40 hours and I'm only 53% through with this render. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong that would cause it to take so long. I'm only using the basic anti aliasing. Or is this just average? At the rate its going it will take another 48 hours to complete. It's enough to make me pull out my hair!!! The image itself is not that complicated, it has a few lights, and some water terrains in it, and a few plants but nothing like I've seen some of you all do. I love my new little hobby so much, but I swear the rendering time will make me quit, it's so frustrating to me. All of you have helped me out alot with your tips on post final rendering. But it seems like everytime I think I'm done and say OK this is the final render, I find something I want to change and I just cringe at thinking I have to start it over. /sigh Oh and My PC is a 2800+ AMD processor with 512 DDR ram. Would another stick of ram speed it up? My husband is a computer guru and says it would but I would think it was all processor based.

if you change something small, you could always Plop Render just that little bit, and layer it on top of the original render. I've just been doing that this morning, correcting a small error I didn't notice until the main render was well underway. Also, if you want to give your poor old pc a break, you can click once on the picture to stop it rendering, save your file, close Bryce. Next time you open the file you can click Resume Render button (to the right of the Render button) and it will take up where it left off. For future reference, you can turn off anti-aliasing on individual objects - you hold down shift + ctrl when clicking to close the Attributes box. Doesn't work on trees and some other things.

Yea I've done plop rendering and all the others for post rendering, I'm just talking about the Final render :( I'm not sure what you mean by layering a plop render though, whenever I've tryed to fix something and then resume render, it starts over.

There are only certain things you can change without it restarting the render. I once had an image with only one lightsource and set to normal AA crawl along and I couldn't figure out why. I let it run for about 12 hours and then stopped it, saved, rebooted and restarted and it just stormed through at a decent rate. Just something to bear in mind.

Bryces rendering speed is all about the cpu. You ram really has to do with the opening/saving of large scene files. ----- "a few lights, and some water terrains in it" I would say anything with lights and transparency, and especially transparent terrains, is going to take a while to render. I had a render take 60+ hours, and it was 11 radial lights, behind a terrain with a glass mat on it. With a scene like that (I NOW know) you could turn off the shadows on most/all of your lights, and that would speed up your render. Nowadays I usually turn off all shadows on my lights, save for one, which will be the main shadow caster. Of course, it all depends on the scene, turning off a lot of the shadows could make the scene not look as nice. All depends on the scene. AgentSmith

drawbridgep = EXCELLENT point. Before any major render, restart your computer. Give your render every chance to go as quickly as possible. Can't hurt. AS

Another point may be to save the file with a new name add a "b" or something simple(refresh). & possibly render to disk. Sometimes that helps me when I'm rendering large sizes 4000+. ICM

Yea I've done the saving and restarting also. I've done it about 6 times with this render alone, hehe.
This image does have 4 terrains with a water mat on it so that may be the issue. Seems to really stall out on the fountain part of it. Once it gets past that it speeds up considerably.
If I turn off shadows won't that completely change the picture/mood? I have like 6 lightsources, 3 of them in lamps or lanterns, 3 of them inside a building. I guess I could turn off the ones inside the building?

What does render to disk do?

Message edited on: 09/29/2004 08:15

Oh, also, take into account what the scene itself looks like. Meaning, are there complex shapes all throughout your scene, or just at the top? Your render could hit an area farher down that is less complex and that area wouldn't take as long to render. Or, if it IS complex throughout, then yes, you could probably bet that at 40 hours and 53%, it really would take another 48 hours. If I can, I will do a small render to approxiamte the real time of a full render. For example, if I were going to render a pic at 800x600, I would first render it at 400x300, take the time from that, and multiply it by 4. It's fairly accurate. Btw, how large are you rendering this scene? That 60+ hour render I had was 3000x3000... AS

Render to disk is used when you are rendering a picture of a size that wouldn't fit onto your main document window. AS

540X405, not very large.

Try this, Make your fountain "hidden". Render the scene and save it. Then un-hide the fountain & plop render it small pieces at a time. I ran across this with multiple layers of poser hair. Now I post it in.

Wow...that must be some complex transparencies! ;o) AS

Procedural textures can also be very processor-intensive. Whenever possible, try to use photographic textures which render a lot faster. I usually render at 2000*3000 pixels with normal AA on a dual 1,4 GHz machine (only one processor being used for rendering). Rendertimes are in general 30 minutes with another 3 hours of anti-aliasing, for average file sizes of 400 MB and average poly counts of 150 million.

Yeah, fountains could be hurting that render time - lot of transparent/semi-transparent detail really cranks up the render time. If you're really into CPU killing - try multiple trees with semi transparent leaves. Ugh.

And transparency + reflection + HIGH REFRACTION settings (like with water textures) can boost render times greatly as well. And if you use certain high settings with volumetric textures...you can even lock up the preview window in the DTE, LOL.

HAHA yea i had to turn off the preview window, IT was taking like 10 minutes to render. Ok well at least now I have a reason for all this time.

As an alternative to turning off shadows on lights, try disabling various shadow options on individual terrains/materials. My guess is that there are some very complex ray interactions going on within your water fountain terrains. Given that the water is transparent anyway, you might be able to get away with disabling 'cast shadows' and 'self shadows' (and maybe even receive shadows).

Lights, transparency, reflection = week+ long render. Two cars, some basic Bryce object walls, and something on the order of 60 radial lights (for even light spread from flourescent tubes. It's crazy, but it worked.) At least your computer is about 3 times as fast as what I used. It's a bit worse on an 850 MHz P-III computer.

Can I please have some of your CPU????????, a 40 hour render on your comp would take 6 weeks with my 800MHz. There is so much stuff that I can't do because I know my machine would blow a fuse. Cheers GG 8).

Karineg, just for clarification on plop render and resume render buttons; assuming the image in the example image in the Bryce screen grab above has finished rendering, you can still plop render any portion (region) of the image. After your plop render retouches on the image you can save the image to HD. Also, you cannot resume a render to disk image, only onscreen renders can be stopped, saved and resumed. Once you start a render to disk operation, thats it, its all or nothing you cannot resume the operation.

meant to post this yesterday - the image on the right was finished, and tweaked in PS, I'm just using it as a for-instance. I opened the file in Bryce again, moved a flower downwards, then plop-rendered just that area. Then I can cut/paste that little square on to the finished render in post-work. I see that karineq mentioned that he/she knows how to do that already, I'm posting it more for new users who might be reading this thread - I didn't know what the hell plop render was when people talked about it lol.

Plop render/compositing is a seriously cool trick. I have made big-time use of this in my bryce images.