today, I started work on a scene, and got a little crazy. I went on a mad bombing run with my computer, and now have 1296 trees in my scene- a veritable forest. and let me tell you, if anything slows down a computer, it's having almost 3000 trees in a scene in bryce(from the tree lab, no less). there are upwards of 10.9 million polys in the trees alone! now, of course, I have to add some other vegetation under the trees...and perhaps the odd creature...me thinks that I need more RAM...

When it gets done rendering - you will have bought another computer :)

So you can't see the forest for the trees?

dampeoples: actually, a test render, at default settings only took about 12 minutes. Isstrout: lol! =c)

mmm, i must be doing something wrong, when I render anything from the tree lab it's s-l-o-w. And I have 1GB of RAM!

Um a stick does not cout as a tree LOL what are you powered with. I gots me a 1.4 and I would think that not only taking a long time to replicate this would be a slow render.

I'm doing my work on an AMD athlon XP 1700+ w/ 512 MB RAM. I think the reason I don't have incredibly slow renders is because you can't see each tree in it's entireity(sp?). replicating and working in an environment with this many trees was incredibly tedious, but the render wasn't too bad. If I had to guess, I would say you could see most of about 70 trees or so. the rest of the trees were too fill out the background, so when you look under them, it still looks like a forest.

Sounds awesome, we'd love to see a pic, even if it is just a WIP! And I've had the same results on my P3/600 and AMD 2400XP, the tree lab only slows me down if I use transparencies on the trunks or leaves, or any of the optics (reflections, blah blah). Of course, Lightning helps a lot too!

Trees are not always slow. The Bryce trees are actually quite fast if compared to imported models. But as shadowdragonlord said: transparencies and metals are no, no's. So where's the testrender? Have you uploaded it yet?

I will upload to a new thread. look for a WIP by me!