Ok, I'm trying to make my own backgrounds for some portaits of D&D characters I'm making. One in particular is a real problem. She's a Druid and I need some trees as a backdrop. I wanted to make my own as opposed to use someone else's pic so I fired up the old B4. Well I chose the first tree, a fir, and tripled it (rotating and resizing each copy) to give the tree more branches and make it thinker. I have 2, yes '2' of these trees as a backdrop. Rendering time ... days! How can I speed up this time. I'm not talking about upgrading my PC or anything (I have a 700Mhz, 256 RAM and a 64 RAM 3D card), just is there a better way to have a couple nice trees rendered on a 600x600 pic? What can be done to the trees to make them easier to render? Thanx for your time.

The answer is.......smaller polycounts...The more detailed the tree the higher the polygon count. If you look at your poly count for the entire scene its probably out of this world. You need to locate "smaller" polygon count trees...Check out 3dcafe.com or liteluver (I forget the site name but its listed amoung the free stuff) he or she? was kind enough to list the polycount with the thumbnails. Also you might wanna try 2d trees, there are many tutorials listed that will guide you in that direction. You can check out my image using 2d trees just look in the Bryce gallery under "Sunday Ride"....Hope this helps. KAP

It would seem each of my Triple trees has 2400 polygons. I guess that's a lot. Thanks for the tip. BTW, I love the pic "Sunday Ride", how long did it take to render that?

Oops I was wrong, there's about 38,000 poly's. Yikes! Back to the drawing board...

Well, in bryce 4 at that time I was running a 700 mhz AMD with 256 megs of ram...it took about 35 min total. Actually, 2400 polys isn't that much....seems kinda odd..

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

Grasshopper, the answers you seek are here

That does sound very strange. I had a Bryce 4 scene with 13 million polygons and it rendered fast even at 3000 x 2000 resolution on my P2 with 196 MB ram. It seems like Bryce treats terrain polygons differently and much more efficiently than other polygons such as trees. If that's really the case, then I'm starting to get worried about getting Bryce5.

"An Example is worth Ten Thousand Words"

I'd go with 2D trees, as Kap suggests. You can make the trees you are already using into 2D trees by rendering them "standalone" and then doing a mask render. Apply both renders to a plane as color and trans, respectively, and you should have acceptable render times.

bryce 3 could never render my trees.... somehow i never got it to work right .... but 5 rocks.... i'll tell you that, just render a pic with something like 10 trees in less than an hour.... and i have a pentium 3 550,256 ram,32video....