I just spent, what, 2 hours composing my scene, actually got my trees to look good, nice mountains, grass, lovely afternoon, sky, lighting was great. Did a test render to see how things looked, wait, let me just rotate that boulder, just a little more,Whamm, "Bryce has encoutered a problem, gotta close now, goodbye!". Slap my hand now, I didn't remember to save as I went along 'cause everything was falling into place...no just shoot me! Sorry, just had to vent to those who know what it's like, sob, it was a good image...:(

Ka-Boom.....Bang.....ouch.....hurt.... Yep... but the next one will look even better cause you know how now......

Thanks for the shoulder hewsan...:)

No it won't. You'll make another one, all the while the little bryce voice inside your head saying, "yeah...but it's just not as good as that first one, it's good, but man, that first one..." If your little bryce voice doesn't work you can gladly borrow mine...anytime, please. I now save like I'm gonna get a prize if I do it often enough.

BANG! Oooops! Sowwy! I knew I had 2 improve on my aim!

...and isn't amazing how the second attempt flows from you just like an old family recipe. * Setup one firmly size costrained 800X600 document. * Save file! * Load items in specific places. * Save file! * Check textures frequently. * Save file! * Test-render. * Save file. * Render at 4 days * Save file (be sure to let computer cool before post-work)

Agent Smith: YOU ARE SO RIGHT! I had a beautiful landscape all saved up and then my HDD blew up.........life just sucks!! The Bryster

The only trouble I've had with bryce was when I had about 30 trees in a scene - it used to throw its hands up in the air whenever I tried to save the scene after adding that 31st tree - very weird. It wasn't even the biggest of my br5 files by any stretch of the imagination either....

My entry has 53 trees in it. Was done on fine art settings in about 40 minutes. No post except the name. That last bit aside, I think that many people will have trouble with lower RAM levels when playing with many trees. Since I went to 512Mb (now have 1024 Mb) I have not had any similar sorts of issues.

I found the other day that Bryce always crashes when you use a BMP material in the DTE in the second slot (bump) and delete the default one before trying to add a new one. I don't know why I told you that, because it simply isn't interesting. I'll get me coat...

UUWEE! I just hate when I lose my scenes. I once made a scende in Bryce 3D on wich I worked for 2 weeks to make a figure in the scene walk (without using parent-options and the object orientation, because I hadn't figured out how to use them yet) and then my file got corrupt because Bryce went flat on it's face during saving. Blue screens, damaged windows and registry. Windows and Bryce had to be re-installed etc. Things like that happen and it sucks. There's no maximum number of trees as far as I know. I've once created a huge forest just for fun to see how far I could push bryce. But I do save my scene in seperate files when it gets complicated. If one file get's lost or damaged you still have the rest of your scene and it is much easier to get it back to what it was before the errors. When I make the final render I merge all the scenes and hope the render works out. Bryce can work with scene-files of up to 1,2 GB at least. (I tried it on my computer with my september challenge entry. 680 million poly's or something. 3 GB swapfile and RAM used for 100%. It took one day to load the whole scene. incredible that bryce still works 'smoothly' when using such obscenely complex scenes.) But what I really find incredible is Truespace. I've seen everything on a computer crashing and Truespace just rendered along like nothing happened. It almost looks like it has it's own operating system build in.

'UUWEE!' was meant as a negative expression :)

What operating system are you running? I've never had a crash with Bryce... But maybe that's just my luck. I sympathize with you on loss of data and corrupt files. I have to deal with matters like this all the time due to my job. Don't worry and make regular saves, things can only get better. If you have a CD-Writer, use it regularly to backup files that you don't want to loose. At least now you know where every object goes... TT.:)

ttops is right, after finishing something I like I always burn to CD. But even this has it's drawbacks especially if you don't have a burnproof writer. I had two CD's full of wonderful artwork that I thought I could keep forever until I decided to add one more little file and the damned writer overwrote everything. The first one was an accident the second one was not learning from my mistakes, I'm much more careful now. Catlin

Also remember that most of y'all are using PC's, and they SUCK! ;)o On a more serious note...many versions of windows are aweful at managing memory, so even if you had 2GB of RAM, windows would only allow 512 to the program. Sucks don't it ;)P

I use Windows 2000 Pro, really nice and stable, manages memory very well, noticable difference in Bryce, big difference in Poser. I have 3 hard drives. One is OS and the majority of installed programs.(10gig) Another holds all files to be saved & where I install my games, Bryce and Poser(any real big programs)(60Gig). And, one more to backup all the files to be saved(80gig). And, then there is the cr/rw with re-writable disks...I take no more chances. I also believe it helps overall having hard drives that are 7200rpm. AgentSmith

I make a habit of doing the very same thing at least once a week or once a session which ever comes first. Yep call em Vapor creations heck I lost a whole years worth of stuff once and I only have one half completed image from my first painting program. 0 from bryce 3D and only a few from bryce 4.

I use a network of machines at home, but at work I run Bryce 4.01 or whatever. It is flawless, I mean it never crashes and I spend much more time on BR4. But with all this network space, I often back up my files on the owner's computer at work! He never uses it, anyway... too bad Lightning won't work on Pentium 1's! (laughs) As for the great PC/Mac debate, I will hold my tongue and laugh inside, then check my wallet and laugh aloud!

TT joins in the laughter too. ;))

catlin_mc giggles in the background. ;P

Yep, I have a network in the house too and use XP pro operating systems. You can allocate whatever amount of ram you want to running programs. As long as your Board supports the amount you want to stick in, there's no problems with using more than 512MB RAM. If I ever want a Mac I'll build an 800Mhz PC in a plastic bread box. ;)) TT.

I have WinXP, P4, 2.53ghz, 120GB harddrive, 2gigs of ram, 128MB DDR NVida GeForce4 TI 4600 Graphics card, you'd think Bryce would be happy as a bug, huh?....

And thank you all for the sympathy, it's nice to know everyone gets wrapped up as much as me, being new to Bryce, I thought it was just me, bet I'll save from now on, does Bryce have an auto save feature?...

I still have to backup 20 GB :) maybe I should buy a DVD-writer. My (slow) CD-RW writer doesn't handle everything to fast.

I think the real issue isn't specs or anything like the momma's boy breadmakers vs. machines with real hardware, or the cost. I think what's at hand here is system stability, which is based off of the quality and compatibility of parts. I've built the last 11 computers in my network using AMDs and Nvidias, and top notch motherboards form many different manufacturers, Asus, Azza, MSI... I've never had a hard drive crash down on me since UDMA 66 came out years ago, and I run these suckers all day on several non-related projects. I'm not sure why, but BR5's system stability is great on fresh new machines, and Lightning makes the whole "render time" issue a fairy tale. The funny thing is that I do almost all of my work on the two lamest machines in my repertoire, my P3-600 (sometimes I'll clock it to 800!) with 256 megs SDR PC-100 RAM and my P2-266 at work with 64 whopping megs of RAM!!!! Hell, my P2 doesn't even have a 3D accelerator! The point is that a bad-ass machine does NOT make you any better of an artist, and if you think a render time of days is long, take a look at the Sistine Chapel sometime. Or better yet, the earth! It renders in realtime, but can you ever actually SEE it all? Perspective is the key, use the tools at hand. We burn...

I've never had Bryce (5) crash "randomly", but there are two or three guaranteed ways to get it to crash on any PC OS. I run it on 3 different ones, from a 1Gb 2000+ XP to a 128K 750 Win98 and it's exactly the same on each. Having said that, Bryce memory management on XP is superb. I can be running a render, surfing the net, typing a document, all at once and Bryce is always happy and there's no slowdown of other apps. On its own, it never increases the temperature of the CPU by more than 8 degrees, even on complex renders. Poser, on the other hand, uses 30% CPU even when idle!!!!!

shadowdragonlord, this has nothing to do with artistic talent, just with a indeterminate problem that caused Bryce to close, and my not having saved my work. I should know better, it's save it now or pay for it later...being when you lose it. And like all technology, computers no matter how well made or maintianed, they do break down eventually for whatever reason. I was chapped because my system is relatively new, and the scene was not all that big. Other than not covering my ass by saving periodocally, Bryce5 runs fine. Although it's not the only app, Poser, Vue d'Esprit, Cinema4D, Amapi, Carrara Studio2, all reside on the same machine. I have two systems, the other does all the drudge work (wp,spreadsheets, web design, graphics,etc.) Zhann :)

My system is really stable now. I haven't had a blue screen in months. I never had damaged hardware. But waiting for a 2x speed CD-R writer to burn 20GB isn't much fun. (Really gotta do it though)

I used to work with bryce on a 300MHz AMD K6 II with an incredible amount of 16MB EDO-RAM clocked at 66MHz! I can also watch 2 films at the same time while bryce is rendering. My personal render-record is 11 days on one image on a 1800+ AMD palomino XP with 512 MB of RAM. If I tried it on my old PC it would probably have taken a year to render.

I find its better to do some changes then save with a version number. If you do a save as Bryce will add a number on the filename for you. I have had situations when I have done a change and another change that screwed everything up. Nice to be able to step back. Also if you picture ends up somewhere that you don't want to go or you found a better idea, you can backtrack to a certain version without starting all over again. Truespace is a bit too buggy. Try messing with the extrusions and you get a dialog box behind the program. Seems like it is hung but no thats just a hidden dialog box. Click on scripts when you don't have one, boom instant crash to windows. If you don't have a script loaded, ignore the click or pop up a dialog saying "no script loaded". Don't just crash.

Bryce has crashed on me twice in the past two days, last night it wanted to send a report to Murkysoft about it. Mind you, I was fiddling about in the tree editor at the time, last crash was the tree editor too I run XP Pro on 1.2GHz and 650Mb RAM, should I be worried about my system ?

No, your systems fine I checked it last night. Too many processes running in the background.;)

Thanks 7of11, I'll be sure to do that, great idea!

Complex trees seem to make the treelab unstable. At least on my system.

Yeah, I got wild with the dials in the tree lab and whoa...those big ones really eat up memory.