Hello there seems to be a major problem with Bryce 5...I made a waterfall image(a perfect one after about the 500th trial) and the blasted thing wouldnt let me render it...when i press render it starts rendering and on the firsst scan it gets stuck half way through and desnt go any further...i checked task manager and Bryce 5 is still running but I dont know what the problem is...The image has 378864 polygons and i am using a Athlon 650 mghrtz with Win XP...320 mb ram...please helpo me this is my finest work(yet)...any help is highly appreciated!!! IGOR

How long are you waiting for it to move before deciding it's locked up? I had a picture that took almost an hour for the line to move because of the complexity of the picture. If you have overlapping transparencies and/or volume materials it will grind to a halt there too. Just for info it took 1 week for it to do the AA alone.

Running it under Windows XP isn't helping your cause either. WinXP tends to slow down computers by about half their speed when compared to Win98SE due to a ton of overhead XP performs (I have two machines in the house, one a Celeron 850MHz on Win98SE and one a P4 1.6Ghz on WinXP and the Celeron seems slightly faster than the P4!). This might impact render times. What others said above is also true. If there is ovelapping transparances, refractions, or volumetric lights/solids, it could takes several minutes for the 'render line' to nudge down a row. Just leave the render to do its thing overnight and see how far it got by morning. It should have moved.

Aye, one thing that will really help in these situations is Bryce Lightning's Tile Optimization... I've noticed between my Pentium 3/600 and my Athlon/800 that when it hits complex spots, since the tiles are smaller, it REALLY improves the rendering times! Perhaps you should just render to disk, and keep an eye on the progress that way, if Lightning isn't an option...

sounds like a complex render. I had bryce get stuck on my images too. I had one that would need 4 years to render on my old machine. On my new machine it rendered perfectly fine. Does halfway mean at +/- 50% of the render or at 50% of the a certain pass? Here aresome rendertips: 1. When you render always put spatial optimization at high. It can double renderspeed sometimes compared to a low setting. The ony case where it causes problems is when you are using a huge amount of metaballs. than you might loose some polygons somewhere and get a black spot instead, but when you are using normal objects it is ever a problem. 2. Never use a volumetric world if you want a 'fast' render. 3. Volumetrics are slow. use them with care and only when they are necessary. 4. Have a look at the raydepth (shadow-rays) in the render settings. it is usually at 6, but if you don't need reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections of reflections you can set it to a lower setting. It can really speed up rendering in some cases. 5. Only use internal reflections if thay are really neccesary. 6. Only use light-gels if they are really neccesary. 7. All premium settings are slow.

The longest I've had the first pass render at is about 1hr. I've found that each pass takes around 2X as long as the one before when working with Super setting, and there are 5 passes (6 with standard, but they're quicker). So if your 1st pass is, say, 4 hrs, you're looking at a render time of 4+8+16+32+64=124hrs = 5+ days. If it takes a day for the first pass, you might as well stop it as Bryce 9 will be out by the time it's done. Also, Rayraz, I'd disagree with the "all premium settings are slow" bit. It's mainly the rays / pixel that slows down the render as far as settings go, so a Premium-16, no matter what extras you have (i.e. soft shadow, ambience) will almost always be faster than a Super-32. Trouble is, the lower Premiums aren't as good at the same rays/pixel as the lower Supers. And if you want to use extras like DOF, you need to use 32 rays/pixel at least, preferably 64+, which drags the render time down. There was a thread about a week ago which went into all the do's & don'ts of how to get faster renders.

tuttle: you are right about the raysetting, but the quality is only of high standard when you are using 32 or more rays. (there may be some exeptions, but as soon as you take a scene with water or reflections and textures premium gets to slow for me)