Another trick that Eric left out was grouping. Group your scenes logically - Susan Kitchens gives and excellent breakdown of how to optomize a scene for rendering in the RealWorld Bryce books. Effectively, a ray tracing engine calculates everything that the ray could hit in a scene, and wether it actually intersects it or not. When you have grouped and subgrouped items, it calculates if it's going to hit the group, and if not it moves on to the next group or item. If it hits the group, it checks to see if it will hit one of the subgroups, and so on... Loical grouping can speed up render times significantly if you have a complex scene with lots of items.

"I am a good person now and it feels... well, pretty much the same as I felt before (except that the headaches have gone away now that I'm not wearing control top pantyhose on my head anymore)"

• Monkeysmell