Quote - I've used range fall-off on all the lights; the scene is intended to look as natural as possible.

I'd doublecheck if they're reduced to as little range as possible. (aka, if u only realistically get stuff in a radius of 50 bryce units lit theres no use using a limit of 200 units)

Quote - 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.

Sounds good. Also no volumetric world i assume?

Quote - 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.

It's a top view right? in that case those glass things should be barely visible. I'd either remove them or, if u really really have to, use something with plain transparency (u know the kind that doesnt refract). The surfaces might not have many visible pixels but if theres lights behind the glass windows the glass will still slow down the rendering of those lights.

Quote - 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....

Check if ur grass plane texture can be made as low-res as possible. A plane that shows as a few pixels doesnt need a map of 1024x1024 for instance. This might save u some memory usage which will possibly speed up the scene

Quote - but that would probably take as long as the rendering.

Are u sure? If u think u can optimize things significantly, i'd say its worth a shot! And if u cant avoid a render-time debacle, make sure u tactically inform your client before its absolutely totally last-minute

Quote - 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.

If you're gunna render in segments anyways, try spliting your scene up to multiple scenefiles each containing only area's of your total scene that cover mainly the segment you're gunna render. If that's possible for your scene-setup. (even grand master rochr seems to use multiple seperate renders of different parts of scenes, it's really an efficient trick!)

Quote - 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.

For a full-page professional magazine print in magazines such as 3dworld 2500 to 3000 pixels wide or high generally suffice. thats for almost 30cm of image width or height. I wonder if that's a decent guideline?

Quote - 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

Dont worry, it's a know problem Takes lotsa saving before u can buy the fast system. But once u got it, it's so worth it! haha. Anyways... if ur lookin into a carreer of professional 3d graphics it might be a good idea to also slowly start looking into some other software that renders faster. Especially if you love to do highly complicated scenes. Faster renders are just that little bit less stressfull when workin for a client u know :biggrin:

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