Attached Link: The Bubble Theory

Nice one Noel, thats an awful lot of render time, good job it wasn't an animation. Chris-S

13 hours?? WOW! It does look very cool Noel. It has a very surreal feel to it. Nice work! Neal

'Twas the transparency that did it. Each of the 175 bubbles has 75% Transparency, 100% Specularity, 10% Reflection and 5% Diffusion. Render time without the Transparency is around 10 minutes.

Noel, I've been dying to try out one of these monster renders with the new system (Athalon 550 and 256 megs of memory) Do you think you could send me the Bryce file so I can see what I can do? I don't know much about Bryce yet, so I can't set up anything fancy like this at this time. Or anyone else that has a monster-render bryce file I could play with -Darth_Logice

Sure Darth, I just Zipped the file into a tidy 175K package [without the bit-map image] - but I don't have your address handy.

gboycott@mediaone.net

Holy catfish, 13 hours render time!!?? That is why I tend to render characters in Poser and the background in Bryce and cut-and-paste to make the whole picture.

Ive got a PII400 with 384 meg of ram, Id love to give this a stab also, my email is chemical@tcac.com

Noel, if not too late, could you send to me also so I can test out time? lilwolff@hotmail.com What did you do your rendering on? Thank you! smiles

I rendered it on my Micron PII 450 - 256Mb RAM. The check, er... the file is in the mail. ;)

Great image Noel!

Noel, Could you send me the file as well? pennies5@aol.com Thanks!

I'm running a Dual PIII 450 with 256 Mb RAM but Bryce does not take any advantage of dual processor system does it? It should!!! I would like to give it a try too... trimegisto@rocketmail.com

Noel, Just curious. What are your system specs? That is one cool image. Wallpaper anyone?

Noel, My system took 11 hours and 17 minutes to render your scene. Spatial optimization high and just normal antialiasing. Man, it took something like 8 hours just for the antialiasing. Can I then conclude that Bryce 4 does not take any advantage of multiprocessing or mutithreading? If it did my system would have taken far less time don't you agree?

trismegisto, FasTraxx reported about the same amount of render time on his system. No, Bryce does not take advantage of multiple processors. There was word that Bryce was being ported to BeOS, and that this would allow multi-processor support, but the status of this is unknown at this time. My guess is that the people working on that project are now working for some company other than MC. In some ways this is good, because I'd really want to buy a quad PIII with a Gig of RAM, just to run Bryce. But then, I'd want to be doing this kind of picture at print resolution, with volumetric lighting and everything, and the render times would be even longer. ;) There are some ways to speed up the render, like minimizing the program while it renders. This saves about 10% of the render time by not having to write to the screen. But I could have improved this picture's render time by removing the bubbles that can't be seen anyway. The real trick is to balance what you want with what you have. Jeff Richardson does amazing things with his PII 200MHz - I don't know what his render times are like but he is able to acheive his artistic vision with the tools that he has at hand - rather than relying on new hardware to make his life easier. dlfurman - Thanks for the compliment. ;) Like I said above, I have a Micron PII 450MHz w/ 256 Mb RAM - I run Win95.