Gday Folks, hoping you can help me.

When I played with Bryce years ago I tended to just get an image in mind then go for it, expanding my knowledge of the program as I went.

Things like polygons and such like terms weren't something given much thought and now I'm finding with Bryce 7 PRO that maybe I need to learn abit nore about the theory so that I can better manage the images I'm wanting to make.

As a case in point, the image I'm working on at the moment is 600+ meg in size and about 520+ million polygons.

My question is what are the things I need to look out for that will push the image to these types of extremes?

Looking forward to your thoughts,

Ross.

Textures! High quality and kb-heavy jpg textures will make Bryce grind to a halt in a hurry. Also, exotic light settings and shadows.

I agree With Bryster Lights and textures will add a lot to the render time and file size but also the Amount of Boolean Objects you are using will add more to it as well and by the sounds of it you are doing quite complicated and big models. What I suggest you do is make them into different modules and save them as .obp and put them all together once your happy with the results. Also Skies and Clouds will also add a lot to the render time and file size. if you are using Lights have them on a lower setting the brighter they are the slower Bryce will be. Also here is a chart of the render options (basic only I am afraid for a more thorough guide go to youtube David Brinnen has a excellent tutorial on how to play with render options)

here is the link to youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WTYURTvXkw

and above is the file tutorial

Regards

Karl

Thankyou both for your answers, must admit if the mat file isnt hi res I tend to shy away and lights and shadows, just gotta have them :)

Karl, thanks for the video, very imformative.

I downloaded the current bryce to see if I could still remember how to use it and if so maybe make a pic every now and again.

Took about a week to get up to speed but now after seeing all the extra's version 7 has, I'm thinking I'll be back in the newbie section for some time.

Thanks again to both of you for your answers.

Ross.

You might want to consider something else. Much of my stuff is about modelling, complex mechanical parts. I like to create the whole thing so that you can explore it from any angle. However, this means that my models are poly heavy and huge.

While I have no idea what your image will contain, it might be that if you can nail down your point of view (POV) you can 'go hollywood' and remove items in your scene that are simply out of sight of your pov, in much the same way as a hollywood film set would not include the rear of buildings for example, simply because in a movie they would never be seen.

Hi fozzibear

Brysters right you might want to consider another program as Bryce is mainly used as a scene builder and making objects like space craft and engines (which it is fantastic at) take time and lots of Polygons. But Bryce is a easy program to learn a yet takes time to master and is well worth the effort and thinking about it 3d studio max lightwave and other modellers will all have faults of some kind. Heres an idea Compress files you are not using at the moment and delete the originals and unzip when you need them again.

I hope that helps

Karl

Thanks again for your thoughts.

After starting to read The Amtrak Wars for the umptenth time I've decided to do a series of pics on that world as I see it.

So, we have a futuristic wagon train, assorted support vehicles and bits and pieces. The first pic is in the hanger where the wagon train is prepped for the next mission.

There is a section in the first book that describes the wagon train heading up a tunnel to the surface so after building the wagon train I decided the tunnel was next and thats where I struck the first problem, all four sides of each tunnel was put together adding up to 16 terrians with high res images used as bump maps and textures then that had to be multiplied by 50 to get the length of the wagon train inside. Looked fantastic but then when I went to load the wagon train as well......................well, you can guess...................CRASH. OH, there was 50 lights in the tunnel as well.

The tunnel is on the back burner for now.

I was wondering if more Ram would help.

How much Ram do you have the minimum to run Bryce 7 Pro is at least 1 Gigabyte I have 4 Gigabytes of ram and it works pretty well. Do you own a Windows Computer or a Macintosh pc because Bryce has issues in Mac osx Lion (it will not work) and in snow leopard it will not import pictures so you would need either Bryce 6.3 or Daz Studio to transfer over to the different platforms. Once an image is made into a .br7 file it will not work in lower versions (even 6.3 so use it wisely) What type of Train are you making because I have a free download of the international flying scotsman in Bryce 7 you can use it if you like.

Try dimming the lights a bit if it keeps crashing you can do this by lowering the intensity and specular.

Good Luck

Karl

The textures will slow things down as will the light (though the intensity of them will make no difference)  Its not really a polygon issue if you are using bryce booleans as Bryster has pointed out, it takes some beating.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1638165&username=Rochr&member&np Rochr with another stunner.

 The bryce boolean works very well for distance, with a square edge. If you start trying to boolean chamfer, bevel, etc it gets somewhat complicated and this is where the mesh modeling should come in. Its about how much detail you need.

International flying scotsman?

You can model most things in Bryce with a little patience.

Another thing to consider is if you know where the camera will be you could use an image plane in place of some of the distance objects, I have done this before by creating a model and then rendering it, and then using that as a texture for a plane thus reducing that item to a single poly, helpful if the thing is a background made up of 2 bookcases with multitudes of books in them plus a fireplace, and paneled walls, reducing all that to a single poly helps a lot.

And I know someone once used to create entire armies this way, all the background figures would be single poly planes, with only the foreground figures actual humans... or in his case, orcs.

You have to be consistant with lighting, but it saves oodles!

Thanks again folks for all the ideas.

To answer one of the questions, my computer has 1 gig of ram.

I now find myself with another problem. Four times now I've rebuilt the current scene, rendered it and then I go to save, hit file, save as and bryce decideds its time to freeze solid.

Actually, I believe the technical term is hang, is the any way to make bryce unhang itsself?

This is the image I saved from the print sceen.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2327835

If you saved in increments as you built the scene with different file names, try going back to an earlier version and open it. Try to save it under an new file name.  If all is okay there, I suspect you are working with a corrupted file.  Or possibly you have pushed the memory capacity to its limits and the save process is taxing your computer beyond its capabilities. 1 gig of ram isn't very much when it comes to 3D graphics.

The image's br7 file was saved as 26 different versions, each file opens and saves fine until the very last one.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm in the same position as when I was using bryce a few years ago, not enough ram, damkit.

Light is not the problem!

Seems many of you are not paying attention to the Render Report. Look at the ray firings of primary, secodary, and shadow rays. Here is where your questions will be answered. You will notice the more point lights you use the faster the shadow ray count increases. Usually shadow rays outnumber light rays by 400% for me. Understanding shadows is more important than understanding light when it comes to determining render times.

There are a few areas of confusion or misinformation in some of the previous posts I will address as follows:

Point Lights:

The default sun, radials, spotlights, all of these are considered point light sources. IBL, Domes, 3D Fills are cluster forms, made up of multiple point radials all managed as one. Point raidals have no physical size so they produce hard shadows by default. More on that in a moment.

There is a common misconception in the Bryce community that light is the enemy. On the contrary, it is the lack of appropriate lighting that ruins lots of Bryce renders daily. I will explain. Light is your friend and to get amazing results you need more than just the default sun and some ambience glow. There is so much more to lighting than that.

karl.garnham1,

Please have a look at my gallery:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=496780

I have pushed the limits on Bryce with indoor and outdoor lighting many times. Dimming light is unecessary and is likely detrimental to the final output. Bryce is already known and ridiculed for producing low contrast images. More light, not less, is the way to go. More contrast in the result is a good thing.

The brightness of a lightsource has no direct bearing on render time. You must have misunderstood something at some point in the videos. David and I have been friends for nearly 7 years and I dont remember him ever saying that. Light is not the issue. Shadows however, there is the rub.

Here are the things that do greatly affect render speeds:

1.Blend Transparency: This is by far the single slowest render function in Bryce aside from full volumetrics. Blend Transparency forces each light ray and each shadow ray fired to be fired multiple times adding to the render calculations. When a light ray strikes a solid object it stops and then a shadow ray is fired by the model onto othe rmodels. But when it hits a transparent object a second light ray must be fired along with a shadow ray. No wonder times increase as they do.

1. Normal Transparency: As mentioned above, transparency in general increases render time because secondary rays must be fired. But with optical transparency there is also the issue of internal reflection, which also increases render time.

2. Reflection: Reflection adds greatly to render time because it means more secondary light rays need to be fired as one surface reflects another. Limit reflection to where you need it.

3. Materials: You can light a scene using thousands of point light sources. If the materials are all neutral gray the scene will render in mere minutes. If however you have complex patterns in the materials, obviously the render will take more time. Lights alone are not the issue, it is the light combined with the textures that increase render time.

5.Shadow Intensity: By default the sunlight shadow intensity setting in the sky lab is 90%. The shadow setting in the skylab serves as the master shadow switch for all subsequent lights in the scene. Turn off sun shadows, it turns off all shadows for all lights. While 90% seems good at first, it adds to render time. Lower shadow intensity means that rays that would normally stop when they strike an object are instead fired a second and third and 20th time as they penetrate every surface in the scene on their way back to the camera. Believe it or not 100% shadow intensity speeds rendering.

6.Shadows 101: Lack of shadows is one of the things that makes Bryce renders look so cartoonish. In real life all light, even indirect skylight casts soft shadows that help reveal model contours and shape, making the image look 3d instead of flat and 2d. Lack of shadows will make the result look flat and 2d, which is usually not the goal. This is why IBL looks so good, because it gives both light and shadow from multiple directions just like in real life.

Scenes with a high degree of geometric complexity take longer to render due to increased shadows. Volumetric planes with detailed clouds take longer to render than less detailed clouds again due to the detail in the shadows.

Shadows are indeed what tend to cost the most render time, but they are essential. More lights means more shadows, so there is some degree of legitimacy to the notion that lights add to render time. IBL, Domes, and 3D Fills are comprised of multiple virtual point radials, so they add to render time. But if you think that the default sun and ambience alone are going to get you amazing results, you are wrong. We need light, so even if it takes a bit of time to render the results should be worth it. The more lights, the more you must avoid blend transparency. Dont use billboard trees if you want a fast render, use real 3d trees.

Ambience is evil and should be avoided at all costs whenever possible. Ambience bakes away the shadows that make a render look 3d. Replacing ambinece and skydome with actual radials floating around to represent light bouncing around the environemnt will give more plausible results.

Fozzibear:

Bryce 7 is not 64 bit, but it is LAA (Large Address aware). Bryce 7 can be pushed beyond 2gb to 3.6gb if you have enough system ram. Look at these two places for all the info you need.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=155519&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556

Dont give up on Bryce. Bryce can do anything. It is right for all projects. Just look beneath the surface and you will see that Bryce is very capable.

Lastly, Bryce 6.3 is probably the slowest rendering release of Bryce yet. There was a bit of a snaffu if you will where Bryce 6.3 was released accidentally without a certain form of optimization being enabled. The results are that 6.1 is about 65% faster than 6.3. A step backward, I agree. Daz didnt seem too conccerned because they knew they had B7 coming out shortly afterward and it indeed has the opimization both enabled and updated. B7 is roughly twice as fast as 6.1, even moreso faster than 6.3.

Hi Bryster

Thanks thats a great compliment I have always admired your work they would love your work on Solar Voyager as well(its a space art forum).

Hi rashadcarter

Your work is awesome I bet took a long time to learn how to get that good. And thanks for the information I thought it was the light because everytime I used them the render was slower but thats not the case. My work is mostly space ships and Engines and I have to admit they are slow renders does the number of Boolean objects have anything to do with the render slowness because they are not always reflective? (although as you have said I did not always remove the ambience) You are completely right about Bryce 6.3 it has a lot of problems(I know because sometimes when I opened a file it automatically crashed) but it has a plus over Bryce 6.1 and even 7 pro in some cases and that is on an mac you can't import pictures in without it crashing and it has another plus that 6.1 does not have it doesn't kill itself when people use Daz Studio 3 to make models .obj (I read that on wikipedia personally I never use anything other than Bryce 6.3 and Bryce 7.1 Pro)

Thank you for your help and showing me you work and sorry for the late reply I have been unwell.

Karl

In my experience, many polygons isnt really an issue in bryce when you use native bryce objects such as terrains and booleans.

Might get different if you import an object from an external program.. but i havent really pushed those past half a million polygons a piece i think.. at least not that i can remember.