I am right in the middle of creating a scene in Bryce 5 and for some reason it has decided to take forever and a day to complete even the smallest of tasks, what gives? My picture does contain a couple of 3ds imported flowers and plants, but the rest has been created with Bryce. Can anyone tell me what is going on? My system is an Athlon 1.2 with 512 megs of RAM and a 64 Meg DDR video card.

How much glass, reflections, volumetrics do you have in the scene? Have you turned on the "volumetric world" option in the sky lab? That would REALLY slow you down. Just wondering.

Volumetric is turned off, and while I was checking to see if it was turned on, it took about 4 minutes just to close out the Sky Lab. Could the 3ds objects have anything to do with this slow down? There are no reflective surfaces or glass, just grass bricks and trees.

Since it is the only thing that has changed, it does seem to be the culprit. I have used .3ds vines before and they almost killed me in rendering time. Perhaps, save, restart, and try again? But, barring any other pc oddity, sounds like a complex import slowing you down. Keep checking back, perhaps someone else has ideas.

<< just grass bricks and trees. >> Imported grass can be a rather big file sometime, if it's been duplicated many times it can cause slow downs. Trees are the same, are you talking a wall of imported individual bricks? that could be large to. Here's a couple of thing that may help speed things up some. Work in solo mode when ever possible. Change the wireframe resolution lower ( static, selected and motion ) turn the nano preview to wireframe mode.

I've tried eliminating one object at a time and saving the file as another name, starting the render, to try and find the culprit. I also ran into the gel light bug in bryce. You save the file, exit and return with your sphere light with "gel on". That'll slow it down some too. Good luck

Grass was created by me using a tutorial I found on the web, and they were fairly small patches of grass to boot. Created 2 trees using the tree lab. Bricks were created using a black and white .bmp image then creating and editing a terrain. This really sucks because it is frustrating sitting around waitng for the damn program to finish its business. It's gotten so bad that when I try to select an object to move, it takes forever and a day for the program to make the object avialable to be moved. Then when I do move the object, it has about a 3 or 4 minute delay then decides to move.

Have you checked the file size of your project? I have found that one of the pictures I made, which seemed simple, ended up being 94 megs and doing the exact thing that yours seems to be doing.

Sounds like you have some high polygon objects. Did you use terrains or lattices for the grass? If so at what resolution? and what resolution did you use for the wall? The only time I had a file do what you described, I had 96 MB ram and my scene file was 350 MB ( had a bunch of high polygon count objects )

I have notice an odd phenomenon. e.g.: I'm working on a pretty large Bryce file (50-60Mb), make some changes and then save it. I then start the render and it tells me something atrocious like 5-1/2 hours or much more, and if I let it just go, it takes that damned long to render. On the other hand, if I stop the render after the first pass when it shows the 5hr estiomated time, change to a different view, such as top, then back to my main view, and/or click on some object (sometimes I have to do both) and make a TINY change, such as moving it 0.01 z+, I can then click on the render button and after the first pass it gives me an estimated render time of something like 35-45min, and that's roughly how long it actually takes. I've duplicated this with a lots of files, and it's weird, but it seems to work every time for me. (B4 on a win98, PII-400mhz w/ 256M ram system, BTW - on which about 85Mb is the largest file size I can work with unless I want to wait a couple Minutes after clicking just for something to f***ing highlight so I can edit it).

I have noticed that some of the objects did have a high polygon count, but I do not know how to control this. I created the walls using a lattice and the grass was created using a terrain, both I think were 1024 resolution. If this is wrong, I only created these at that resolution because all of the tutorials I have read say to use 1024 for best results. What is a good resolution to use in order to get fine looking results? Please help me!!!!!!

The higher the resolution ( in terrain editor ) the more polygons used to create the object. What I would do is evaluate each one. If the object is close up or has much detail you may need a high resolution. If you can't find any way around using high resolution try this. Whenever you import or create new objects, go to solo mode to work on them. ( solo mode is the blue button, at the bottom, in the middle of the VCR type buttons, selection palette mode ) Select the objects you will be working on then click the solo mode button ( it will turn red ) then those are the only objects present in the scene. Which should speed things back up for you. An example would be say you import a flower, select it and go to solo mode to texture it. Then when it's time to place it, figure where it will go, go out of solo mode and select a few object in the vicinity ( along with the flower ) then go back to solo mode and use the other objects as your guide.

I second Stephen Ray right there. Lowering 1024 terrains to 512 will DRASTICALLY reduce your .br4 file size, Polygon count, simplify rendering, and make things easier for your Bryce. I only use 1024 if something is going to be really close to the camera. And, I keep reducing the terrain size as it gets farther away from the camera, defintely going no lower than 128. Also, the point of; Changing the wireframe resolution lower (as low as you can take it) and turn the nano preview to at least wireframe mode, and if you don't really need it, turn it off. This will help you on the fact that objects take forever to come up selected and take forever to move. I only have 64 megs of SDRAM, so, I am constantly having to do stuff like this to make it so I can even use Bryce... AgentSmith

Thanks to everyone for all of the great advice! I am fairly new to Bryce, so I don't really understand some of the things you have described, but I will try each and everyone of them and make a post later on to let you know how things are going. Thanks again for all of your HELP!!!!!! HardRock1960