Hey guys -

I'm working on a Christmas image, creating different parts of it in separate files to keep load/render/save times down. However, the size of the one I'm currently working on has ballooned, and I'd like some advice on what changes I can make to bring it back down.

This file is a train engine pulling a car loaded with gifts. It currently contains:

1. A .3ds train engine pulling a .3ds car, each textured with adjusted procedural materials, no bitmaps. (I've had to duplicate the car and boolean-hide half of each one to make the car shorter.)
2. A group of about 50 two-mesh gift models (each is an .obj exported from Poser, textured differently by me with bitmaps.)
3. A lattice as text on the side of the car.
4. A figure from Poser that I'm using for scaling reference with the other files.

The .br5 file size is already 110 mg, and I have yet to put track down.

Initially, I created a single layer of those .obj gifts, since they look really good, and just used a g2h on a terrain for the ones under them. I wasn't able to get that to work very well, and I'm not sure how I would have textured it even if I had. I also tried just making a simple texture for the default cube primitive, but they ended up looking rather strange because I really need a different texture for two of the sides, and I don't have a texture template for a cube, strangely enough.

What I need to do, I think, is figure out another way to make a pile of gifts, without actually using 50 of those good ones. Does anyone have an idea as to how I can pull this off more efficiently?

Thanks.

Taerin, I'm not exactly sure I understand fully what you're saying. Of course, an image would have been the picture that explained a thousand words. Jumping right to your last paragraph and perhaps your real concern, seeing as you have all the gifts grouped in 50 two-meshed ".obj" models and apparently already setup for final render. It might be advantageous for you to render these gifts as they would appear in the final render all by themselves using the final render lighting setup. Then, using this render, bring this into an editing program and separate, as in masking, out the image of all the gifts and create a single layer image, as it would appear in the final Bryce render. In your Bryce scene, delete the gift objects which you will later postwork into your scene as a separate layer since it has already been rendered under the same lighting setup and need not be rendered as part of the Bryce scene thus saving you file space. Does this make sense to you?

Sorry 'bout the lack of pic in the previous posting, here's one now:

See that pile of gifts in the second car? (Yeah, I'm still adjusting the car's placement, I know it's up under the engine.) That's the pile I was referring to.

I do like the idea of rendering the gifts separately for the final image and posting them into the final shot. If I can't figure out another way around this, I might just do that. Thanks!

This probably won't help, but just in case: double-check that you don't actually have any extra objects in your scene that you don't need. I ocasionally do something wacky with the mouse or typing coordinates or cut & paste, and on occasion I've found that one object is actually 10 identical objects occupying the same position, or I have copies of some object lost behind the camera.