This is still a Work In Progress, after 14 hours of rendering I stopped it (so it's not fully AA'd). I'm planning on making a poster out of this when it's finished, I will render it in 4000x3000, that will take like a full weekend. Any tips on reducing render time? I reduced the quality a bit so it would be under 200K, also you might try adjusting your brightness to see the image better (I've had some problems with that) BTW, the stars and lens flares are post-work

dont know about the render time but I kike it as lot

Thanks ;)

Maybe the volumetric fog is to complex. detail at more than 50 is usually very slow. Do you use volumetric light(s)? It makes your scene render slower. Huge scene-files make the render slow too. I have rendered an image once and it took ages, but when I checked processor usage during rendering it was at only 13%! the harddisk was swapping at max. speed, but was just to slow and the processor had to wait for the data all the time. Increasing ram could dramaticly speed up rendering, but only if swapping is your problem. Soft shadows are slow too and textured lights will dramaticly increase rendertime too.

The image is verry nice. I wouldn't mind having it render for several days if it was my image. (but then again I am used to rendertimes of several days)

Thanks, yeah I also don't really mind day-long render times. But I was just curious if there was any way to speed it up. Because I have an "athlon 2000+, 512 DDR Ram, Geforce 4 (Bryce doesn't make any good use of your GPU, or does it?)" setup. I'll look into the quality settings. And yes it is quite a big file, I'm not an efficient modeller.

If your using Bryce5.. Do you have soft shadows turned on for those spot lights? That makes a standard antialias render almost as slow asa premiumFx render. You could try setting a black to white gradient for the color and make sure soft shadows are off.

I'm too new at this to have any thoughts about render time, but this is really amazing. Great job! I'm in awe of the vastness and complexity of the scene.

Yes, I use Bryce 5. I'll look into that soft shadows thing. But I can't now, because my render PC is defragging now. But I think the problem lies with the glass in the domes and especially in the walkways, I could really notice that the rendering slowed down enormously at the glass walkways. Any tips on reducing the rendertime on glass?

Is the "render line" slowing to a crawl when it reaches your glass objects and then speeding up again when it passes them? If so, there's a good chance that is your problem. If not, do you have the volumetric world turned on? This makes everything crawl. You can speed up glass by turning down the refraction slider. Hope this helps.

Yeah it really bogs down on the glass, the line goes down one pixel every few minutes. So turning down refraction might help, but will the glass look much different?

if you are using glass, turn off refraction. you don't need it. I suspect the sheer number of lights is your biggest process consumer. you've got at least 30-40 of them. Definitely check for soft shadows and volumetric effects. The trees won't help either if those are the generated trees. You'd be better off using a picture on a plane, or adding tres in post. You could also try rendering them separately and compositing them in post. Your vehicles are small enough you could get away with a single headlamp spotlight for each. try using glow maps instead of light sources for some of the areas, like the walkway and the elevator shaft. Add the smoke in post. If that is a volumetric material, it is a processor pig, esp. with 30 different light sources hitting it. The water does not need to be refractive, or even transparent in this scene. Maybe consider even rendering the rooftop separately from the rest and compositing later. Try attenuating some of the area lights and headlights so that they are not all being calculated in the entire scene. Also, some of those lights don't need shadow casting turned on. Lights without shadows are MUCH faster to render, so play with that a little. Hope this helps.

Thanks, could you explain how a glow map works and how I use it?

Can anyone else jump in on this? It's a little different depending on the application used. Unfortunately my Bryce machine is not with me right now and I don't remember how i do it in Bryce. Usually it is a map applied to the ambient values of a material or to a "self illumination" property. Are you familiar with the materials designer? try loading a black & White checkerboard bitmap into the D channel of a material, then fiddle abient/diffuse settings, assigning the values to D, until you see a checkerboard glow. Once you know how to make it glow, you can assign different bitmaps for different glow shapes. HAs anyone else done this recently? I am not remembering the specifics. Maybe I'll do up a Tutorial for bryce sometime next week...

I think I understand. That seems pretty logical.

The person swimming is getting burned by the light. Humans don't need that much light to see at night. I know you have the lights turned way up so that we can see them from our location. We are too far away to notice if light is reflected or refracted from anything, so those settings can be turned down some. That smoke is probably killing your CPU, too. Bryce uses your video card's GPU when you are scrolling around a scene and Bryce needs to do a quick re-render of your objects (with shading and textures, etc). But when you hit that render button, your video card pretty much goes dormant. Bryce is now talking to your CPU to figure out the color and brightness of each pixel it's setting on the bitmap. The faster your CPU, the faster the render gets done. If your hard drive is grinding away while you're rendering to the screen, all bets are off. You don't have enough RAM on your motherboard. This will keep your CPU grounded during the flight. Awesome image so far, though. SHONNER http://www.shonner.com

Hey thanks, It mostly was the glass, after lowering refraction, in a small test render i saw a real dercrease in render times. Now I just need add a few final details and I can render my poster in under a weekend :)

Hi, nice work but my July Challenge took over 20 hours to render and I've seen stuff take days........... regards The Bryster.

So where's the black monolith from 2001? Just kiding. SHONNER

Pretty good pic. I'd just let it run.

One word: Smoke.

Send this to NASA and tell them to get busy. :)

Check your lights and see if the gel map setting is turned on. I had a render and it was taking forever, turned gel map off and it sped up a bit.