I'm wondering, what's the deal with the network rendering? I sort of understand the idea, that it enables someone to render a scene over several computers, but how does that work?

Now this answer is coming from someone who doesn't own it, but here it goes. The computers that you want to use for the rendering need to have "client" software installed. You then enter the "ip address" of the box you want to use over the network or internet. It then see's that and begins rendering its portion of the scene. Pretty much it, kinda like file sharing... Hope that clears it up for you

Well I haven't delved into it just yet ( I just installed 5 on my PC today). I'm going to attempt to do a Network render from a Mac with a PC. I hope it will work because in 5 things have greatly slowed down. With the higest setting on, a simple rendering can take up to 12 hours to complete. Hmmm I don't like it but it does make a better render. But to answer your question. A network render allows 2 or more machines to render 1 image, delegating different parts of the render to different machines. In essence you're getting a duel processor render with 2 machines. So rendering will in theory take less time. This is how the large animation studios get their jobs done. You have several machines running and rendering parts and pieces of the same image to speed things up. I hope that clears up at least a little bit of the process. James

I've got network rendering on multiple machines at home. My fastest machine is set up as the host, plus 2 slower clients. It was pretty seamless to set up, and generally has worked well - with two caveats. First, if you are network rendering with slower clients keep in mind that your rendering will be limited by your slowest machine. For example, a piece of an image I was working on took 15 minutes on the fast host. A similar piece would have taken 8 hours on the slow machine. Now, I had all the ray-tracing options turned up, so the slow machine, a plain old Pentium was crippled by the effort. So, plan for your slowest machine. Second, twice I have had the host loose track of the net render in mid render and start sending pieces of the default Bryce scene load midway through. This has only happened in the middle of the night so I do not know why its happened. There ya go. :-) TomD

Great bit of info TomD. Thanks. Though I havn't been able to get my Mac and PC to work yet. I'll keep trying though since I know this will help me a lot since I want to take advantage of the higest settings in Bryce 5. And they really SLOW things down! I have PCMACLAN running to have the two talk together normally and that works fine for an AppleTalk connection, but B5 doesn't seem to recognize this connection. Hmmm. But I'n starting a new topic. I'll stop now. ;-) I hope we at least answered MikeJ's question. James