Can anyone give me an indication on the maximum file sizes that can be made in Bryce 4. Is there any relationship between file size and RAM. This would be handy to know when planning new images as my current Bryce 4 file sizes are exceeding 220 meg. I use a mixture of boolean modelling and models made in the terrain generator an imported 3ds models that are made in Amorphium. Most textures are either tweeked Bryce standard tex's or Photographic JPEG's. I am presently using a p4 1.6 Northwood processor 512 megs of RAM a Geforce 4 440mx graphics gard (from what I understand, the graphics card info is irrelevant unless working in open GL?) and running Win XP pro. It would be nice to have some sort of formula rather than taking a submarine diving approach where you just keep going until you implode. Any info would be appreciated.

Dave

I take the dive, personally. Processor speed is primarily relevant to render times, and your file size is limited by the RAM -- sort of. File size and polygon count are independent of one another. That is, you may have a 200 meg file with a relatively low polygon count (due to textures and such) and you may have a 1 MB file with a huge polygon count (metaballs and trees will do that). RAM will help deal with the files with large sizes / high polygon counts. I'm a Mac guy, and here is the rule of thumb I use (this is adapted from Photoshop, it's not completely accurate). You need in the neighborhood of 60 MB free RAM just for Bryce. That is, if your OS takes 70 MB RAM, you need 130 total to run Bryce and the OS. If you add shapes to Bryce, it will now require more memory. If physical RAM is unavailable, virtual memory will kick in, and it will start to use your hard drive in place of RAM, and you'll notice things slow way down. Though I don't know how much RAM an individual polygon or a primitve uses, what you do if Photoshop is this: 60 MB+ for the app alone + twice the file size in additional RAM (for a 200 meg file, you'll need an additional 400 MB RAM). So, we have 70 MB for the OS, 60 for the app, and for a 200 MB file, another 400 MB RAM bringing minimum RAM requirements to 530 megs. Again, I don't know how polygon count influences things, but I know that eats RAM, so this equation may need modification -- afterall, it was designed for Photoshop, and not a 3D app. But it should get you closer to a logical equation.

To reduce the requirements of the program on RAM make sure your wireframe resolutions are only as high as you need them (this is for display purposes only since I don't think that affects file size. For file size make sure that the terrains you are using are only as high in resolution as you need, a 1024 terrain takes up a lot of space. Textures will also increase the file size depending on what resolution they are. As far as what the max is, I haven't reached that high yet. My seadragon pic I'm working on is only around 50 MB with a few million polygons and hundreds of objects.

This doesn't really have much to do with the rest of this thread, but it is somewhat on topic. I am running an AMD Athlon XP 1700 processor, 512 MB RAM, and WIN XP. The other day, I was working on a new project, I had 4 terrains and about 7 DIFFRENT trees(made in the tree lab). the next tree that I made came out fine, like the others, but when I moved it, everything in my scene went to bounding boxes(presumably due to lack of available RAM). I've never had this problem before, so when I checked the processes running, bryce was listed as taking up half of my RAM(unsuprising, no?) anyway, I'm just curious...I am assuming the trees are what is eating up all my ram. correct?? If this is the case, what other alternatives do I have(other than buying more software) thanks, big_hoovie

big hoovie......while working on my seadragon (all metaballs) this happened to me as well. As I said above reduce the wireframe resolution on selected, motion and static. The higher these resolutions are the more memory it takes to display the object (esp when moving) right now I have it set at res 8 and it stopped making eveything boxes so it was easier to place things.

Don't know about Bryce 4, but the biggest file I ever saved was 538 MB in Bryce 5. Also if there's no real limit in the program, then the limit is the free diskspace at the disk where bryce places it's temp-file.

The show-as-box thing is normal, this is done to keep the refreshrate in the wireframewindow reasonably good (or at least that's what seems logical to me). It happens with my complex scenes all the time. Also terrains eat up memory. as well as latices.

Aye, when I'm at home it rarely switches to bounding boxes on my pIII 600's, but at work on a pathetic pII 200 it's always like that. 256MB of RAM apiece vs. a mere 64 MB on my work machine. At work, I run into file size barriers all the time, and it's not due to free cache space but I assume RAM itself. A 70 MB file running with only 64 MB still runs fine, it just caches almost the whole time. I end up only creating materials and skies at work, then e-mailing them to myself for use on my home systems.

When using a memory-manager like ramidle you can put things in your ram wich normally are stored on harddiskdisk and backwards when using files wich are smaller than your total amount of free RAM it's handy to set your memory manager to 'let windows use as much ram as possible' The speed of bryce dramaticly increases when it's using RAM instead of on-disk temp-files, but when your RAM is full the speed drops, so use your memorymanagers wisely and you can increase workflow.

'ramidle' seems a promising tool...is it free? Where can I get it?? Currently I'm working on a br5 file that's 185mb of size. Its still performing slow after I've reduce the wireframe resolution on selected, motion and static. The hourglass appears whenever I move an object or camera. I'm using 512mb RD RAM on a P4 1.4 MHz running win2000 (sr2). One more thing which one takes more memory in Bryce, a native bryce object (.obp) or an imported object (.3ds, .obj)?? Thanx-a-lot for all those tips!

Thanks everyone for all the input. It has been most helpful. I've checked the task manager on XP and it say's that I'm using about 680 megs (PF) so I'm definatly running off the hard disk when it comes to memory. I could probably be more efficiant with my object creation in Bryce as by the time I scale the scenes and render the entire image at about 1152 x 768, I've noticed that most of the detail on smaller objects gets lost. Can Bryce be set up like Photo shop to have scratch discs? and I would be very interested in Ramidle as well? For the moment I will keep diving to the depths as my P4 sub with 512 megs of ram hasn't fully threatened to implode yet, although Win XP has on several ocasions told me that it has had to increase the virtual memory so that it wouldn't spring a leak. Once again, thanks folks for all your contributions.

Dave (and hopefully I'll get this bloody picture finished one day soon)

Search with google for RAMIdle, there used to be at least one free version (I didn't have to pay for mine and as far as I know it's completely legal.). Another memory manager is Flashmem. I'll have a look too when I'm finished reading my messages.

Attached Link: http://www.tweaknow.com/ramidl.html

Attached Link: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/maxmem.htm