I like the fell that my image is starting to get, but I'm worried about render time if I make it anymore complex. So any ideas on keeping the feel of this and improving the composition while cutting back on reder time. This small image took me a day to render(Yes, 24 Hrs.).

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=77704&Start=25&Sectionid=2&WhatsNew=Yes

Would love to know the specs on your computer, the pic I did in the attached link has about two dozen trees and took 3.5 hours to render on a Celeron 566 with 256meg of ram.

Yeah, make sure your sky isn't set to be volumetric, or at least reduce the settings for it drastically (done in the sky lab). That simple pic of that size shouldn't have taken that long at all. Or, perhaps it is your render settings, I've heard Bryce 5 has some computer-crippling high-end settings. I don't have Bryce 5 (I assume that is what you are using) BUT...I DO have an almost obsolete-slow-butt speed computer and I do much more complex scenes in way less time. The only time I took 24 hours to render was a 45Mb .br4 file with 200 objects in it.

Wow! How on earth did you manage to twist the tree trunk - I thought you could only get those "telegraph pole" trunks?

Found a major part of the problem, the tree itself. I played with the tree lab for a couple of hours, but finally got feed-up with how stupid most of the trees look. So, I downloaded Tree Generator 1.2 from Cnet. With TreeGen I was able to make a fairly-good tree. What makes it look so good is also a major part of the bottleneck, its got almost 40,000 polys. For those who wanted specs, I have an AMD K6II 500 with only 128Mb of RAM. Yes, I know, old.

I'd say get a faster system. I have a PIII 450, 256 meg ram no speedster by today's standards. I rendered the same tree in under 2 mintues.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=78132&Start=1&Artist=darthuv&ByArtist=Yes

It's fixed. Problem, complex fx on texture (Plasma Fire). Plasma Fire has an awesome effect be it really eats time. I think it may be trying to fill objects volumetricly.