I think Wolfie wrote a program that will make little thumbnail images of all your presets... it runs on Windoze only (it's written in Visual Basic). I don't know if he's distributing it, but you could always ask him. his URL is www.wolfiesden.com.

side note: UNLESS you're working with really big and/or complex scenes, or if your system is really RAM-strapped (64 megs or less), adding RAM won't speed anything up.

Here's how the "resume render" button works. If you start a render (NOT using the "render to disk..." option in the menus, but by using the big round button on the interface), then Bryce starts its initial passes rendering, and saves the result in memory as it goes. If you click the mouse while Bryce is rendering (unless you're switching to another application) or press escape, then Bryce stops rendering, but it keeps the image it's already rendered in memory, INCLUDING a map (in the 4th channel) of the render progress. If you then click the "resume render" button (or choose it from the menu), it will pick up where it left off. But that's not all. If you quit Bryce, it will save the image AND the progress map, so you can quit, shut off the computer, whatever, start Bryce back up, and resume rendering just by opening the file. Two things to remember: (1) you must select the "save image with file" option in the preferences. it's selected by default, so if you turned it off, you need to turn it back on. (2) in older versions of bryce, if you double-clicked on a scene (.br4) file, it started a new render once Bryce booted up. I haven't tried this in awhile, so it might still behave that way. If that's the case, then you need to start Bryce from the application, then use File/Open to open the image. Then just hit resume render. Of course, some of the people who do really long renders just either (a) forgo the use of their computer until it's done (b) use their computer with Bryce running in the background (which really slows down everything, including the render) or (c) have a dedicated render machine that they do their renders on. --flick

I'm afraid you're going to need to be more specific. What numbers? What specifically about the render engine? Are you talking about output file size? If so, that is set up under the "File/Document Settings..." menu item. The numbers there are the viewing area size in pixels, i.e. 800x600 pixels. You can then render the final output at 4:1, 2:1, 1:1, 0.25:1, etc. meaning 4 times larger, or 25% the size, etc. This would translate to 3200x2400, 1600x1200, 800x600, and 200x150 pixels, respectively. Pixels are just pixels: on screen, there are typically between 72 and 90 pixels per inch, depending on your monitor. If you're eventuallly going to print your Bryce images, it depends on your printer -- an ink jet printer (for example) will produce its best quality output if you print at about 150 pixels per inch... NOT the 1440 resolution that some printers claim, which is for 4-color printing, not continuous-tone printing. So if you want your image to be 5 inches wide, printed on an inkjet printer, it should be about 650 pixels in the horizontal dimension. I apologize if this doesn't answer your question: if not, please be more specific and we'll be happy to help. --flick

wow! your info is very thorough on the 'garage' pages. Unfortunately, I got a "file not found" error when trying to access the "benchmark results" page showing what the render times should be for various computers. That's the kind of testing I've always wanted to do on Bryce, but never gotten around to. --flick

There are three main causes for slow Bryce renders: a-) the texture/material engine CAN be slow (but isn't necessarily slow, provided you choose your textures wisely). Volumetric textures and multi-channel, multi-component textures with a lot of phase variance are the primary culprits. b-) High polygon counts of imported objects. Poser figures especially, due to their high quality, can slow down render times. If you stick to Bryce's native objects (which are very versatile), render times don't degrade that much c-) Numerous numbers of lights can cause Bryce to choke up pretty bad. IMHO, Bryce's light rendering engine is significantly behind-the-times: it's not terribly efficient and it doesn't allow for effects such as soft shadows, etc. If you keep these things in mind, you can achieve perfectly acceptable render times. As I work on an image, my renders are very rarely loner than 3 minutes - I just get bored. There's a trick to this, too: Bryce renders in a unique "increasing resolution" mode, unlike most other renderers, which are line-renderers. Bryce renders the entire picture at a very low res, so it looks blocky. Then it progressively renders it 7 more times, and it gets sharper with every pass. The advantage of this is that you can very quickly distinguish form, composition, & color elements during a test render. In addition, Bryce has two wonderful render tools: the so-called "plop-render", where you can re-render a selected area of the screen just by drawing a marquee around it, and the so-called "spray render", where you can use an airbrush-like tool to literally spray-paint on the new image, for irregularly shaped areas of interest. So, when I'm doing a test-render on a complex scene, I'll usually start a full render (to get overall form/composition/color info) and then cancel it after 2-3 passes. Then I select the detail areas that I want to check and render those a few more passes. As the other folks said, when you're finally done with a project, you can just set up the render and leave it overnight. Or if you need to get into your computer before it's finished, you can stop the render and resume it later. Bottom line: Bryce renders slower than some other products, but it's because of its highly involved materials -- the material/texture generator is simply the best thing out there. It's got kind of a goofy interface, limited import/export support, and a few missing features, but you'll find that it's the renderer of choice for many people who use Poser, Ray Dream, Carrera, etc. because of the quality of textures & materials. It doesn't compare to LightWave or RenderMan, but then again, it's about 1/4 the price, too. Hope this helps. --flick

remember that a mirror is really a piece of glass in front of a thin polished sheet of silver/chrome/steel. So make your mirror using a very thin cube (for the glass) and a 2D face (for the sheet of silver). You can get nice effects with this, like tiny double-reflections at certain angles (which really happen with mirrors). Note: this will play hell with your render time!!! --flick

ah.... the benefits of protected memory. Although I have had Bryce puke out and crash on me once or twice on win 2000 on my laptop. It's pretty interesting: I've got a G4/400 Mac at home, and a P3/500 laptop at work (that I carry with me on a train commute). I can do head-to-head comparisons between the two systems.... and they're pretty well identical for render speed. I rendered the same scene on both machines: the times were 16:54 for the G4/400, and 16:08 for the PIII/500... go figure! One of my co-workers got a new system (at work) with a 1.3 GHz processor... I'm eager to sneak in some time and see how fast Bryce runs on it :-)

I would highly discourage anyone from running Bryce on a system with only 32 megs of RAM - you can get away with 64 if you're running an older operating system, like Win95 or Mac OS 7.5. - and 32 megs of RAM can be had for about US$30-$40. If you're running Mac OS 9 or Win ME/2000, you really ought to have 128 megs of RAM anyway... these operating systems just don't perform stably with less than that. you're right though: RAM doesn't do a darn thing to speed up renders - EXCEPT if your system's virtual memory system has to get involved. You always want to have enough real RAM to keep the entire Bryce memory partition in real memory when running, plus a little extra: otherwise, the program will be swapping memory to disk regularly, which can cause huge slowdowns. lots of RAM is needed, however, when opening large scene files. I have a couple I'm working on right now that are over 50 megs, and several postings here on R'osity and other sites come from scene files measured in the hundreds of megabytes in size. If you can't fit the entire scene file into memory, Bryce will either fail to open the file, or crash ungracefully after opening it. Since Bryce doesn't take advantage of the G4's vector processing unit (which uses 32-bit floats: Bryce works in 64-bit doubles), if you want to render the absolute fastest possible, buy a PeeSee at 1.3GHz or more... I think the 1.6's from AMD are out. That should cure your slow-render blues :^D Hopefully Bryce 5 will fully support the G4's vector unit, Mac OS X and multiple-processors - resulting on screamin'-fast renders.

The other way to get to that dialog is to go into the DTE and click on the upper-right-side button on the central preview (i.e. the preview showing all the components mixed together). The lower-right-side button randomizes the texture, which can be a fun way to get wacky effects.

There are lots of things you can do to decrease render time. first: memory will not help your render time very much at all. The only time it will help is when you (a)have a very large and/or complex scene and (b)you have enough real RAM that the computer doesn't have to swap to the hard drive (using virtual memory). Having more memory will, however, let you manipulate larger scenes with more lights, before Bryce crashes on you complaining about "not enough memory". Make sure you're not running other applications in the background. If you're listening to MP3 music from your computer, for God's sake turn it off! Decoding MP3's is a sure-fire way to slow down your render process. The only real way to reduce render time is to reduce scene complexity (or to buy a faster computer). Often this can be done without sacrificing quality. The big killers for render time are: 1) highly complex textures 2) volumetric materials 3) lots of light objects 4) highly detailed imported DXF/OBJ meshes etc. If you have lots of lights, you can cut down by using 'fake' lights for the smaller/distant lights... just use a sphere with the ambience setting really high. Unless the texture is going to be viewed close-up, complex textures are a great way to bore yourself watching the little render progress line march down the screen. Simplify textures on distant objects. If you're running on anything slower than a G3 you're going to be somewhat disappointed in Bryce's performance, no matter what you do. I upgraded from an old 7200/90 to a G4/400 last year and did test renders: the G4 took under 1/2 hour on my detailed test file, and the 7200 took over 17 hours!

It sounds like you're having some fundamental problems with object placement. In order to get your objects placed where you want them, you have to "think in 3D". I suspect that the problem you're having is that you're clicking on the objects, and then dragging them around the screen with the mouse. This is not a very effective way of moving the objects: it's imprecise, and (as you've seen) you can only move the object around in 2 dimensions - namely the dimensions of the current camera view plane. Instead, click on the 'edit' pane at the top, and you'll see some handy tools for moving around your objects. Select an object by clicking on it, then use the object resize and movement tools to place the object. The little drop-down triangle menu next to the controls lets you select "world space", "object space", or "camera space" for the 3-D coordinate system that the tools operate in. That subject is a little advanced: but the easiest thing to note is that "camera space" works just like draggin the object around on screen: the 'x' direction moves it horizontally, and the 'y' direction moves it vertically. The 'z' direction (surprise!) moves it toward/away from the camera. Also, when positioning objects, move the camera around often. If you find a particular view you like, mark it with a camera memory dot so you can come back to it! I find the trackball to be very handy. When positioning an object, rotate the camera around it from different angles, making adjustments. --flick

There's no particle effect per se, but you can get the same effect by using a volumetric material. Create a material in the DTE that is in 3-D, using something like the "spots" noise... and set your ambience values very high (so that it glows). Play around with it enough, and you should be able to achieve the effect you want. Be prepared to spend plenty of time tweaking it, though :^)

yes... you have to create 2 keyframes right next to each other, i.e. one frame after the other. If you change the frame rate, you'll have to move them manually (since they'll stay in the same relative position in actual time) Another easy technique is just to move the object 'way off camera. Just make sure that the two keyframes in question are right next to each other, otherwise you'll see the object zipping off the screen. last note: if you're going to do the transparent thing, make sure to select "Blend Transparency" from the render options pull-down menu in the material editor (in the middle upper right corner, just next to the texture component channels). Wouldn't it be nice if you could animate the "hidden" attribute in the attributes dialog box? ::sigh:: cheers --flick

ummm.... what the heck are you talking about, maxxtro? This thread is a simple Q/A about the gamma-correction option. Perhaps you've combined two posts into one. And anyone who frowns on using publicly-available models is just being a snob. They're publicly-available for a reason. Many artists do not have the resources (time and/or programs) to create their own complex models. Kind of like poo-pooing a painter's work because he doesn't grind his own paint from scratch!