How long is it before the rendering time is "too long", and you start to get irritated?
1 minute

Bah, on my machine, a "too long" render is closer to an hour. A preview pic at 300x400 takes me about 3 minutes.

Just finished a aprox.400 hour Bryce render :)

I had a 3 hour render in Poser

most renders i do in mental ray take about 17 hours

Longer than it takes to make the coffee.

Actually, longer than it takes to make coffee, spyphon off the bottom of the pot (cause I hate waiting for it to finish), add some water to it, sit down and light up a smoke.

I'm used to overnight renders on Bryce.

Attached Link: http://66.70.166.29/promo/watersim.mpg

well if you are using a decent OS( NT,win2kpro XP, mac OSX) you can alway hide the render and pretend its not happening while you go play on the web for burn some CD's etc this water simulation took only 3 hours but i was so busy posting in various cinema4DXL forums( Cg talk, Creative cow etc) and burning some backup CD's the passage of time went virtually unnoticed

:-)

3 cigarettes, a glass of wine, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and 3 or 4 chapters of whatever I'm reading at the time.... ;-) 45 minutes to an hour, and then I start getting worried the whole thing's going to crash before it finishes!

I have learned to render big files into a bunch of smaller file, then layer them together in post work. I may not be saving a lot of time, but at lest I don't get board waiting. And I don't worry about crashes. Tashar 59

I've never had a render take more than 3 minutes in Poser, even with a dozen figures and complicated lighting. I had a Terragen render take 45 minutes, which drove me nuts. :) I'm praying Poser 5 doesn't increase the render time too much because IMO, Bryce is unusable because of it's speed. Take care. SnowS

I'm one of the impatient ones, and I use VUE cause it renders a lot faster than Bryce (maybe not as well tho) - but even then anything over 30 minutes, and I re-design the piece. Since I'm not selling the artwork itself, it just seems masochistic to wait for hours (or days!) just to make a picture that a few people will see and say "Ooooh-Ahhhh!" and then forget. I'd probably think differently if I were making a magizine cover or a commercial poster, so don't fault the programs themselves. Each individual has different reasons and motivations for their work, so all are correct in doing whatever pleases them.

If it's more than three days, I start to get antsy. (I work in Bryce.) But I've learned to survive the longer ones by rendering only at night. -dg

By gads if it don't render in five I'm ctrl-alt-dltin' it to make sure it's still workinL.. not the most patient fella meL

Long renders don't bother me cause I started using Bryce1 in 1994 on a Mac LC III - 16MHz/max RAM 10MB/40MB HD and sold for $2K (w/o monitor). Any render took hours and just adding water would make it a multi-day experiance. Poser 1's best preview mode (flat shaded at the time) could take a minute or more to update every move and a small render with one figure, AA and a background image could take over an hour! To me, having 2+ gig computers boogles my brain... Best - Dan

... which begs the question, what are we all using to do these day-long renders and how big are the files?

Any delay is irritating, anything over two minutes I would call unacceptable, and would start pasting stuff into the background then hiding/deleting, leaving only the bits I am currently working on posable.