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.

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