Attached Link: here's a little screenie of what I'm doing:

so, any tips on how I could make Bryce faster? I already tried closing all programs I have open and let it render in peace, but didn't really work out.

Oddly enough, I asked this same thing earlier over at Daz..this is what was told to me that can slow down renders.

• IBL with many lights (high quality),
• with IBL, transparent materials really slows things down,
• many light sources,
• soft shadows,
• high frequency procedural materials,
• Premium render options,
• volume materials,

not sure if that helps you any..but be patient..lots of helpful folks around here as well :o)

I didn't use any lights, only a white background :0

I used the super fine rendering option, no soft shadows, and the default materials of glass and green metallic material, that's all. which is why it's bugging me.

Hmm,..well maybe too a high polygon count..i/e detail..I'm just guessing here now..but I have noticed that in my rendering at times. You might check and make sure too..there isnt a lot of other stuff running in your task manager hogging up memory like those pesky svchost things.. a big hog too is Firefox..so dont go googling while you render..

Really though..most times I do renders..I just back up from the pc..let it go..and just go take a nap.. LOL

Generally speaking, it's soft shadows that can slow things down, but if you're not using it, then it could be anything...processor speed. There is a 'priority' control which can be set to low, medium or high, however, it's set at medium as default.

 One thing you can try is to stop the render, save the scene and then exit. The restart Bryce and reload the scene, and resume the render. This should clear the cache and give you a little more speed.
 

If your screensaver kicks in, it can also slow things down, considerably.  When I render an image, I usually change the wait time on the screensaver to about 700 or 800 minutes before it will kick in.  That allows plenty of time for the render to 'do its thing.'

Loads of reflective surfaces there. I'm not surprised it's slow.

TheBryster: so the reason it's slow is just because of how reflective it is? there's nothing I could do, right?

in that case, I'll just leave it in peace.

Yup, that's my reading of this. Bryce has never been the fastest kiddy on the block, but the results are worth waiting for.
If you had a mulit-core porcessor you could take advantage of B6.1's priority settings. But failing that, I'm afraid doing some housekeeping, disabling your screensaver and shutting down stuff that runs in the background on your 'puter is just about all you can do to speed things up. 

Of course, you could open two versions of Bryce, select the top half of one screen to render, and the bottom half of the screen in the other Bryce. When finished, combine them in an art app like photoshop etc.
This is suppose to speed things up a little, it might be worth the try if things take too long.

hmm.. I'll render it on my laptop >=D has better specs than my PC
hur hurr
but for now I gave up and rendered it on normal mode,  it did in 7 minutes what 'super' did in more than an hour.

May want to try renaming the file, close Bryce, re-boot your sys, open the newly named file and try again with render to disk.

If it continues, don't abandon the file, send it to any one of us willing to give it a shot. I'd be more than happy to try for you.

I agree with Bryster.  I see reflective surfaces and transparency in your screen shot.  Hard to tell if soft shadows is enabled. 

My advice... go to bed and hope it is through at breakfast.

edited...  just a note. Watch the preview window.  If it takes more that a few seconds to display, you can count on the larger render being expotentially longer.  You didn't mention final render size.

Ah, that's a matmatical type of TopMod model eh?

Looks like you are going to have to take the render time hit.

I see transparent parts layered all over reflective parts, that's the recipe for long render times. (Along with higher polygon counts, which I understand is needed for a smooth looking mesh/render - I've done that too)

Yet, I see no high frequency detail going on, so IMHO, you could easily go without rendering on the Fine AA setting. That would speed things up to an amazing degree.

Fine AA settings truly only help with fine patterned details and/or small/fine parts (ropes, anttenea's, etc) But, I've done that also. Sometimes you just wanna take the render to the max.  ;o)

P.S. - I gotta also agree, since there are no areas of noticable shadows, make sure any and all soft shadows are turned off, that would make a huge difference also. (if you do have any activated)

AS

 Try going into the render options and cutting  the Max Ray Depth from 6 to 4 (or even 3). This may not work for you because you may end up with some obvious non reflective/transparent polys but certainly can cut down on rendering time.

 Turning off TIR might also speed things up, though it'll make your glass possibly look a little darker..

I agree with skiwillgee..just set it..forget it..once it is done (whenever) you can save it and move on to quicker things. Maybe take in that DVD you been waiting to see, or visit an old friend  :)**

Makes you wonder what kind of super computer they made Bryce on..and managed to leave all the stuff turned on, and it work ..LOL

**

Early Bryce versions used to be referred to as Sleepware.

I use to set up a scene, hit render, go to bed, and the next evening after getting home from work and having dinner I'd go take a look at where it was up to. If it was finished I'd move on. If not, I'd get a pen and paper and start designing my next CPU killer.

Now, with the multi core processor and enough memory to choke a large elephant ,I set up a scene, hit render and go to bed. The next night after............

The NEXT step (which Daz mentioned like 4 years ago) is to have the cores on your video card also help out the rendering. It's supposed to make a dramatic difference.

In fact Nvidia had just recently released some new software called CUDA that will start letting software developers do this for a wide variety of different software.

The CUDA software is free and works with any Nvidia 8000, 9000 or GTX video cards.

We need to plea to Daz to get this going for Bryce (and the rest of their software)

 Actually AS the second generation of Tesla's is comming out soon, or maybe its out already. These are special Nvidia cards made specifically for massively parrallel computing just about anything.

CUDA is not as much a software in the traditional sense of the word, its more a programming environment for C (a programming language) made to enable programmers to develop software for parrallel GPU's :-)

Version 2.0 of CUDA has been released and many cool apps have been written with it so far. However they seem to be limited to scientific programs as far as i can tell.. I havent found anything for maya, max, xsi or other larger apps yet, so i doubt DAZ will be introducing it to bryce very soon either :(

Yup, I got my statement a little wrong there. Nvidia cards that can use CUDA are;
"GeForce 8, 9, & 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB of local graphics memory"
Also, there are Nvidia Tesla and Quadro's listed. See the whole list here;

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html

As far as using CUDA to harness the Video Cards multiple cores for rendering 3D scenes...just give it some time, it will happen.

I would just love to help convince DAZ to put somebody on it, toot sweet.  ;o}

Register and upgrade to version 6.1?
Go to where you set the quality and two down is the priority. Click on it and set priority to High to access your dual core and use more than 50% of the processor.

Electro is wise.