I currently have a scene rendering on my graphics only PC.  After 14 hours it is 7 percent complete.  This is going to be multiple days long, maybe a week or so. Since the PC is used only for graphics and I have a second PC for web stuff this is no problem.  I two questions:

If Bryce is rendering to a file, what would happen if you try to access that file in another window?  Will it crash the render or can you see the progress?

What is the longest render you have ever successfully completed?

 

oops that was three questions.

The longest render I ever did/designed was for a client, we used bryce lightning and 4 computers to render it and it took 2 1/2 months. Granted it was an animation in HD format heheh. As far as your other question it seems like we had tried that before during the testing cycle and it would either crash bryce or the render would stall etc etc, I can't remember now for sure, but I think it kills bryce when you try to view it during the rendering cycle.

Do atleast one thing a day that scares the hell outta ya!!

Longest.. 2 weeks.. pretty silly.

Yup..it crashes. Or it won't open.

I once had a probem midway..am not so sure what it was..but the uncompleted tiff file was on my desktop..surprise surprise.... after bryce shut down. I opened it to see what it would look like. Ten percent of it was done.. the top bit. The rest..looked like those bar codes you get on products. And not in colours..in black and white. 

Did you tell your PC to use multple threads?

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All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

And in my final hours - I would cling rather to the tattooed hand of kindness - than the unblemished hand of hate...

Oh yes, on high priority, bryster.  I've known that one since it was an option.  I knew it would be long. 8000X7200 at 150 dpi, premium render, some volumetrics and some transparency.  

So far so good.  I'm about 40hrs into it and it is around 25% and still running.  I was most wondering about accessing the file and Clay pretty much settled that question.  I'm glad I built the 'puter in a full sized case that has 5 fans plus a good CPU cooler.

Unfortunately, a weird quirk that has now been lost at some point (when Bryce turned 7?) was;

Being able to 'Render To Disk' as a PSD and then anytime during the long render, I could go into my Windows Explorer, then "Copy" that PSD file to another location and then I could open that copied file and view it as I normally would, all without bothering (crashing) Bryce or its active rendering file. This way I could see how the render was going along / how it was looking.

But, as I said, unfortunately, this can no longer work. I know I used this process in Bryce 4, 5, and 5.5 (and maybe even in version 6.0?...can't remember)

In Bryce 7, you can still copy and paste the PSD but it just now comes up pure black. Very unfortunate.

*For whatever reason, I had always found that the copying function would not be allowed to work/happen if I was rendering to disk as a BMP or TIF, only as PSD.

AS

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"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"

Oh-Oh somebody woke AS.!

Available on Amazon for the Kindle E-Reader

All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

And in my final hours - I would cling rather to the tattooed hand of kindness - than the unblemished hand of hate...

Rofl...I'm usually always checking my Rendo email, tells me when there's any new Bryce posts.  ;o)

Yeah, I just tried this quirk again to make sure and nope, it still doesn't work. (I had not done any Render To Disk's with my current setup of Bryce 7 & Windows 7.) The PSD still copies correctly but just comes up black when I bring it up.

I'll have to re-install B6, see if I can do it with that (just for `scuse)

AS

Contact Me | Gallery | Freestuff | IMDB Credits | Personal Site
"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"

Man, that would be great to know.  I have no particular favor to B7.  If B6 will allow checking up on a long render, that will be the route I go next time.  That brings another question:

 If a scene in built and saved in B7, can it be opened and rendered in B6?

 I know the opposite is true.  I'd check it out but that will be at least a week from now.  How in the world did you ever discover this easter eggy thingy?  

"If a scene in built and saved in B7, can it be opened and rendered in B6?"

• From what I remember, no. (will have to give that a try though)

"How in the world did you ever discover this easter eggy thingy?"

• Accident. Many years ago, I was doing a Render To Disk and while it was doing that I copy and pasted a number of files for a quick backup to another drive and then noticed the PSD file being rendered also got pasted, I double-clicked it and boom, the partial render came up. (used PSD for Render To Disk ever since)

AS

Contact Me | Gallery | Freestuff | IMDB Credits | Personal Site
"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"

Bummer, just re-installed Bryce 6.1 and the copy and paste quirk doesn't work, the PSD pastes but just comes up black.

Maybe it was something to do with in the past I was usiing Windows XP and am now using Windows 7? (I know that a huge leap in theory). It's probably only works with with B5.5 and prior.

Ah, well, too bad. That would be kind of a cool thing if it still worked.

AS

Contact Me | Gallery | Freestuff | IMDB Credits | Personal Site
"I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now"

My graphics machine is still XP.  Why change something that is rock solid stable?  I'll try that trick after this long render.

Aaand maybe a lesson to be learned is: "If it is an older Bryce version file it might be best to open and modifiy it in the older version unless you are trying to access a newer feature like  instancing.   Hmm   a lot to ponder and too much to remember.  Thanks AS for all the info. 

Told this before, but back in 2007 I had a commision for the National Space Symposium. The image needed to be rendered large enough to be used on bill boards and 30 ft display screens on the main stage.

Having never done this sort of thing before I naively rendered it on my machine at 2000 pixels wide at 300dpi. It took a whole week to do on my ageing machine which had a 15gb hardrive and 256 mb ram. I emailed it over and of course they came back and said it was way too small. I explained my situation and they decided the best thing to do was have me send the scene file over on a cd so they could do it themselves.

They had purchased what they termed a super computer to handle the task, but it still took 6 weeks to render. The thing was, there were gaps in the terrain which I had smoothed over with the clone tool originally, but they displayed it raw, which still annoys me today.Still it hangs in the foyet of their office next to a poster designed for an earlier event by none other than Ralph Mcquarrie so that makes up for it.

http://joevinton.blogspot.com/

The eigth day render is finished.  The result.. meh.

 The original is 8000 X 6400 pixels but I am now experimenting with various post work approaches on reduced size copies to see what I can do to enhance it.  I wish I had some of you other Brycer's modelling skills but I pretty sure I can add a lot of detail with PhotoShop.  

Ultimately I hope to have it printed on metal as a four panel cluster display. 

BTW..., 2 terrains, an old model I booleaned, and 2d backdrop from Hubble telescope site, 4 radial lights.

My longest was 11 days, for a single frame, but it was a long time ago. I remember there being some cludges as AS mentions, but I also have a feeling there was a cludge using mutliple camera locations so that you would end with several files.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.