I've watched people complain and bitch about the speed of bryce's rendering, I am here to say I don't get the debate, I jst recently upgraded y system, the comparisons between the old and new are below, and a picture that took about an hour to render before now only took 15min, what is everyones complaint, you pay for what you get. Old New IBM APTIVA NO BRAND NAME AMD 500mhz PIII 933Mhz 128meg RAM 256 megs On board video card ATI 64 VIVO card SB Live SB Live 10gig HDD 30gig HDD win 98 win 98 20X CDRom 40X CDRom/DVD so with these changes I improved render time by 4X, why does everyone still complain, I can't wait until I get another 256megs of Ram and then see the render times.

LOL, are you taking the p*ss? Bryce renders slowly. If you increase the speed of your processor-memory system, it will render faster. Big deal. It's still slow compared to most other programs out there. If you use one of those programs, like Cinema4D, you will also see an improvement with faster hardware. Render speeds for that program will go from fast to very fast. Bryce will still be relatively much slower. That's what people 'bitch' about; and when the new version renders slower than the old version for no beneficial reason, they 'bitch' even more. BTW, unless Bryce is writing to disk (virtual memory) because of large files, you won't speed up rendering by adding more RAM.

Save your money... rendering speed does not improve with more memory :( I have ran extensive tests on this and after 256 megs..no difference. The only thing that makes a difference is number crunching power.. or Floating Point Calculations. So far the best for this is the AMD Thunderbird, if you are an Intel fan sorry, this is nothing against them, but I have ran it on many machines with all kinds of memory and CPU's including a 1.1, 1.3, Thunderbird and P4's at basically the same speeds. So don't expect a big improvement if anything adding memory. Hope that helps save you a little ;)

Bryce 5 renders even slower than Bryce 4. However, I guess I will just use it for final renders...and adding some special stuff at the end. I do seem to notice a nice quality on the b 5 renders. I also do like the render percentage being shown at the bottom of my screen. I can leave, do other things, and not run into having a render pick up the "on screen" image, if i am off wandering.

I'm close to a machine upgrade, and was looking at the TBird. I'm glad to hear someone comment on it - are there other oppinions about processors which are best for Bryce / other 3D apps?

Yes Bryce 5 is slower on my AMD 600 MHZ/448MB of Ram. But that an inherent trait with Bryce, yes I wish Corel had done something to speed it up. But the render quality is oustanding, luckily I don't use it for animating too much. I can render a 4200x3200 pixel detailed image in Carrara in about 30-40 minutes, and it looks incredible, but when I want landscape scenes(which is what I use Bryce for) I have no other choice but Bryce. At first I was not very happy with the upgrade, but the new features(despite the render speeds) make it worth my $99 bucks. kaom

Attached Link: http://www.ozartnet.com.au/ultraart

Aloha: Here is an image that took seven (7) days (24hr/day) to render (G3 300MHz), but we printed it at 120cm x 120cm (48"x48"), and it was the hit of the show. The image can be viewed with a pair of ChromaDept 3-D glasses. Can anyone tell us how to get the Bryce 5 upgrade at $99? Thanks, Walt Flood, Agent for Thomas McCluskey, Digital Artist

Compusa

Bryce is just gonna be slow. You can't fix that. Like it was said above, u get what u pay for. I use 3dsmax 4, wich costs upwards of 1000$ to render. It goes about 4x as fast on the same system. A good solution if u have a big lump of money around is to buy something with a better rendering engine than bryce, and just export and import ur scenes. At least its alot faster than RD.

Just for info, im rendering this pic at 'super' with maximum ray depth 20 and tir of 18. Its been rendering for a day and half most of the time. Its render resolution is 1600x1200 but ive dropped down this partial render size. On my 1.2 thunderbird this is taking forever, even when finished i want to attempt to remove those tiny spheres in the middle and see if i was re-render just the egg shape on left with 0 reflection. If i can ovoid redoing the whole scene i will. The 4 replicated diamonds in the make even this fairly fast cpu choke. I recommend you try making a scene with lotsa glass and volume textures and you might reconsider the speed that you think bryce has.

Render is a function of the processor in Bryce. Most new software needs faster processors. That's the game. You want to use an old processor? Feel free to do you ascii text on an 8086 machine. You want the fancy stuff? Buy a fancy machine. There's a reason why the Model A went the way of the dinosaur.

15 minute huh? Have you tried rendering a tree? I've been trying to make some forest backdrops for some fantasy characters and I've all but given up because of the time. Even on a 700Mhz every tree adds about 2 hours of render time. Now image making a forest. :(

I have an old PII 450 and each tree certainly does not add 2 hours of rendering time! I've done pictures (at 800x600) with almost 30 trees that took about an hour to render. Watch your leaf materials. If the trees are in the background, remove all bump from the leaf material. Also you can reduce the number of leaves and still have a good looking tree. HTH Spit

I can't speek of Bryce 5, but Bryce 4 added about 1.5 times to the render time for every light added. Something to think about when you place lights. BTW, this is just a FYI.