Attached Link: Help! Render impaired!

I have hit the wall on render speed, my 800mhz intel takes 7-9 days to render some of my work at the default image size,and just opening/ saving files can take an hour or more. Can I dramatically improve this by going to a new dual processor system with a gig of ram, or am I barking up the wrong tree, should I give up on Bryce and learn Maya?

Dude! 7-9 DAYS? At 480x360? What in the name of all that is holy are you rendering? Three-hundred glass dominoes falling over on themselves, underwater...surrounded by reflective sand? (just a guess, lol) Ram will increase the size of the file you can open, and most likely the speed at which it is opened, but rendering speed all comes down to cpu speed. And, yes a new faster pc will help, yet I have heard that Bryce 4 will not be improved by a dual cpu system. Anyone else know anthing on that point? There HAS to be something you can do to optimize your scene, man. I know your scenes have a LOT of glass and reflections, but wow...7-9 days...

By the way...I LOVE your kinetic sculptures!

Thanks for the input agentsmith, I had not heard that dual processors will not help bryce.....got a sinking feeling when I read that bit! Need to research that more I guess. I've really tried to optimize things as much as I know how to.......the stuff you see on the website is not the heavy duty files I am dealing with, the worst of those images only took a day or two at most. Right now I am working on the Nautilus, doing a complete set of interior models, and cap' Nemo was a notable packrat....he had a lot of stuff crammed into that boat. I had to break up the lower decks alone into three seperate files just to allow my machine to handle them. The big headache at the moment is the Library, even though just the spines of the books are real the total number of objects is staggering, I am thinking I'll probably wind up having to paste 2-d images of the books into the fronts of the bookshelves to progress, although that leaves the depth/ texture effects somewhat wanting when rendered. And I still have to add the furniture and lights! Gads. I originally envisioned a cutaway file shot of the whole boat, but even though it's only about halfway done, if I merged all the decks together my machine would freeze solid, and starting a render is out of the question. ( that's with no background, water, sky, or atmosphere by the way)

If you have computers at work, Bryce 5 will let you network render stuff, so you can have several things crunching at the same time. I assume you've already eliminated screen savers, background apps, internet stuff, etc while you're rendering, checked system resources and maxed out the free resources. Are you using soft shadows on everything or some monstrously unnecessary antialiasing level? Maybe bumping up your swap files settings would help some, if your system is making frequent saves then over time the disk access speed will become limiting to your process...can't think of much else. Anyone else care to offer opinions? I do love the Triton speedster...can I get mine in red?

Your 3d work seems very exciting and I can well understand how the "Nexis Platform at Midnight" with glass, reflections and lights could take several hours if not half a night. I think the solution you're proposing is the way to go, doing shelves of books as maps rather than individual objects. You might be able to achieve some "depth" using a bump map in a separate channel. Also, if you haven't found out by now, whatever you can construct within Bryce, primitives, booleans, and/or metaballs, this is far more advantageous than importing meshes, modeled elsewhere. I did a 1930's teletype machine in Electric Image and brought it into Bryce. The keyboard alone was around 58K polys, but when duplicated four times, it totally crippled the program. I then did a Photoshop grayscale and Bryce terrain. Having almost three times as many polys, Bryce not only rendered quicker even when multi-copied, but the redraw also remained fast. good luck, manowar

Thanks Manowar; Indeed, I try to construct as much as possible in Bryce, and I sure would like to develop better skills with the terrain editor, a years practice has apparently not been enough for me! :(

Attached Link: http://www.planet-3d.com/garage.htm

I have some tips here that may be of help. Later, Phillip

You mentioned that you try to do as much modelling in Bryce as possible. Does that include a lot of Boolean work? That will slow things down dramatically. If need be, model in another app and import. Rubycon

That point about Bryce 4 not benefiting from a dual cpu is just something I have read in other forums. While that seems logical to me, I don't know it for an absolute fact. E-mail corel, they can tell you for sure.

Hey If your Kinetic Sculptures are anything to go by, your Nautilus will be fantastic! I did a VERY simple internal of the Nautilus (based on an external model I found somewhere) as in my gallery,,, See! It's really Poo! Please post an image! We'd love to see it! Bryce4 cannot use both processors on a dual system but Bryce 5 CAN. The network rendering capabilities can use the second processor as a 'slave' machine.

You never did mention exactly how much ram you have vice the amount of ram being used by the file? Also which operating system are you running? I know from experience that as bryce approaches 80% of your physical ram being used it starts swapping. This gets worse fast. Ive had a picture take 4 days of steady hardware swapping on the drives, installed more ram and test rendered the same pic at 17 hours. Therefore, if bryce is at 300 megs and you have only 256megs installed, your going to run into serious issues. I do understand the 45mins-hour opening a file though, happened to me on my last posted pic. The raw .br5 file was 720megs though, luckily zippable to 360megs to be burnt.

Hogwarden how can the network rendering use the second processor as a slave since it uses IP address to do this. Aren't both processors on the same IP address? I have a dual gig powermac and I would love to be able to do this, but I don't see how. Also everytime I try to use host render with a net render bryce5 crashes. My only successful net renders work with slaves and the host not participating.