What are the best ways to speed up my animation renders...the speed is kiiling me. Also, if I set an animation to run at 30fps then change it 15fps after I've created some movements, will it automatically retime the movements so they still move normally? Please help....

Attached Link: http://members.surfeu.fi/apache

Firstly, unless you are doing animations for broadcast TV/Video, you dont need 30fps, if its standard computer/ CD-ROM playback, 15-20fps should be fine! - if at all possible, lower the amount of things like bump on textures that are not really needed, glasses and highly reflectives are the worst, as are too many lights, so basically just cut back on anything you may not need or see if you can compromise on some aspects of your scene. Changing the fps after keyframes are set should keep things where you wanted them in relation to each other, although exrtremely fast, complex movements will maybe lose some ledgibility if you halve the frame rate! - Check out 'Real World Bryce 4' by Susan A Kichens, its an invaluable resource for any Brycer!!

Changing the FPS will have a very minor effect on your motions. What happens is that your keyframes will get rounded to the nearest equivalent keyframe when you convert. For instance: say you set up the original animation at 30fps, with keyframes at frames 0, 9, and 20, or times 0.0s, 0.3s, and 0.66s. If you move to 15fps, the keyframes will be rounded to 0, 4, and 10, which translates to 0.0s, 0.27s, and 0.66s. Notice that the middle keyframe has been shifted slightly in time. This is due to the rounding when you change FPS, since every keyframe must land exactly on a tick. The way to avoid this is to pick beforehand your development FPS and your final FPS, and make the development FPS an even multiple (2 or 3) less than the final FPS. So you might do your development at 12fps and then output final to 24fps. If you do that, there's no shift, since everything gets scaled evenly by 2. As far as decreasing render time, you have several options, but remember that in general Bryce produces very high-quality output, very slowly. Options to reduce render time: (a) buy a faster CPU (the brute force approach) (b) use less complex textures, avoid volumetric materials, reduce the number of lights, don't use "volumetric world" setting, reduce your bump frequency and height, reduce the number of imported mesh objects - .obj, .3ds etc. files (c) render your animations with anti-aliasing turned OFF - note that this might slightly increase the animation's file size, since the leftover 'jaggies' tend not to compress very well (d) render your animations in small chunks on multiple machines and use a video editor to splice them together (e) reduce the FPS and/or image size of the animation. -flick Looking for more 3D resources? Check out 3D Commune www.3dcommune.com

Attached Link: http://www.planet-3d.com/garage.htm

I know a few tricks, but the one I use the most often is that I found a friend with a 1.1 gig Athlon and Bryce, and I let him render for me. ;]