There has got to be something I am doing wrong, or no one in their right mind would be using Bryce 5. I have 600 some odd megs of RAM on a fairly nice machine (PC) I have in my scene: One Victoria, one Vicky's changing pony tail, 2 spawned props of the tail itself, plus textures and transparencies. Nothing else. Default lighting, black BG, anti aliasing off, default render size. The nano preview (which is too small to be any real use but it's better than nothing) itself takes at least 5 minutes to refresh, and the "fast" preview? I have yet to have enough patience to let it get beyond 7%, and that took about an hour This can't be right. At this point, all I'm trying to do is get my material settings right, but I can't do that if I can't see what the heck I'm doing. Can somebody please give me a clue?

Try to go to the render option and watch if the render style is normal or superpremium. Or go to the sky lab and look if the option 'true ambience' is on (in that case set it of). Hope it helps

Hi Momcat- One other thing I have found that can really slow down a render is some layered transparencies (or semi transparencies/volume materials). Any of those in your image? Vasquez's comment is quite accurate too. Especially in combo.

The only things in the scene are what I mentioned in my post. The render style is set to nothing, since anti alias is off completely (I turned it off to see if it would speed things up. It didn't). I'll check on the true ambience thing, but the sky is the plain black BG preset. I can't imagine anything simpler. I have one body texture with eyelash trasparency, a seperate texture for the irises, and one hair texture with transparency. That's it for textures and transparencies. I cannot imagine what is slowing this down so much unless it is the hair mesh itself. It's Anton's Victoria's Changing POny tail, with the curly tail, and two spawn props of the tail bit stuck on either side so she's got a mop of golden curly Q hair. I've seen renders with Much MUch more involved than I have. I can't imagine what it must have been like to set them up if what I am experincing is normal. I haven't even fixed the lighting yet. I'm just trying to set materials so far, but I can't do that very well if I can't see the results of my efforts.

What's the speed of your CPU? Are there any backgound apps ruuning that would eat up CPU cycles?

500mhz P3, nothing else running except my DSL connection.

How big is the model file?

If you have soft shadows enabled on only one light(light-lab), it is the same as turning on premium FX. Conical lights are worse than radial lights. If you use premeium FX, please belive me, you don't need 128 or even 64 rays per pixel, unless your render is the size of a dinner table. A high haze setting is often a good subsitute for a volumetric FX. EXPERIMENT!

just checking....are you sure it's the pure black sky preset and not the angelic sky which is a volume sky preset. They look alike in the library and are close together.

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

You might try the benchmark (version 1) on my site. It will at least tell you how you PC stacks up against others. If it doesn't fall in line with those int he ~500 MHz range then you might take another look at your PC. http://www.planet-3d.com/garage.htm http://www.planet-3d.com/bmark.htm

Hey there, Lets try some troubleshooting: First, create a blank sphere on a blank plane with no sky, see if that renders at an acceptable speed. That will tell you if there's something wrong with your processor/cpu. Second, Look to see if you have too much lighting, maybe you have several sources in the same place from hitting Ctrl-D a few too many times? more light sources = slow rendering... (duh) And if worse comes to worse, get yourself a new processor :) all that memory is fine, but the processor is doin the work ;) I'd suggest an athlon 1.4 ghz, and 512 megs of DDR ram... the price is right, and it's what's in my system, and it works wonderfully :) Most of all, Good luck, we're intersecting our metaball fingers for ya :)

Well, I don't know what was wrong, but I started the scene from
scratch and it seems to have fixed itself. There are even features
there that were not present before, like a preview window in the
light editor, and a wireframe overview window when you move the
cameras. Everything is up to speed now >^^< Must have been a
gremlin. Thanks for all your help >^^

A gremlin uh? That's a possibility, but you know that win has a lot of gremlins inside. ;P . I hope that in the future you will have no more problems

You know what? I am really beginning to think the culprit is the hair. THe hair takes longest to render anyway, but it seems to make a difference how close up you get. The closer I get to the hair, the longer it takes. Once it's done with the hair though, it flies. This shot took 34 minutes. 25 minutes of it was hair.

Whoops! Wrong shot. THat one took about 45 minutes or so...fast preview. This is the one I meant: