I was just wondering, can Bryce 4 use the rendering capabilities of your video card... I'm just wondering, cause that would be a way to get quicker renders...

only when in dirext x or open gl modes, and all it does is increase your redraw time. Only thing that really speeds up render time is faster cpu and more ram.

That's what I thought but someone suggested that the card might work and I figure, let me ask the experts... thanks...

It's about time we got this straight. No matter what video card you have or what 3D software you use. THe card will not effect render times in any way. THe graphics card has nothing to do with the process that creates your final image or animation file. It only effects the speed of your interface while using the modeling or animation program. Also it will determine animation playback quality and frame rate.

Bryce files are mostly number crunching as I understand it. That's not a function of the video, its a function of the math processor in your chip. What you see is not what's happening inside. The image sizes are only a few k, maybe a few megs if you render at large format. So, that should tell you that the real work is not being done on the video card, but in the processor chip/ram. Bryce is ahead of its time. Maybe some day AMD will come out with a 20ghz/640bit chip that accesses a strait pipe to some 4xDDR 666 ram and then we can render faster. Until then, find ways of reducing render time. Reducing bump height when its not needed, using a simple color with transparency instead of water textures when you can, reducing specularity/refraction/reflection where you can, avoiding volumetrics when you can, etc. Use the resource hogs only when necessary.

Well, I guess I didn't state the question clearly... I was more interested in speeding up screen redraws and things of that nature, so that when you're doing previews and stuff, would the card render onscreen quicker for viewing sake, like when the card is used for video game... Not for final results sake..

But I got the message... :)

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.

Forgive me, my spellchecker is on vacation and I'm having to spell this stuff my self. ;]

Thanks Sherman, I'll keep that in mind as well...

Np. ;]

Just uncheck antialiasing. Bryce is sooooo slow at this. I get a 6X speed increase.