Hi all of you fellow Bryceaholics out there. I am starting this thread to discuss the pros and cons of Bryce Lightning. If you are wondering what it is, let me explain it.

Bryce Lightning is not a way to model lightning in a scene. Rather it is a way to speed up your render time for a Bryce project. I'm sure if you have worked with the software for at least a couple of months or longer, you have discovered that some render times can be much longer than the time it takes to compose a scene or an animated sequence. With Bryce 7 Pro you will also recieve Bryce Lightning. This is something that is supposed to help with render times by spreading the render operation among several computers. The way it works is as follows:

1. Have a network of friends or business associates who have Bryce Lightning installed on their computers. They don't have to have Bryce 7 Pro installed, although they can if they want to.

2. When you have a project you have put together ready that you know will take a large amount of time to render if you use just your computer, contact this network via e-mail or whatever to let them know you need the use of their computers to help speed up the render. Ask for permission to do this.

3. Now when you have it all ready, set up the render parameters. when you start the render, Bryce Lightning will make your computer the server, and all of the others in the network at that time will be the slaves. Each slave computer will recieve a portion of the project that it will render and send back to the server when done. The server then assembles all of the rendered parts into a whole. If it is an animated project, each slave computer will be used to render a certain amount of the frames, which are then assembled by the server.

Obviously, this is a way to create great works in a much shorter amount of time. In the case of animations, a clip that might have taken months to render can be reduced to a few hours or less, if you have enough computers working on it through Bryce Lightning.

Now this is my reason for starting this thread:

I would like to know what you think of this. Have any of you used Bryce Lightning, or tried it? Is it something you would be willing to try? If you have tried it, how would you rate it on a scale of 1 to 10? Would you recommend it to others, or would you warn others against it? If you think it is great after using it, could you describe the experience for the rest of us?

These are things I'm sure many of us wish to know about Bryce Lightning. I have it installed on my PC, but have not had the opportunity to try it out yet. I'm sure that it has its good points as well as bad points. The thing we need to know is whether it is worth using or not. The only way I can think of to know this, (without having used it), is to find someone that has and see what they think about it.

As a new product for Bryce, it probably has a few bugs that need to be addressed by the good people at DAZ 3D. The way to find these bugs is to work with the product and report the problems to its creators, so that they can work to improve it. This is how DAZ 3D improves all of the software and products they offer. I applaud them for this, as it allows their consumers to be a part of the process.

If you would like to know more about Bryce Lightning than what I have provided here, you can check it out at daz3d.com, or you can acquire the Bryce 7 Artist's Guide, (see my thread by the same name, also in this forum), which has a section that explains it far better than I can.

Well that's pretty much it for now. Let me know what you think. I will welcome any and all comments concerning this here.

Thank you.

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I think my brain is in my big toe!

Why?

Because when I stubbed it, my Doctor said I had a concussion!