Hi, thanks for your responses so far... to answer a few points raised: 200 days is a guess based solely on the fact that it's taken 2 days to render 1%, nothing more. But if rendering continues at the exactly the same rate, then it would take that long. Whether it really will take that long, I've no way of telling at this point. I've used range fall-off on all the lights; the scene is intended to look as natural as possible. No volumetric lights, or reflective surfaces. Although there's a small lake and a river in the scene, the light going across the water surface is at a very low angle, and there's little (if any) reflection. There's glass, of course, in all the windows in the buildings and cars, but most of these are so small, and viewed from directly above, that they shouldn't really affect things too much. I suppose I COULD go back into my file, ungroup everything, tab thru all the hundreds and hundreds of elements, deleting all the little panes of glass.... but that would probably take as long as the rendering. I'm using normal settings, not superfine rendering. The Bryce file is 293.2MB. Doesn't seem to significantly slow down my hard drive (I can post here fine, and surf OK, and right at this moment I also have Photoshop open too). Rendering in segments is an interesting idea, I hadn't thought of that. Will give this some serious consideration. It absolutely has to be 300dpi. 72dpi works only for screen renders or low-quality small images. It won't work for professional print jobs. 300dpi is the minimum resolution I can use. And finally, yes, I'd love to upgrade my machine; one of those latest shiny new G5 dual core processors would do for a start if anyone feels like buying me a slightly late Christmas present:-) But I was actually hoping to use the fee from this job to pay for one, can't afford it right now! Thanks for your ideas. Please keep 'em coming! Rob