Quote - Here is the offending render.

I think my problem was my enormous universe.  I created several enormous terrains and then used the small corner where they came together to stage my scene at.  I ended up with lots of terrain polys that were not shown in the render and probably should have been deleted in the terrain editor.

I had that problem with renders at first. What I do with my terrains now is enlarge them to the maximum along the X axis and Z axis. This helps to get around the high poly count problem.

Sometimes though it is necessary to use more than one terrain, especially if you want to use one to add features of a different type to the other. One way to solve the poly count problem in such cases is to positive boolean all of them, group your terrains together and then click on the little square with the C in it. What the C is for is to convert boolean groups to a single mesh, which in most cases will reduce the poly count for the object, (especially multiple terrains as they usually have higher poly counts than most other shapes).

I did not know about this feature of Bryce at first. Then I found the Bryce 7 Artist's Guide PDF file and downloaded it. I highly recommend it! I learned a lot about Bryce very quickly by following the instructions in the guide. There is still a lot to learn, but at least it is a very useful guide and is very easy to follow.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013.