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