Hi All, I read with great interest the Render thread below, about long Bryce times. One poster suggested, rendering on a second machine. Great, if you have it. If you have it - how do you PACKAGE all the files for the render. IE: I would guess you would have Bryce on both machines, right? So you want to take your work files off machine 1 and put to machine 2 to render, right? ( burned CD rom, i would guess ) But I know Machine 2 bryce, will Bitch, if it doesnt have ALL the files it needs to render the main Bryce file. My question is: HOW do you collect all the odds and end files to give to machine 2? I hope thats clear.......... thanks Mighty Brycians! Kathy

Haven't tried it yet but B5 comes with a network render package that is supposed to do all that for you. All you need is the plugin loaded on the other machine from what I hear.

With two machine...1 has Bryce 5 installed and the has Bryce Lightning installed (for the network render) I have i second cpu with only Bryce Lighting installed and work perfectly.

Not tending to use Bryce 5 a lot, I tend to do my modeling and poser work on one system, and then just transfer the exported files and associated textures over to the other system, and then import into the scene I built and render. I'm a bit atypical... I have two systems, and my roommate has two, and we both own bryce 4, so there's almost always a system not in use to do something on. And my internet system is completely seperate from all of those. Quick tip: if it's a file you're importing, it speeds things up to have all of the textures and other files in the same folder when you import - then bryce can find them faster without constantly asking you where they are. I'm afraid there's no real shortcut on gathering them up except to keep track of them while you're designing the poser figure or whatever model, and dropping them into a work folder as you go. [That I've found at least] If it's a bryce file you've already built, you've already gone through that tedious process... Bryce will already have the textures etc you need in the scene file, so you just transfer the file and open it up. I find a lot of times on my 600, I can minimise Bryce while it renders and work in another app without increasing my render time too much. [Keeping in mind that I tend to build scenes with a lot of reflection and other long render time features, so adding a few extra hours to a render that's already going to take several days doesn't bother me much.] Hope any of this helped a bit - it's late and past my bedtime. ;]

Wow, thanks for replys. Don't think I installed that lighting. 1. But don't you need a network card in both computers to run that? 1. Any tut how to set that up in win 98 or ME? 2. I REMEMBER NOW!! : my edit prog has a PACKAGE setting. You can package all files of a project in there. Works great! Does Bryce have anything like that? Are you saying that one tiny bryce file has ALL the info needed? I dont think so. Any perfect ideas, how I package it to burn to a CD - if I cant figure out the lighting ( network ? ) way. Now I'm getting frustrated and sad. Kathy

Yeah... with the exception that if you have several poser figures, lots of geometry, and tons of materials, especially image textures, it won't be a "tiny bryce file". ;] I have several bryce files on my drives that run from 60mb to 190mb [unzipped]. That's the main reason bryce files get big - they store all the textures, image textures, and other information within the scene file. [Poser .pz3 files can get huge also, but they don't store everything within. I'm still trying to figure out how that bit of file bloat gets so large] I don't realy have any "perfect ideas" on it other than what I mentioned, organizing the textures and elements into a work folder as I build them so they're all in one place when I'm ready to import into bryce. Yeah... as I understand it, to network render Bryce 5 you'll need a net work render in both systems.

190 mg Holy Moly! I have to check those again. thats good news if all the stuffs in the one file!!!. I figured it was like other progs - where the main file - just POINTS to the source files. COOL.......COOL BRYCE..........NICE BRYCE.......... COOL AS ICE..........super cool BRYCYCLES....... Kathy " I'm Freezing"

Glad it helped. ;] Typically, it's imported geometry that makes a file huge. Especially poser .obj exports with tons of image textures. You can cut that a bit by reducing the images size and compressing the jpgs that will go in the bryce file. Bryce will scale the images when it maps the textures anyway. [I'm lazy, so a lot of times I skip that step - hence the huge size of some of my bryce files]

Wow - I just noticed I've got some up to 70 mg! and that puppy took 75 hours +++ to render!!!!!!!! yeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!! Kathy