Hi everybody... I think I'm stupid, because in 7 weeks membership it's the first time I enter the Bryce forum :)
Here's the question: in my last renders, I encountered what for me is a strangeness: I rendered an image with normal AA and it took 6 days, so I shied away from Premium... then, out of pure curiosity, I did a try with Premium at 16 rpp, with SoftShadows and TrueAmbience checked... and the rendertime decreased sensibly (about 20% less)! I retried with 36rpp and got more or less the same result. I re-read the manual, but there's no information about that; all the other image settings were just the same, so... there's someone who could give me a better insight on this issue?
I would also like to ask when you prefer to use Premium Effects and when Normal or SuperFine... and (it's the last, I swear!) if --and in which way-- the softshadows setting in the LightLab affects the SoftShadows option ckecked in Premium Rendering.
Thanks for your attention and for the support I received since I'm a R'osity member.
Stefano

When you use softshadows in normal mode they create messy shadows when there's any glass in the scene. When you render at premium the shadows are good again. The 20% speed increase seems strange to me. Did you render both renders directly after each other without shutting down bryce and changing anything to the scene? Bryce seems to keep some information when rendering wich can be used to optimize other renders of the same scene. That could mean some time-improvement. Other than that it's new to me that Premium is faster. I usually use Normal render mode, unless I want some premium options in my scene. I only use superfine when the textures are very noisy and need extensive AA.

With careful planning and controlled use of glass refractive settings and any reflective surface settings (hint: only mirrors are 100% reflective), low use of volume textures with quality sliders set as low as you can and still get the effect you want, and leaving volumetric world turned off, I use premium rendering at 64, soft shadows on, with resolutions as high as 1024 without renders taking much more than 6 hrs, most less than 2 hrs. It's really all in the planning stage. Check out my gallery here: the creation of the objects and scene may take me weeks or even months (I tend to tire of one project and move to another and return to the first project later, to stay fresh), but the renders are pretty fast. I hate to tie up my machine for too long, because it cuts into my time in the Forum. :^) Tjohn

I should have mentioned I use the 64 setting with soft shadows, because they are too grainy around the edges for my tastes at 36 or below. I always drop all the way down to 4 when I'm checking out my composition and plop render only the sections of the screen I'm concentrating on before I'm ready for a final render (big time saver).

Depends on how much contrast there is in the scene. The Normal Mode does an Anti-Aliasing pass last, which is just an image (2D) blur effect which averages out highly contrasted pixels (the jaggies). If adjacent pixels don't need it Bryce skips it, so it's very fast but it can blur fine contrasting lines out of existence. The Premium modes shoots so many rays per pixels that an AA pass is not needed. For a scene with a whole lot of contrasting pixels 16 RPP is actually faster and looks "crisper". For all the render effects 16RPP is almost always faster then AA mode (cause they add contrasting pixels). As TJohn says, neither 16RPP or AA looks too good for render effects. Best; Dan www.bryceworks.com

Don't know about your time averages, new one to me. I use premium settings only when I use finer objects in the scene, which need to be rendered more clearly. (blades of grass, etc.) AgentSmith

Thanks for your insights and help. I continue to have this strange behavior concerning rendering times: I tried in each and every way, but I keep on getting faster times with Premium. I tried also with other images, so ok, I think I should consider me lucky and take it as a Bryce gift! :) As for your opinions about when to use the different AA modes, thanks a lot: it's a section not so well covered in the docs, and now I've a way clearer mind about it. --Stefano