Hello folks had anybody sat down and tried to figure out all the new settings in the Bryce Render options?I have read the manual and I have most of the settings as in the manual but with all the default trees that I am useing I am topping out on render times @ 2 hours and I am rendering usually 10to12 Default trees with my background Forrest now of course in Bryce 4 we didnt have all these Excellent trees with all the high detail either now with what we had to work within 4 I am thinking this render engine might be a little faster then Bryce 4....TATATAT hold on before you get in an uproar can we as a Bryce community come together and figure this problem out can we come up with a simple scene everybody can download complete with sky everything and have all of us render the scene and document the settings so all of us can benefit from this awesome rendering Program?

Of course it would have to be a fairly simple scene not huge on the download...

What would be the end result of this? Meaning what's the benifit? Just curious... Since anyone/everyone is going to have an almost completely differnt PC setup, comparing render times would be just that, see who can do it the fastest. It's been fairly worked out that Bryce 5 is 8%-15% slower than Bryce 4, depending on PC.

Well on one of my pics I have cut off 7 minutes by bringing down the bump map settings in half then the original settings...I was thinking it would give everybody the opportunity to really get to know the ins and outs of the render options maybe helping the newer folks and me about what would be the best settings to get the utmost out of the Render engine I still have a long ways to go in trying to figure out the new options and what they do and if they can be munipulated into speeding up the render times...I really dont mind the render times That I have even useing the awesome preset trees in 5 I personally think 4 is a little fsater but I do say that 5 is faster at loading models and textures faster it seems and when I import one of my models built in 4 and import into 5 it loads way faster...Better codeing?I dont know I just want to get the best render times I can...

With the right settings you can make the scenes render much faster. (not in all cases but in some) I've tried is once with my alien modelled in AMAPI 4.1 (My first posted image features the model) and it rendered 12 minutes in Bryce 3D, 11 minutes in the Demo of bryce 4 and I got it down to 7 minutes in Bryce 5.

Aye, I've noticed that in Bryce 5 that by messing with the ray depth numbers you can produce pretty quick renders, even with the extra effects on. Of course, don't sacrifice quality in your final works, but for preview rendering it can help. When you sleep, render. When you go to work, render. That's how you defeat render times!

Thats another question...If I go up on ray traces does the picture get better or are you sacrificing quality by going up instead of down?what about the options for reflections?

More rays, more accuracy in the render. (More time for your cpu to think too!)

More rays means more (accurate) reflections and stuff like that. With raydepth 1 you get only primary reflections. With raydepth 2 you also get secondary reflections (a reflection of a reflection) and so on. you usually don't need more than 6, unless you want your glass-textures to look like they're lamps without actually illuminating the scene without Additive turned on or when you have a huge render and you need the details like reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections. :-) When I'm rendering an animation I usually use raydepth 1 or 2.

So I need to set my rays too less then 6 ? That is where it is set right now...

When you're using almost no reflections or glasses you can set the raydepth to 1 or 2.

Bryce has a max reflection depth of 6 (i.e. two mirrors set to reflect each other, instead of infinite reflections you only get 6, after that it renders black).