Hi guys! I wanted to make a rework from an older pic (only 52 MB); everything was fine until the start of the rendering. I made 50% of AA yesterday then shut down my laptop; in the morning I started to render again but it didn't work any more; after a few minutes my laptop (512 Mb ram) clicked and shut down so I closed every program I could (Antiv. IE etc.). Nothing helped; my laptop works fine until I start rendering the same pic(from 50% AA) then everything crashes...(It's not overheating either) It happened a few years ago that I just couldn't finish a pic because of this same mystical AA crash...I really hate Bryce when it goes totally mad...where is B5.5 for God sake! A sad and angry Brycer :-(

You will have to change something for it to work. I suggest change the water so it is not transperant just reflective it won't change the pic much and will save the processor a lot of processing. the other problem is too may polygons. Bryce treats terrain polygons differntly than imported or tree polygons you might have to loose up soem of the foilage. What is the resolution of the figure in the bacground could you use a lower res version. Save soem polygons exportign from poser you can make invisible those parts of the body that are not showing. Those parts will not import into bryce coudl save you some power without any change there. I always watch my polygons and try to work efficiant.

Thanks Dann-O; I going to check if I can adjust or tweak things as you advised. I have rendered much more complex and larger scenes than this without problem; this is the second time during the years when the rendering totally stops.

Strange; I started to render from the beginning and now it works but it's slower than it was first time; it seem that it couldn't continue with the saved version; hope I can finish it this time...

1. save the file under a new name. 2. save the psd file like it is. 3. render the bottom part only through plot. sometimes bryce corrupts the file if it's too large. i found that sometimes it's easier to save it under another name, restart the puter and just open that. drac

Thanks drac, you were right; the file became corrupt but it works again after I renamed the file.

Strange this..I've rendered files 10 x the size of this and had no problems.....

Yeah Bryster, but you're special. :^)

It's the trees. There is a bug in bryce 5 which when yopu have a lot of terrains and trees it freaks out. I had a really cool scene of a building interior lit by moonlight. The whole building was made of about 25 terrains and there were a few trees providing an ivy-type effect. Tried foy DAYS trying to render and it kept crashing. Deleted the trees and it went fine.

TJohn: LOL Yeah right!

Aye, remember that Bryce 5 Treelab Trees are metaballic (grins!) in nature, and they cost extra processing power because it's not an actual model, but a series of filters creating the "metaballs". In this way, Bryce's metaballs are vastly inferior to "biospheres" in Amorphium, for example, or metaballs in Lightwave or Maya which have actual geometry involved... So, the metaballs are most likely the culprit... I've often made thousands of spheres, and then when you Convert them to metaballs, you get a big ole' Nothin...

Right about the Metaballs but ( I am relativly sure Bryce trees are not metaballs)I don't think that is the problem with the tree generator. Trees are treated like imported models not like terrain. Try rendering a scene 2.5 million polygons with just imported models. Most likely won't render. But with 2.5 million poly terrains no problems.

Well, thank you Bryce trashing my whole system; something very bad happened; the computer crashes ALL the time now and can't even run SysRecover, it shuts down... Never seen anything like this before...damn!

I can't believe Bryce trashed your system. This one has trees and is 246mb. I had no trouble with it whatsoever.

No, Dann-O, Bryce "Treelab" trees ARE constructed internally from metaballs. The sliders in the treelab determine how they will interact. But you are right about Brycean terrains being converted on-the-fly in it's renderer, and the listed polygon count display in Bryce is just an approximation of what the terrain will yield (in polys) when rendering, and not a RAM-hungry monster during construction phases.

I have to agree with Bryster. I've had more than a hundred Bryce trees in one scene several times without crashing. In fact the last Bryce crash I had was before I ran the 5.1 update I've had big files that were slow to save and load and render but no crashes. And I've only got 512 ram. I'm afraid something more sinister may be at work on your machine attileus, like a virus, or a hardware problem.

Thanks Bryster for your concern; I also made pics like yours above (200-300 MB) without much trouble; I'm worried about that my laptop became so instable after the latest rendering; it crashes now when I want to run SysRecover.(It always saved my day before...) I must say that is unhealthy to make overnight renders on a laptop, I shouldn't do that; my system was rock-solid before starting Brycing; now I just don't know what happened.

Thank you guys; strange that my McAfee didn't give a warning...That must be a really sinister thing stopping the WinXP SysRecover. Hm, it will take a week to reinstall everything. :-(

Just for the hell of it.....is your laptop overheating? I seem to remember this has been an issue with other L/T users in warmer parts of ther planet.

Yes, overheating is another problem with my laptop but I always managed to render large scenes except here. Never mind, I managed to render this scene in 3300x2700 without AA then resized to 800x600 and it's already in the my gallery; it seems though that my laptop REALLY hates rendering.