Hi, I discovered a trick that can greatly reduce rendering times in Bryce with no sacrifice of image quality. It doesn't occur in all situations, but if you notice your models take unexpectedly longer and longer to render after you group objects, you might want check this out. Unless you need to perform a Boolean operation, let Bryce apply the NEUTRAL Boolean to objects. This cuts overhead for the program (I had no idea!). If you find you are combining objects in groups (to keep track of them-- not for special Boolean operations) and your rendering time seems to increase when you do this, look at the attributes for each item in the group. Chances are at least one of them has been set to Positive. If the group has no need of Boolean operations, ungroup it, click each item that belongs to the group and make it neutral. Then re-group. You'll find your render time is now reduced. It won't work to set the group itself to neutral, you have to ungroup, make each item within the group neutral, then group. I made an object of three components, two lattices and a cube. The objects did not need Boolean operations, but I had made two of them positive (for some reason I forget). It seemed to take a long time to render. Yet when they were ungrouped, the rendering time was faster. That's when I looked at the attributes box. Making them all neutral and re-grouping them solved the problem and cut the rendering time for the object from 47 seconds to 22 seconds! So, this might work for you in some situations!

Thanx for the tip. Gotta check it out.

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Tried it, it works. Great tip for the backroom, thanks!!! (went from 18 seconds to 7 seconds) AgentSmith

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Thanks for the tip. I'm using my fathers old computer and it sucks. I needed some way to speed things up until I can get my new Alienware. Thanks again.

I had noticed that it renders faster when items are ungrouped, but never thought about changing all to neutral. Thanks.

I've found that I can ungroup the objects, but leave them all selected, then open the Attributes window and set them all to neutral in a single step (just don't mess with ANYTHING else). It's quicker than having to select them individually and change them one by one. One they're set to neutral, I can just hit the Group button again.