I'm rendering an image and am wondering if anyone else has had times like I'm having. I'm on a P3 500 with 126 ram. I've been rendering for 38 hours and I'm 17% finished. Bryce 4, with the 4.1 update. There are alot of trees and lights. Does this seem normal or is something wrong? Also, I'd like to thank the people who answered my other post, I really appreciated it.

Umm... trees (complex objects w/ transparency?) and multiple lights will definitely slow down the render process. Depends on the number, and the settings. Also, if you have any volume materials at all, it's a sure bet that's adding quite a bit of time to your render. But 17% in 38 hours... unless you've got a TON of trees and lights, as well as a large/complex volumetric, that's crazy. Rosh

I tried a scene once that had about 25 Bryce trees and was only about 60% after 25 hours of rendering on a P2-400 w/256mbram. Good thing I didn't add volumetric effects!

I have a 750Mhz with 256 ram and complex scenes like that take a long time on any machine were Bryce is concerned. I always try to cut corners when building a complex scene in Bryce seeing if I can do something in a way that wont extend rendering time but if its not possible you have to go the long way.

Hi Kash... I just wandered in here to get away from the flame wars... but, I finally got a figure on the photo quality test render for "Temple..." At photo quality, high settings for everthing it went from about 23 hours at standard render to 4 days, 13 hours and some odd minutes estimeated time. Major increase for the render settings difference. Thats the most equivalent scene I have to what you're trying: Lots of lights, transparency, reflections, and imported polygons. (that's on a p233mhz with 512mb of RAM) My suggestion is still to render a bit larger than your final size at standard settings, then export as a PSD, increase the res to 300dpi in photoshop, run a sharpen filter, and reduce the image to your final size... It's a cheat, but you should be able to finish the render and the image in less than 17% @ 38 hours! Thats way too slow if you want/need your 'puter for other things... Since we talked in chat I've tried this with three other files and I got pretty good image quality each time this way. Not as good as if I rendered at 300dpi, but LOTS faster. It should work... (crosses fingers and looks hopeful) Since bryce just crashed on me AGAIN on my last test render, I'm going to go re-install brye again. Guess I'll be out of the brycing biz 'till I get all my .mats reloaded... sigh Later and good luck with it. I think that's going to be a great image if we can get it done. Wish my first render had been as good, way back when.

I am on a G3 iMac with 160real ram/240virtual and had one that took close to 3 days. It's in the gallery and called "The Arrival". It was 16x12 at 72 DPI and had a few volumetrics in it. Some artists have been known to set up a render and go on vacation. However, Bryce can be comparitively slow sometimes, but it does do beautiful renders, and with the price it can not be beat

I have a render that is estimated to take about 2 days. I let it render for a while and then I save the file and resume rendering later. It's being slowed down by a lot of weeds from 3DPlants.

I think my longest render that I actually let run was 17 hours or so ... Not patient enought for volumetrics most of the time and can't stand being unable to do ANYTHING for days.

If I may cut in this one? There are tutorials on "shortcuts" to curb large render times without sacrificing too much quality...If memory serves me correctly it is called BryceTech...there are over 100 different links to good tutorials...most of them still useful to Bryce3 users like myself.

I'd like to thank everyone for replying and especially thank IronBear for going out of his way to help me. This is my first render and I just had no idea what to expect or what was normal. After everyone's kind replies I have alot better idea and though it's not much fun waiting for the render to finish so I can use my computer again, I'm not worried that it's a bug or I did something wrong. Thank you again! Kasheera

Awwww... blush

::::sits in inspired awe of IronBear::::

Me? What the heck did I do? blushes again Ya'll quit that.

:::snickers::: Isn't he cute!

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Like the previous posts have said it has happened to all of us. As we get better and better at creating Bryce images and we add more complicated (or just plain more) objects the rendering time takes longer. In some cases, it has even crashed my computer. I see that you have more RAM than I do but I'm working on increasing my RAM. This same kind of question was brought up on one of the AOL 3D boards and I have seen some people post that with even 200 plus Megs of RAM the rendering time can still be slow! So you are not alone.