Anyone have any experience with how bryce lightning works. My render times in bryce are quickly approaching 3 and 4 hrs with proper lighting, I'm having to use the sun to preview my render and trust that proper lightning will work for the final render. I have 2 PCs, 1 is a Athlon 2600+ OC'd to approx 3200 (benchmark guess) with 1GB RAM, this is the one where my render times are getting towards 3 and 4 hrs. I have another networked with it, a 3.1GHz intel with 512 MB ram that I would like to sync up with my machine to do renders, but to be honest I have no idea where to start. I've heard this is possible with bryce lightning

3 - 4 hours seems reasonable for a decent render to me.

As for Bryce lightning, I played around with it, but couldn't see that it was any use. Maybe if you had 3 or 4 machines it would be ok, but I lost patience. Bryce is not a very efficient renderer. I have found that other packages generally work faster, but it's difficult to compare.

The scene i just rendered was done at 1600x1200 and took about 4 hrs, there is only the 18 spheres, the ground, their textures, and the lights. It seemed too long to me but if others are getting these kinds of render times as well i guess it will have to be dealt with. I agree that there is much more powerful software than bryce, PARTICULARLY when it comes to making complex shapes for models which i'm quickly learning that bryce is limited with. Right now though I have alot of ideas in my head and bryce is the software that I currently know the best. Its hard to sit yourself down and force yourself to learn the ins and outs of new software

The best way to speed things up is to install as much ram as you can afford. I went from 512 megs to 4 gig. Cost me 600 bucks but "WICKED SPEED". Renders that took forever zoom now. The ram was for photoshop cs and rendering movies.

you do not need 4 gigs of ram for photoshop CS, probably not even video rendering. You would have probably noticed the same speed increase by adding another gig to your 512. I would say 2gigs max, and even thats excessive unless u were running multiple bulky software titles at once and doing large printwork. If I had $600 to spend on my PC, it would go towards a slicker mobo + processor, but considering the specs of the pc i just described I obviously don't :-p. Excessive ram does not speed up your pc, unless your box is actual using that ram its nothing but wasted.

I ran 1.5gigs with windows hard drive caching disabled for a good while and never even came close to maxing out on mem usage.

Right now my PC is in the middle of a render, bryce's process is using 150MB of RAM, 650 RAM is still free. BUT it is using 99% of my cpu time, meaning that is more likely the bottleneck

Yeah, for the hardcore artists using the expensive software with all the cool lighting options on, they create little 'render farms' to process it - kind of like a mainframe I suppose.

As for creating shapes, Bryce is severely limited but I found it was a great introduction into the whole world of creating boolean objects (much more satisfying than just using models that someone else made or that came with the software, but much more difficult). I played around with Wings 3D as a modelling program. It has the great advantage of being free ;-)

I created my mushrooms with Wings. Its not a great render - more of a test - but i was really pleased with the mushrooms. It is difficult to do shapes that are complex, but it is even worse doing organic stuff. I wish I had the patience (and skill) to do really good renders. The stuff I post here (a rare event in itself nowadays) are just images that I knock together quite quickly.

do u know if wings has the capability to export in .obj format?

HERE

quote:

Export Formats

* Nendo (NDO)
* 3D Studio (3DS)
* Wavefront (OBJ)
* VRML (WRL)
* Renderware (RWX)
* FBX (on Windows and Mac OS X)
* Yafray
* Toxic

thx for doing the work for me :) i'll try not to be as lazy in the future haha

yay for open source modelling software, i'll definitly be giving this one a shot

;o)

/has had some renders taking 12 hours+ before now

Though that was on my machine before I sank another £500's worth of upgrades into it.

Best advice I can offer is, simply set up the HQ render before you go to bed, leave ya machine on all night and let it just get on with it. It's what I did for the 12 hour+ ones back last year, it's what I'd do now still.

the hard part about that is, I do most of my work at night, I dont really sleep. it would prolly be easier to queue up some renders during the day hmm...right now i'm busy learning lightwave and probably will not be working on any real imagery for a while-oh yeah and theres that thing called life..almost forgot

Actually I have found that rendering speds don't really pick up until you have the best possible video card in your machine. I have a dual processor Quicksilver G4 with a gig of ram. My render times were running upward of three to four hours for somplex Bryce still images. A 256 Meg card cut that in half, and really helped with volumetrics, which previously had run so slow I couldn't be bothered.

However for still images I don't bother anymore with fancy lighting effects in any of my 3D programs... I do all that with photoshop. These days I use Bryce for animation, landscape flyovers and logos.

Given Bryce or Cararra, I would go for Cararra. It's slightly pricier, but much more full featured as a modeler, and scads faster as a renderer. For those of us who don't see the sense of the expensive top of the line software for home use, Carrara has just about everything you need, including robust plugins and scene import from poser.

http://rubbadukki.net/Show1.htm

The more RAM the better.

For XP 2 to 3GB.

For a 64 bit OS, 4GB or more.

Michael.

Are your render times increasing?If so maybe you have some sort of crapware running on your machine in the background sucking the life out of your system.Another thing you might try is turning of as much as you don't have to render like insides,backside,upsides,downsides you get the point basically stuff you cant see in the render once its done.Plus you might change your shadow settings,sometimes lowering the accuracy of shadows improves render times allot and aren't that noticeable once the image is rendered.Plus you can turn down the render quality,once again sometimes taking it down a level with decrease render time allot without a big loss in image quality.