I have a scene which I believe would benefit from the use of network rendering using Bryce Lightning.  The scene is relatively small (~150MB), but has quite a bit of lighting and softened shadows.

My "farm" would consist of three machines: two that are roughly equal (a P4 3GHz/1GB RAM and an Athlon 3200/1GB RAM), and a much weaker machine (P3 800MHz/512 MB RAM) for use as the host.  The machines are connected via Ethernet, WiFi, and a Linksys router.

I was wondering if there was anyone with experience using Bryce Lightning who could tell me if I was likely to see an increase in render speed with this setup.

For animations, yes, but I don't know by how much...for large stills Im not sure, but the manual seems to suggest it does. On my two direct connected systems(2.2ghz & 2.0ghz AMD 64), B6 L2.0b is slower with large stills, than just using one host. Maybe I need 3 clients to get the benefit, so it might work for 3 or more.

I ran some tests network rendering with the two faster computers, and discovered that in Bryce 6/Lightning 2 the host isn't used to render the scene.  Monitoring CPU usage showed the host at zero percent most of the time, with spikes up to 20%.  Definitely not the behavior of a machine performing a complex render.

If that's true, and there's no way to get the host to work on the render, then a two computer network would be slower due to network overhead.  Or did you mean two clients and one host (three computers total)?

And for further reference, the scene I'm working on is a still image.

In Bryce 5 there is a tick box to render on host, but I think with your machines this would slow the overall thing down. The host would pass 3 tiles, one to itself and one to each of the lightning machines, the problem is it only gives new tiles when all tiles are complete, so you would be waiting on the host machine to complete all the time.

The host will work on the render if you run a separate Lightning .exe on it, but the host/IP dot in setup will show a broken red dot for host(it will still work though so just ignore dot). The host will take it time to start if your using it(up to 5 min for large scenes). Gog_CA1, may have explained why I get slower renders using my host and client machine on the same scene at the same time using tiles. 

Smaller files, I have got better render times, but larger still scene files bog something down and the times are slower(this is with my host and one client rendering). So I guess you have to have at least two clients working and host just watching to get a benefit. There is an overhead with Bryce Lightning which may be the reason most don't use it(and Bryce REALLY NEEDS A NETWORK, lol). So I guess we'll have to wait for an update to it. My Shade 8 app on the same network almost cuts my times in half with host and client rendering, why Bryce doesn't is beyond me.

edit: oh yeah, I re-read my first post, I meant at least two clients, with the host just watching not rendering.