I'm working on a picture that has a lot of things imported from Rhino, and right now the polygon count is a bit over five hundred thousand. I don't mind the waiting, I don't mind it being slow, but the noises my hard drive is causing is making me nervous as hell. I have this feeling that if I keep pushing it, it's just going to go "snap!" and I'll lose everything. I have a 1.3 ghz AMD Athlon processor with 128 RAM...it's not suitable for dealing with such a high polygon count picture! I'm sure everyone here has dealt with pictures that pushed your 'puter to the limits. Is there anything I can do that might ease my hard drive a bit? A time saving method? Some in-program settings tweaks? I even had to turn off the nano-preview because it made my hard drive scream while it refreshed! Thanks.

If your harddrive is thrashing your basically out of luck. Whats worse, when it gets really bad, your render could be as low at 20% of cpu usage. If youve got some high polygon terrains, you can reduce them a little, save and restart the program. That will free up a little ram. Everytime i hit about 250-275megs ram used by bryce outa 320megs the thrashing gets bad and fast. Be careful about exiting bryce abruptly when its thrashing bad. Did that once and from what i can tell, it must have been accessing the huge object presets i had, corrupted the whole file and the original br5. Theres no substitute for more ram, had 512 on a file 1.15gigs in size and bryce took 4 days thrashing the whole time. Got a full gig and it did the same file in 17 hours.

Relax, your hard drive is fine. Those noises it's making is perfectly normal, really. I only have a Pentium 1, 200mhz with 32mb Ram and a trident 1mb video card...and a project that I'm working on right now has 90 objects in it at a total of 4.6 million polygons. But, I have found it is the number of objects that take forever over polygons. Another Bryce project I have has 1,602 objects at only 408,000 polygons and that sucker takes a longer to load & probably 15 minutes to save...all much longer than the other project that has 10 times more polygons. To sum up...your pc & hard drive is fine, and yes turn off that nano-preview! That's about the best thing you can do, that and have something other to do than sit in front of your pc while it groans, a watched pot never renders. Agent Smith

Good point about the Ram, pmoores. In 3D...you can NEVER have enough ram. Get more if you can.

Hey, thanks a lot guys. ~sigh~ guess it's time I harvest my other computer. I can yank 128 RAM out of it...but, I can't remember a time where I didn't tweak my computer hardware-wise and not messing things up. Wish me luck!

Best of luck. Another thing I forgot to mention is when I have a big mesh in my scene, once I have it where it needs to be I use the Attributes option "Show As Box". It REALLY helps on speeding things up in the preview window. Agent Smith

One thing that I've found that helps is breaking up the image into several files, rendering them separately and merging them back together in a paint program. My gothic cathedral was 25,030,066 polygons and I split it into 14 files, then composited them in Paint Shop Pro. This cut down on the file sizes and rendered faster. Of course, this probably isn't feasible for some images, but when it can be done, its a great time saver. -darlisa

Wow, twenty-five million polygons! My picture (currently) has a measly 750,000! Well, an update: I yanked 128 RAM out of my other computer and stuffed it into this, and I am just shocked at the difference it made. My hard drive no longer screams, in fact, it barely makes a sound until I start rendering it! Thanks everybody!

Just a suggestion to every one, speaking from the point of a certified(A+), bonified(cause I can acctually use that world here!) technican, it might be a good idea to also try setting your machines swap space to equal numbers. A lot of that hard drive clicking isn't so much the machine trying to read your file as it is the machine trying to open it. This causes the OS to adjust it's swap size. That's fake memory that windows makes on the hard drive, for all you non techies. Adjusting the swap size makes the hard drive move a bunch of data around to make room for more fake ram. This causes your drive to read and write like 4 or 5 times more than it would other wise do. If you match your min. and max. swap sizes windows will accept this as fact and won't have to move anything around. This could also potentially effect your load speeds since it doesn't have to pull your file through the mess of read/write windows is making. ok...sorry just had to get that out. Thanks for reading. I hope it helps!

Tekchip - sounds neato, but could surely there would be a risk involved in such a task (Computers tend to have a give-and-take relationship with the user), right? And could you fill us totally-technically-defunct folks in on how you go about doing this here swippy-swappy?

lol....well it's been quite a while since I've done it with any of the 9x versions of window but I'm running 2k so heres the 2k version of how to do it, and I'll give you the win 95,98, ME version as soon as I look it up. In windows 2000. Right click on 'My Computer' Left click 'Properties' Click on the 'Advanced' tab Click on the 'Performance' button A window will open with a 'Virtual Memory' heading half way down. Click the 'Change' button Set 'Initial' and 'Maximum' to the same numbers. Click the 'Set' button. Click ok a few times and your all set. This should cut down a little bit on your hard drive going click and may effect your performance some.

Attached Link: http://www.bootdisk.com/swapfile.htm

Tekchip - well, I found my way there in XP, but I'm worried. What exactly does this do? And what do I set the minimum to the maximum or the maximum to the minimum?

it tells windows that you have a single set amount of swap space which is the fake memory that windows creates. You set them both the same so that windows won't have to resize your fake memory which causes a lot of reading and writing from your hard drive. Changing this number simply tells windows that it has a set amount of memory to work with instead of letting windows try to resize this space as it sees fit. As for what you want to set it too. Most people I know set it to 500mb including my self. I have heard of people settin it to less and being perfectly fine too. I'd suggest no less than 200mb though.

Well, thanks everyone for your help! I successfully made my picture, and submitted it...if anyone's interested, it's hiding away at: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=139422&Start=1&Sectionid=2&WhatsNew=Yes