Alright Bryce 6.0 owners lets take a quick review of the new HDRI ability, and how to start avoiding render times from hades.

Simply put; In the Sky Lab's IBL (Image Based Lighting) area is where you will load an HDRI. Take notice of the "Quality" slider, think of this as you would when you take your Render Options of "Rays Per Pixel" from 16 to 256. Small jumps in your HDRI Quality value will equate to not a huge difference in the final result, but you could pay dearly with long render times.

Bottom line, keep it low. If you can, keep it at zero. (that's my personal opinion, actually all this info is)

The HDRI Quality slider mainly affects the qulaity of the edges of your soft shadows. You will probably notice a change in the brightness/darkness of your scene as you increase the Quality, but as stated the main difference is in your shadows edge softness. I myself have not seen any other increase in the overall "quality of the render", but it is early in the Bryce 6 game, I'll keep looking.

Do some plop rendering in your own scenes and see if you really need a higher quality shadow border, if not, keep it low or none.

You can download the scenefile I am using for a comparison HERE. It contains a synthetic, seven exposure HDRI I created in Photoshop.

I'm not going to keep going, you get the idea. From 0 to 25 I increased the render time by more than 3 times. Yes, there is a difference in shadow quality, check out the images and compare. Again, I suggest experimenting with your own scenes and make sure what quality value you need before you dive into a very long render.

But, I will say there is little shadow difference in 25 vs. 50, 75 or 100. But, boy can the render times go up!

And, I will also say that once I put a texture on the ground plane (bricks, stone, rough dirt), it was very difficult to see a difference at all in the shadows with 0 vs. 25

Thanks.

It's defenately using the dual cores looks like. I'm getting 2:45 on that first render with 0 quality. The second one on quality setting 15 I'm getting 6:45 on for render times. Running a AMD 64 X2 4800+ processor.

Opps, mistyped. Got 6:15 on the second render.

I gotta pop for the dual core...my mobo will take up to a Athlon 64x2 4600+, would be so worth the money....

Yep, you can get the one I have now for $300 I think.

Exactly. I think I'm going to get a Christmas present for myself....

They're worth every cent. Just had a thought. I havn't tested Lightning yet but if it's multithreaded as much as Bryce 6 is now you'll get a bit of speed increase off of using it on a dual core as well. Very nice. They are saying that further mutlithreading optimizations are coming in the free update 6.1. Looks like they're starting to make a new base if you will to build future things on. Very good to see.

I bet they will really be able to dial in optimizations once they get more feedback from the users. And, if a Bryce 7 could take advantage of 64-bit cpu's.....oh, that would be a small dream come true.

Hell, you could make a cheap render box out of a Mac-mini dual core or just make your own with a mini-atx board with a cheap AMD X2 for $150 and $80 for a board and if you had other spare parts that's some nice extra rendering power for very cheap.

Looks a heck of a lot faster than softshadows in Bryce 5. that is a good thing.

Its cool!

&^$! your quick render times!!!   ;oD

I'm getting that dual core for Christmas if it kills me, lol.....

1:10 on a quad G5 2.5ghz, AS, you really need a Christmas present soon.

I got yer "quad" right here...lol.

Yup, max out my currrent rig, and make it dual core. Then later...make it my network render slave when I buy my new PC that wll have 4 quad core cpu's burning a hole through my floor. 

I think you're making him sick :)

I'd like to play but haven't the faintest idea how to play.

I'll have to save all the threads I can for later perusal.

They are downloading and rendering that scene file I put up for download in the first post in this thread.

Both on a dual processor computer with 1 gig of memory -  I don't know how to find out what the gigahertz are.

I'm hoping that the reason mine is so slow - is because this isn't really mine, as mine (with 2 gigs of memory) is still sick - has been since May...

This, is Ian's computer, while he tries to find out what's wrong with mine,,, at the moment he thinks it might be the hard drive. (we've given up on the firm we bought it from)

(P.S. sorry I didn't realise what you were all doing, too busy frantically trying to download all the HDRI stuff I can, while I can get online.  But I don't think it's useable - not if I have to learn a whole new program JUST to use the IBL part of Bryce6 - if this isn't right, I wish someone could explain the IBL thing in words a Beano reader could understand.)

Image Based Lighting basically puts a sphere around your entire scene with an image wrapped on it.  Instead of the sun providing light, the light comes from the image (more from bright areas).  You can also choose to have the image as the background for your scene.

Basically, what it does is provide realistic lighting and shadows, as well as giving reflective objects something to reflect.  You can simply use one of the many free HDRI images available on the net (link in the header for some), or you can roll your own - from photos or a bryce render.

I did try to get some free hdri images - but the only ones I could get (From the Bryce Backroom page on this) you need to learn HDRIShop to convert them into the 'Probe' type images that B6 uses... unless I'm missing something in all the excitement.

The other links on that page that seem to link to the images that Bryce can use - just 404'd on me.

I'm extremely impressed.
I'd love to see how an intel based mac does once the universal version is out.

Thanks for the sample file, AS.  This was fun!

Coolness.

I have a new Intel MacBook Pro 17 with duo processor.  I will be interested to see the times of render before and after the UB update comes out when Bryce 6.1 is released. I imagine it will be around twice as fast as using the Rosetta emulator.

Fran - HDR conversion and import in ten steps!

1. Open HDR Shop
2. File -> Open
3. Image -> Panorama -> Panoramic Transformations
4. Source Image Format -> Either mirrored ball (if round), or Latitude/Longitude (if rectangle)
5. Destination Image Format -> Light Probe (Angular Map)
6. OK
7. File -> Save As
8. Radiance Format
9. Save as blah blah blah.hdr
10. Import into Bryce!

Ok, even on a clean rebooted machine mine is going like a tortoise.

Render time 10.37

Windows XP SP2
Pentium 4     2.53Ghz
1.89Ghz 1GB RAM

I've been trying out IBL on a landscape image I've been working on a couple of weeks but it seems I would have to alter teh terrain mats and bark mats I've made in order for them to look any good under IBL.  Any tips for the kinds of things needed to make mats look good under hdri?

I've spent too long messing around trying to get HDRI working well for this scene, perhaps I need to get back to finishing it off and rendering under ordinary lighting in order to see how much better Bryce 6 is.

Quote - Fran - HDR conversion and import in ten steps!

1. Open HDR Shop
2. File -> Open
3. Image -> Panorama -> Panoramic Transformations
4. Source Image Format -> Either mirrored ball (if round), or Latitude/Longitude (if rectangle)
5. Destination Image Format -> Light Probe (Angular Map)
6. OK
7. File -> Save As
8. Radiance Format
9. Save as blah blah blah.hdr
10. Import into Bryce!

Oh wow!  It's that easy????  I had no idea.  It just looks so intensely complex on the HDRShop site.

Thank you so much for posting this, I really appreciate it.

Kathye

Whenever you set a new HDR, Bryce defaults to 50 quality.  Try making the quality 0, then working up in 5-10 at a time until you get a look you want, without the massive render time.

Fran, a page that has HDRI's ready to go for you is the Debevec older hdri page;

http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

Get the round ones, not the cross ones at the bottom. Under each image right click and save the .hdr files.

oh i so want to try this test out but i'm not playing with bryce for a while, unless i can just install the app without any of the content files then i may do it.

reason why i state this is quite simple, 120 gig hard drive with only 12 gig space free which i don't wnat to take up with anything i'm not going to use yet

CD - the downloads from Daz are in 30-70 meg chunks, one of which is the bare program, the rest are content files.

I wonder if you can use the fake radiosity and reflections tricks for help in quality and render times using HDRI? There are some sites that have some great tips for Bryce(which Im sure have been posted here before ).

Quote - CD - the downloads from Daz are in 30-70 meg chunks, one of which is the bare program, the rest are content files.

Mate i have them all downloaded and backed up on disk, i was just wondering if i can install just the bare program and run this test or do i need content files as well...my guess from what you said is i only need the main program file.

Yup, you only need to install the main install file (br_ap006_Br6_App.exe). The rest are all up to you, as they are all optional.

Quote - Fran, a page that has HDRI's ready to go for you is the Debevec older hdri page;

http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

Get the round ones, not the cross ones at the bottom. Under each image right click and save the .hdr files.

Thanks AS, for a change I get to go home this weekend - where I wouldn't normally, so I can do it then.