Why would this picture render in bryce at only about 20-40% of all cpu cycles. The rest were idles with a few exceptions. Fresh reboots didnt help; sure i was exceeding my physical ram a fair bit but the system was idle not going crazy. In short, once i re-render this at 16rpp ill never let a file get this large again unless my comp can handle it. ((Well ive finally done it, and brought my amd1.2gig and 512 megs of ram to its knees. This picture even after i virtually started over and reduced model polygons significantly, has 4.2million polygons. Ive given up hope of adding a few wispy clouds in front of buildings as just about anything i do in bryce causes it to go to swapping harddrive for 3 to 5 mins at a time. Hell, it takes 20 mins to save. btw, raw bryce file is 392megs, and total swap used in win2000 is about 800-950megs.)) My only concern is i may have put too much into it, the basic pic was bare before but this one might have too many objects and too little direction. All that needs changing now is a few minor positions and a re-render at 16 rays per inch. This one was reduced to 4 but i can see some bad anti-aliasing on those fine tree fiber thingies. Any comments?

As far as the image, it seems really cool. I could imagine you could reduce the rendering time by just reducing teh size of the output. If you are using bryce 5, maybe there is a way you can get people to help you render this. Just think if you were doing an animation of the ships and tendrils moving.

You might try rendering it in "slices" - start rendering the whole image, and after the first pass, stop the render. Select a portion, either vertically or horizontally, and render that section. I'm not sure how you would export or save that, anybody know if it can be exported? If you can export it, then just render each section separately.

no, dont remove objects, i would find a way to get around it, or be patient, dont screw with something that looks THAT good. check out the discussion on longest render times, some guy had like 1100 hours.