Just wondering if anyone has used the network rendering option in bryce 5 yet. I have a picture that uses about 250megs of resources in win2k excluding other os overhead. If i were to network render, does each computer have to have its own copy or bryce running and would each system need the same amount of ram as the main 'power user' computer you do most of your work on. On a purely license issue, are you expected to buy one copy for every single machine you plan to render farm too?

My copy is "on the truck" as they say, but what I've read indicates that its a license-free network renderer. Beyond that, I don't know yet... but wish I did. :-) TomD

Not sure about your other questions, but the Bryce 5 CD comes with a program called "Bryce Lightning". You give that to each of the computers that'll be doing the network render, they don't need to have Bryce 5. (I may be wrong about something up there, my network is currently down so I can't test it.)

Yes.. In the Bryce Lightning license, it has this: B. YOU MAY: 1. make unlimited copies of the Product for use only on your local area network.

You are all correct, liscence free network rendering, and only the rendering computers need to have Bryce Lightning installed on them, only the puter being used as the server needs to have Bryce itself installed.

I've tried out the Network render already, and I'm very impressed. I networked two 500 MHZ PIII's, and my render time for a large image was cut by more than half. For those of you who like to create short movies in Bryce, Network rendering is a godsend.

I got my copy yesterday and immediately set up network rendering between my host PII 450, my SO's Celeron 300, and my P233 laptop. I took an image that I've been working on, turned up the Premium Render settings (glutton for punishement that I am) for soft shadows, blurred transparency, etc. and let it rip. First, it was really really easy to set up. All I did was install the Bryce Lightning renderer on the two client machines. Upon running them the told me their IP address and say waiting. Then I ran the host, set up to network render (render animation - one frame, with tiling on). The host found the clients with no trouble and they immediately started talking. The host started rendering while the clients were still receiving data. No problem. I started the render last night at about 10 PM - it ended this morning, I'm guess at somewhere between 8 - 8:30 AM -- AFTER I had to go to work (grrr....) So, assuming it worked - it renders to disk, not screen - and assuming I like how it looks, I'm very impressed, cause it took about 8 hours to render that image without all the fancy bells and whistles of Premium Rendering. Now, from watching the rendering going on I really really wish there was a better sense of the progress of the render. While you can see what tile number the clients are currently rendering and their % complete, you can only see what the % complete of the host's task is, not what tile its on, so you kinda have to guess where in the process things are. I'd also like more information like average rendering time per tile per machine, and so on, but I'm weird that way. :-) TomD