It seems that people here are as friendly as over in the poser forum, so here goes. I have a big room, made from bryce primitives.3 sides the front I have left open obviously. At present I have the sky set to bryce default arctic skyline, with sun disabled, as this gave the best result through a slightly open door one side. I have 33 lights (all small and set to low light) to simulate candles. I want to show that the sun is behind the viewer, and low in the sky westering towards evening.There are a lot of windows that side of the building. What would be the best setting for the sun to do this? I jumped straight from b3 to b5 and can't quite get to grips with only having 2 settings (azimuth and altitude) for the sun instead of 3 as was in b3. Thanks for your help.

first off: http://www.bsmooth.de/BSolutions/#SetSunMoon second: put a square parallel light facing the windows and mkae it big enough so that it covers them all. Make it low intensity and give it a pretty good ranged falloff so it's more than the usual) and make the edges a bit soft. Make it infinite, and volume visible with a light gold color. Next, turn on volumetric world in the skylab, and give it a low quality (around 10) and a medium density (around 20)

Thankyou, runs off to experiment.

Don't use volume world! It's not needed , esp for an indoor scene and is a render killer.

Of course that's just for effect :)

The square paralell light has worked a treat. Thankyou for the idea. And that's a neat site, loads of solutions there. I don't think I can even think about volumetric. This image is going to take for ever as it is. I am turning my background poser figures into 3ds to try and save size. It has 34 lights so far, and will end up with up to 20 poser people, and that's without props. May have to do 2 takes.

It's the lights that will kill the render time. I am assuming theya re radial lights you are using, and if this is the case you can get along with less of them. Delete some of them (more than 10) that are not specifically lighting a certain area, and then make 3 new ones. Spread them around the scene so they are high up and next to the edges. Make falloff none, and make the intensity 2 for two of the lights, and 1 for the other one. There! You just save yourself at least ten lights! Tip: you don't need to do soft shadows...simply turn the intensity of shadows in the sky lab down to 25 or so.

Trouble is I need almost all the lights, they are on candles and each one is surface visible to simulate the flame. I can knock out at most 5 which I used as general lighting.I will get there. I refuse to give in. I have the scene saved several times, so if I crash I can go back to a previous incarnation and try again. As I said maybe several layers to build it up will be the way to go. Will shadows from the sky lab work, as I have sunlight disabled?

There's your problem...change all of them to non-volume. Then create however many sphere you need for candle flames. Place them correctly then select Fire from complex fx (the clearish one) - you may want to stretch the spheres so they are skinnier as well. open up the material editor and select additive from the pulldown menu to the left of the first component window. Tweak the ambience until it is at the right brightness, and then adjust transparency as necessary. you can also swith to volume mode ans use base density for a more realistic flame...and in some cases is is faster than using regular transparency. Now do a test render and see if it worked. I apologize if this doesn't work, as I am doing this all from memory because I don't have bryce on this computer. Some of the stuff may be mis-named...hope it works.

non-volume = non-visible

In reguards to the shadows I don't know. If it doesn't just increase the shadow ambience a bit in the light lab for each light.

Thankyou, am now going away to have a play. With this sort of help I can see me visiting this forum more often. Mind you more time browsing means less time actually doing something. Oh well have to fill the time in till P5 arrives. P5 andB5, wonder how that will work. I still can't see that this new render engine is going to work for large scenes, bryce will still win out on that.