dual processors. There is some small benefit to using NT of about five percent. Under NT, the performance meter sez I'm hitting each processor at about fifty percent. I have seen it hit fifty-three percent, but maybe the procs' are running additional programs. Your 866Mhz PIII machine with 512 Meg of RAM is only twice as fast as your 200 Mhz Pentium II? There's gotta be something wrong there, just based on clock speed. I got a jump from my Pentium Pro 200 to my 350 Mhz machine of about 1.7, pretty much equivalent to the increase in clock speed. Also, Bryce ought to be just swimming with all that RAM. You're not trying to run SETI in the background or some other nefarious cycle-byter are you? But Render times are slow, no matter what. I'm running a thirty-hour render at home right now. Its just a tree, and a few terrains, but I prefer to use the artistic antialiasing and 2048x1576 renders.