I have a question. Honestly I have played around a bit in Bryce but never really gone the distance. Well now I am. I imported my Poser figure into Bryce 5 and set up a scene i am pretty happy with. Then hit render to disc and had to render like 2000x2000 or something to that effect for post work reasons. Now its been going about 9 hrs and is at 7%. The little #'s there for rows and columns are still moving so I know its not frozen, my question here is how long do you suspect I will be waiting for this render? I cant tell you technical specifics but I can tell you there are 3 terrains that are water, and 2 lattices that are water sprays. Then my poser figure of course and the sky. Oh and 2 spot lights. SO based on all this whats the approximate damage? Thanks!!

"3 terrains that are water, and 2 lattices that are water sprays" Multiple transparent terrains/lattices? At 2000x2000?! Get a good book and start reading, it's going to be a while. How long? depends on how much area the lattices/terrains take up. Rendering say, blank sky goes a LOT faster than having to render the water terrains, so it depends on how much area of your pic has complex objects in it. If it stays constant with what you said above, it could take a total of 5 days. AgentSmith

"Could" not "Will".

well the terrains cover the floor and half way up the scene to her waist. And there are 4 lattices i forgot that...they are water sprays and kinda large... This so better be good. lol Thanks for your reply. As depressing as it might have been, thanks :)

I'd have to see a general render of the scene to tell you what's up. During regular renderings to the screen, did the render line stop at certain areas of the image? SHONNER http://www.shonner.com

It depends on the resolution of your terrains and the textures on your poser figure as well. If you can e-mail me your scene I can try to find out how to speed up rendering.(I have got a lot of experience with that because I used to render scenes on a 300MHz with 32MB Ram at 66MHz) Also I might have a faster computer and be able to render the scene faster. You said that the terrains etc fill half the image. You said the image was at 7% this implies that there is not even any water-terrains/splashes at the point where your computer is rendering. Am I correct? So are you rendering at premium? or do you use volumetric sky?

2000x2000 resolution is what CG movies use and they use hundreds of computer to divvy up the job.

Cimerone, I understand that rendering Poser figures in Bryce can be a worthwhile cause, but did you try just rendering a screen-size image first? "This better be good" implies you're not sure, not to be critical but seriously you DO NOT want to wait five days for a possibly shitty rendering. That's like four days downtime, minimum... Is it for print? That's the only reason to render so high, and honestly rendering to disk on such an image may not make it any faster for you. What kind of machine are you using? Specs might make things easier for us to analyze the "sitch", and also, have you tried Lightning? It's free, if you have Bryce 5 I highly recommend it... Still, post a screenshot or a smaller image and maybe we can cut your render times down...

Unless you're Poser figure is transparent or something I'd forget about it. As long as your render settings are right it won't cause significant slowdown. The main culprits, apart from a slow machine (!) for slowing down renders are:- soft lights, multiple light sources, transparency, render size, reflection, volumetrics, volume materials, render settings(!!!!) The scene I just posted took 4 hrs, rendered on SuperFine-4 with 150 lights. If I'd included volumetrics, it would have been 40hrs. I've I'd rendered on SuperFine-256 it would have taken 3 days, and this with volumetrics about 5 days. Add 2000x2000 and it would have taken over a month. On standard AA it takes 35 minutes! So you see, it's difficult to guess without loads more info.! Why not render pass 1 to the screen and let Bryce give you an estimate. It's sometimes wrong, but not always, and it might give you an idea. Of course, a 2000x2000 piece is 8.3 times bigger than an 800x600 pic and will take roughly the same multiple more time. Do you really need it this big?

A rule of thumb is to multiply the rendertime of the first pass with something between 300 and 400. this depends on the complexity of your scene and the "noise level" of your textures. If you do that you have the rendertime without AA. It takes some experiece to make a nice quess on how much extra time you need to add to get the rendertime with AA. If you're already rendering on fine-art mode you shoud multiply the rendertime of the first pass with 500 to get a realistic rendertime. Usually for medium AA intensive scenes the AA pass takes about 1,75 times as long as the last pass before the AA pass. I've become better in quessing rendertimes than bryce. These are the rules of thumb I use, but you need to get some experience to get detailed enough to beat bryce.

THanks everyone for all this imput. As for what I meant, I have the general idea of what it will look like from a render I did before adding 2 of the water sprays and the little render preview at the top left corner. As to why I rendered so large, I can't imagine doing hair and clothing at a smaller resoloution. I don't know what lightning is...like I said this is my first real experience with Bryce. As for my system I have PII,450 mhz;40 gig HD, 320 mb's of RAM so it's not a bad machine and has always been good to me. Though I am fairly certain it hates me right now. lol Course we are at 19.5 hrs and its only at 12% I am wondering if stoppping it is worth all this trouble. Or what? I am so not sure. Thanks everyone for all the help, it's greatly appreciated. :)

lightning allows bryce to use network rendering.

My longest render was just under a day. I know folks who have rendered for weeks at a time. There are ways to cut down the render time just by repositioning some of the transparent objects, etc. For example, when i made my first stained glass window, the render got real fast when I double checked and got rid of the glass pieces that has inadvertantly touched or overlapped.

My longest one took me 47 hours!After finishing that I found out that the 48 bit-dithering was activated! Bryce 4,Athlon 1,1Ghz,1024 MB ram,file size 60 MB, 300 dpi resolution at 7800 by 4650 pixels. rollmops :-) ps:get some beer instead of a book !

Strange...I assume this is (basically) a setup of a Poser Figure standing in water (with sprays of water). Given that Bryce renders from top to bottom...usually the fastest part of the rendering would be the first...say, 30%-50%, since it would be just mostly sky and the Poser figure. Then, the last rendered half would be the slowest because of the water with all its transparencies and reflections, etc. Perhaps those water sprays reach up to the top of the frame...

They do reach fairly high. Its kinda hard to explain. lol But I am just hanging out waiting for it to render. At least I can still surf Rosity.

Just make sure Bryce is running on top of everything else, and that it is the only thing running most of the time. Otherwise, it may never finish. On my Win98 system, Bryce 5 (while rendering to the disk) will nearly stall if it's not running on top of other windows. It runs about 20 times slower. SHONNER http://www.shonner.com

True.

I can run PSP, winamp and a simple null-modem networking program above bryce and it still renders at 80% of the "on-top" speed. But as soon as I try to copy a 24 bit layer of 3.5kx2.5k it slows down. same goes for starting a visualizer in winamp. But I can do a lot of stuff before bryce really stalls.

What OS and CPU speed are you using to keep it at 80%? SHONNER I've got a new 360 degree Bryce render at http://www.shonner.com

AMD Palomino 1800+ 512 MB Ram and 2 60GB 120GXP IMB harddisks in stripe-raid. Bryce just takes most of the processor power for itself. Most of the speed depends on the resolution and the number of layers I use in my images I'm working on in psp.

You're looking at days. days and days. The Andomeda WIP in my 'rosity gallery took so long to render, it's still a WIP after all these months. It uses water planes and terrains as sprays. If you did what I did, those sprays take a looooong time to render. If I were you, I'd do what shadow said and do a small preview render first, study it, sleep and look at it again. Once you are sure, start your render. If you render it normally, you can always pause your render and run it at night or when you're away. That's the best feature in the app, IMO.