I've been fooling around with Bryce for 6 months or more, but just today did I figure out network rendering. Wow. I was absolutely amazed. I took a test scene that rendered in 14 minutes on a P3 1Ghz, and rendered it using 4 machines ranging from 800Mhz to 1Ghz. Render time: 3.5 minutes!! I didn't realize that it was going to be able to fully utilize 100% of each PC's processing power. I thought it might be able to increase my render times 10-20-30% The 4 machines I have access to give me a 3.6Ghz rendering engine. That's pretty sweet. It sure beats the heck out of 1Ghz!!

Sounds great, so how do you set them up??? I have 3 P3 machine on my home network. David

I just bought a switch and some nics. Have the dsl on the switch now. Have my 1.4 athelon going and plan on hooking up my old 750 athlon for this very purpose. You're not the first one to say wow so I'm going to really enjoy this. Now to find space on the table for all this hardware!

Bambam, I don't know how it will play out on a home network, but it was really easy to get going on the network at my work. All I did was install Bryce Lightning on all the machines that would be the "helper" machines, you don't even need to install Bryce, just Lightning. Then you run Lightning and it shows you that machine's IP addr and says that it's waiting for directions. Then you open a Bryce image on the host machine and set up the network settings (it's in "render animation" - don't ask me shrug) You add each of the IP's of your helper machines to the list, click go, and bingo! you watch little tiles of your image get sent to each box and they get to work. Hopefully it goes as smooth for you!

Great idea, I've got my old PC lying around and I'm not using it at the moment. Do you need a CD-drive, Floppy-drive, monitor or are these not relly nessesary to use it as a bryce render-box? (I could save some money on a 2nd monitor if I only need one at the server)

I don't really see the need for a second monitor permanently hooked to the second computer, Rayraz. You would have to hook your primary monitor to the second machine to make sure that Lightning is running and get the IP addr, but after you've done that you could hook the monitor back up to your primary machine and off you go. As far as drives are concerned, all you'd need on a helper machine is a hard drive with Lightning installed. You can install it over the network, so I can't see the need for any sort of removable media drives...

Thanks cyber-organic.