Have been watching lots of the videos and trying to take in all the advice. Takes a while for the old brain to absorb all this knowledge now I'm getting older, but I keep watching and learning as they are such great tutorials.
Had another go with the lifeboat render.
Made lifeboat a bit smaller as I realized that it would not fit in the lifeboat station at the size it was!! Changed the sky for a more dramatic one.
Looking good Wendy. Now you've made some changes with respect to the scale in one respect, but also this has introduced some other problems with scale.
Consider this, if you put a figure in your scene and they are stood at the same elevation as your hypothetical viewer (the perspective camera) then the horizon line will co-inside with their eyes. Now imagine a figure stood in the life boat. This tells us the viewer is above the level of the boat - which is fine. Now consider figures stood on the more distant boats. Now in their case they might be more or less level with the horizon. So from this we can conclude, ether the distant boats are quite large, or the lifeboat is a bit on the small side now. This may indeed be correct scale, but from my perspective I'd say something's not right. Perhaps it is the water surface that is causing the scale issue? Try increasing the frequency of the waves. You can do this by modifying this value, here...
See image.
Top arrow - this green button opens the dialogue
Lower arrow - alter this scaling factor, a larger number in x,y,z will increase the frequency of the texture component.
Thank you Rashad - I've spotted your lighting thread, I'll try and put some links together for that.
Thank you Silverdali - I would suggest Dungeon Dimension HDRI since it has some strong coloured light sources in the HDR to work with the specular effect.
That was really good of you, and yup, it's definitely of use!
You might have come "close but no cigar" to the sample I posted, but actually, but you got closer to what I want than the sample did. The good/bad samples were just to show the difference of the colour that was held in the grain. I knew about 50% of what you showed, but it was the other 50% I was screwing-up on, and it makes all the difference. I started all wrong, I was misinterpreting the channels I think. I couldn't get that nice rounded heaped-up effect on the individual cells like you did in this video, so it looked really artificial the way I did it.
I definitely have a better idea of how to get what's in my head now that I've seen that video, cheers mate :-)
@Rashad
The reason leather looks like skin cells, is because leather (real leather) is skin cells!
Leather is dried animal skin, unless of course you happen to live in the deepest depths of the Brazillian wilderness where you might even come across a few human-skin leathers created by the cannibal tribes that live there.
Anyway, I like idea on the UV-less approach for texturing a figure with procedural skin, only how would you be able to control where certain skin effects go? For example the front of a hand has different texture to the back, how would you control and blend them?
You are welcome Len, and besides I like the challenge of making materials.
As to the question you posed Rashad, I would propose having A channel being one type of procedural skin and B channel being another and then using a UV map alpha in C to control what type of procedural skin A or B ended up over what portion of that part of the model referenced in the UV map. So you still have some control and you still have the benefit of procedural bump mapping for your skin.
Due to a bug in the way bump is interpreted from UV images, procedural bump is many times superior to anything offered by a UV map. So this split approach would be better than any UV bump - even if it still relies on UV at some level.
@Peter
Impossible, I haven't even got to Spain yet so I doubt there's a chance of me earning title of Active Member.
You may not have earned it but you've got it. Just as I predicted.
...you just reminded me I haven't even watched the rest of the Opening Ceremony yet...
I strongly recommend being drunk when you do. Her Majesty the Queen becoming her own queen impersonator, and the decline of Britain done as interpretive dance were quite amusing.
@Peter
Impossible, I haven't even got to Spain yet so I doubt there's a chance of me earning title of Active Member.
You may not have earned it but you've got it. Just as I predicted.
Predicting was easy since chohole stated the numbers of posts needed to get the next green square. Another matter are those who miss out every time when something important - for them, obviously - is posted.
@David
Sounds doable then, although I get the impression it might even be harder than just using UV's even though the textures would be better.
@Peter
It must have happened when I were sleeping, typical. And as for the Olympics, don't get me started. You obviously haven't been following the Music Video thread, a place where I've already let my feelings known about the opening ceremony :-P
Thanks for the warning, although I'm short of liquids to get drunk on tonight so will have to watch it sober. If I recall, the last part I saw was Mr Bean playing Chariots of Fire, so it sounds as if the worst is to come!
@Horo
It sounds like you posted something for either Peter or myself, and it hasn't been noticed.
Spit it out, what has been missed? :-D
Not content with forcing TV licences out of us, the assholes at the BBC have even removed the HD version of the coverage for UK-based viewers (who are forced to pay licences for this crap). Can't be bothered to watch it, the quality is worse than even the worst mobile phones out there. It's so bad I decided to skip to bit's and pieces just to to get an idea of what I missed.
Looks like only the first hour was any good. Heard Paul McCartney "sing" (ten seconds was enough) and quickly skipped it. I couldn't find the Queen doing impressions of herself, but judging from the sheer excitement on her face the first time she appeared, that's probably just as well. The best part was the James Bond arrival (they had to do something to make their snotty-selves look cool). The rest was crap, and like I said elsewhere, how they even got "volunteers" from the NHS to do anything for them, is totally beyond me. I'm also rather pissed-off that I had to listen to French introductions before English ones, I mean WTF, it's hosted in England!!!
Perhaps we can have English before French whenever it is held in France?
Yeah right.
They should have put-up a large display of all the governmental twats we've had (and still have) running the country, every one of whom has helped destroy the hard-earned industry of Great Britain. Yes, a nice big display of them all in chronological order, something the Olympic Archers could use as target practice. Had they done so, I'm guessing the cheers would have shook the foundations and caused a quake!
And did you see that bloke in the top right while they were pointing the camera at the Queen? He actually slid down and made himself smaller just so we could see him! Well thanks for that mister stretchy, I suppose it's another selling point for whenever the BBC get hounded about licence fees.
Well I did as suggested and turned off boost light and turned off the forced scattering, leaving just the scattering correction and the reflection correction check and this is the result. Seems odd but even with boost light off it still seemed to boost the light a little. Too bad it took me over 24 hours to render though.
Yes, David is more or less on the same page with me. If i am involved in the next phase of dev I am going to push for UV Mapping and texture baking. Currently, one needs a real human model lit from many angles to make a good skin map. But aside from color, a lot of what makes skin look as it does is the natural leather grain and pores patterns. The benefit of procedural grain is that it isn't slave to resolutions of uv maps.
My current notion is that one would use UV maps for color, but for bump and spec they could use procedurals which can increase the "apparent" resolution a great deal.
Lord,
Yep, Boost Light was not ideal for this darkly lit situation. I see the default TA is doing an acceptable job. It isnt worlds better than the IBL version because in this case there is little visible evidence of color bounces, still they are there. Nice work!
I know these are not skin... but these are examples of hybridized materials (been doing this all weekend) in that they incorporate both images (made from photographs taken by Horo) in an IBL background (Horo again) and procedural textures. Of course with some minor changes the images could be rearranged in more interesting ways by being under the control of the procedural components (much as could have been done with instancing (and would have been better)) but never the less - I think this shows that there it is possible to have the best of both worlds.
Okay here's another one of the BCF's (Bryce Companion File) they used to package with some of the older Daz models. This one is based on RHS's Fairytale Collection - Palace Entrance. The only thing I did to alter it was to add the Royal figures and I adjusted the positioning of the candle flames a bit as they weren't lined up quite right. I also changed the light to HDRI but it didn't appear to make much of a difference so I'm not going to bother showing the scene with and without. I probably need to adjust the settings a bit more to get more noticeable differences but since this render took 16 hours that'll have to wait for some other time.
Okay here's another one of the BCF's (Bryce Companion File) they used to package with some of the older Daz models. This one is based on RHS's Fairytale Collection - Palace Entrance. The only thing I did to alter it was to add the Royal figures and I adjusted the positioning of the candle flames a bit as they weren't lined up quite right. I also changed the light to HDRI but it didn't appear to make much of a difference so I'm not going to bother showing the scene with and without. I probably need to adjust the settings a bit more to get more noticeable differences but since this render took 16 hours that'll have to wait for some other time.
Impressive, but the question I have to ask is, what provision is there for light to enter this scene from outside? If the windows are not transparent or the set behind the camera open to the sky, no light can arrive from the HDR image background to light the inside of the box. Unless... you were to reduce to shadow intensity control within the IBL tab - but that would threaten monstrous render times.
For an internal scene such as this, with many light sources (I don't know I'm guessing) conversion to a TA render setup would be tempting, but it is not an easy prospect.
@Kerya - nice colours. Bryce is a great application for abstracts.
@LordHardDriven - don't bother too much with IBL for indoor scenes. The walls have self shadows on most of the time and the light doesn't penetrate them. Neither does the sun light, only the Skydome light does, but it tends to wash things out. HDRI from Inside won't do you any good either in such a scene. In this scene, you're better served with 3D Fill Lights. You could also put a low light radial in each candle, a bit tedious. Otherwise, I think your scene is quite nicely lit.
Okay here's another one of the BCF's (Bryce Companion File) they used to package with some of the older Daz models. This one is based on RHS's Fairytale Collection - Palace Entrance. The only thing I did to alter it was to add the Royal figures and I adjusted the positioning of the candle flames a bit as they weren't lined up quite right. I also changed the light to HDRI but it didn't appear to make much of a difference so I'm not going to bother showing the scene with and without. I probably need to adjust the settings a bit more to get more noticeable differences but since this render took 16 hours that'll have to wait for some other time.
Impressive, but the question I have to ask is, what provision is there for light to enter this scene from outside? If the windows are not transparent or the set behind the camera open to the sky, no light can arrive from the HDR image background to light the inside of the box. Unless... you were to reduce to shadow intensity control within the IBL tab - but that would threaten monstrous render times.
For an internal scene such as this, with many light sources (I don't know I'm guessing) conversion to a TA render setup would be tempting, but it is not an easy prospect.
Well I don't know how I'd make it a TA only render. I did try it as a TA render but the render time was aweful, something like 4 days if I remember correctly. So I canceled that and thought I'd try HDRI. I did adjust the shadow intensity and some of the other HDRI settings after watching a Horo video on tutorials info. I just assumed the windows in the scene are transparent but now that you mention it I'm not sure. If they are then any light outside the room is darkened because the only light I see seems to be coming from the candles.
I guess I got things confused, I went with HDRI because I could have sworn it was said it was better for indoor scenes then TA. That and less then 24 hours is much better then 96 hours. Although I guess it's not really better if it doesn't make much difference.
@LordHardDriven - don't bother too much with IBL for indoor scenes. The walls have self shadows on most of the time and the light doesn't penetrate them. Neither does the sun light, only the Skydome light does, but it tends to wash things out. HDRI from Inside won't do you any good either in such a scene. In this scene, you're better served with 3D Fill Lights. You could also put a low light radial in each candle, a bit tedious. Otherwise, I think your scene is quite nicely lit.
Well all the candle flames are radial lights, 80 in total I believe. So I don't think it needs any more radial lights. In fact based on what David said and the fact that the HDRI didn't look much different then the no HDRI version I would say that the radial lights from the candles are the only light in the scene.
Good to see all these renders in this thread. Although for the purposes of getting to grips with lighting methods such as IBL or TA it is best to start off with very simple scenes to keep the render times down. A red dragon in a box for example. Then when you've got a handle on what is going on, tackle something complex. Environments from DS might be riddled with transparent textures to make up for geometry limitations, which is probably fine for DS since that render engine works very differently to Bryce's but in Bryce where every pixel is lovingly polished and passed around on velvet cushions before being dabbed onto the inside of the display, things could get a bit "grindy". Speaking of which, this dinnertimes experiment is to try and coax grass out of the DTE (I did try instancing and that's when I decided to go in search of something more render efficient) render time for this about five minutes on my i7 920.
Good to see all these renders in this thread. Although for the purposes of getting to grips with lighting methods such as IBL or TA it is best to start off with very simple scenes to keep the render times down. A red dragon in a box for example. Then when you've got a handle on what is going on, tackle something complex. Environments from DS might be riddled with transparent textures to make up for geometry limitations, which is probably fine for DS since that render engine works very differently to Bryce's but in Bryce where every pixel is lovingly polished and passed around on velvet cushions before being dabbed onto the inside of the display, things could get a bit "grindy". Speaking of which, this dinnertimes experiment is to try and coax grass out of the DTE (I did try instancing and that's when I decided to go in search of something more render efficient) render time for this about five minutes on my i7 920.
Points taken regarding the dragon in a box. In my defense in a desire to "play" in this thread by contributing, I've been working with scenes already made and just trying different premium effect settings. I really don't have the time right now to spend too much on creating new scenes or really delving into tutorials. With these renders I'm mainly just taking a scene I've previously made and changing some settings then start it rendering and come back later. It's frustrating though in that at times when the renders are particularly long, I sometimes have free time to be working more creatively in Bryce but can't because of it being busy rendering. Kind of makes me wish I had more then one machine so I could dedicate one for actually creating things on and the other(s) to rendering or other system intensive operations. Alas I can't really afford that. Ah well, my day will come, I'll buy a winning lottery ticket or stumble across a buried treasure or do something that makes a dying billionaire indebted to me and he leaves me all his money. On that they then I too will have a multi core behemouth with all the DDR's and the Blu-Rays, and the SATA's you could possibly want. Oh and GHz and GB's and all that mumbo jumbo, it'll have a ton of all that. Heck maybe I'll even get one so powerful it can just create the art for me, concept to render?
Oh and very nice photo realistic looking scene you got there. :)
It's frustrating though in that at times when the renders are particularly long, I sometimes have free time to be working more creatively in Bryce but can't because of it being busy rendering.
If your computer sports a multi-core multi-threadable processor, I recommend to use normal priority. On a non-hyperthreaded processor, high priority takes all available cores, normal priority half of them and low just one. If the processor can hyper-thread, it adds the same amount of virtual cores as it has real cores in high priority. The virtual cores increases render speed by 10 to 20%, average 15%. If you go for normal priority, Bryce takes all available real cores to render and is around 15% slower. You have 4 virtual cores to work on another scene and this is sufficient if there are not too many objects and you only render a short moment to see how things look. You can run as many Bryce instances as the memory of your computer permits.
Comments
Looking good Wendy. Now you've made some changes with respect to the scale in one respect, but also this has introduced some other problems with scale.
Consider this, if you put a figure in your scene and they are stood at the same elevation as your hypothetical viewer (the perspective camera) then the horizon line will co-inside with their eyes. Now imagine a figure stood in the life boat. This tells us the viewer is above the level of the boat - which is fine. Now consider figures stood on the more distant boats. Now in their case they might be more or less level with the horizon. So from this we can conclude, ether the distant boats are quite large, or the lifeboat is a bit on the small side now. This may indeed be correct scale, but from my perspective I'd say something's not right. Perhaps it is the water surface that is causing the scale issue? Try increasing the frequency of the waves. You can do this by modifying this value, here...
See image.
Top arrow - this green button opens the dialogue
Lower arrow - alter this scaling factor, a larger number in x,y,z will increase the frequency of the texture component.
Thanks heaps David
Thanks David, I thought something looked wrong but couldn't figure out what it was!
Will have a play and see what I can do.:-)
That was really good of you, and yup, it's definitely of use!
You might have come "close but no cigar" to the sample I posted, but actually, but you got closer to what I want than the sample did. The good/bad samples were just to show the difference of the colour that was held in the grain. I knew about 50% of what you showed, but it was the other 50% I was screwing-up on, and it makes all the difference. I started all wrong, I was misinterpreting the channels I think. I couldn't get that nice rounded heaped-up effect on the individual cells like you did in this video, so it looked really artificial the way I did it.
I definitely have a better idea of how to get what's in my head now that I've seen that video, cheers mate :-)
@Rashad
The reason leather looks like skin cells, is because leather (real leather) is skin cells!
Leather is dried animal skin, unless of course you happen to live in the deepest depths of the Brazillian wilderness where you might even come across a few human-skin leathers created by the cannibal tribes that live there.
Anyway, I like idea on the UV-less approach for texturing a figure with procedural skin, only how would you be able to control where certain skin effects go? For example the front of a hand has different texture to the back, how would you control and blend them?
You are welcome Len, and besides I like the challenge of making materials.
As to the question you posed Rashad, I would propose having A channel being one type of procedural skin and B channel being another and then using a UV map alpha in C to control what type of procedural skin A or B ended up over what portion of that part of the model referenced in the UV map. So you still have some control and you still have the benefit of procedural bump mapping for your skin.
Due to a bug in the way bump is interpreted from UV images, procedural bump is many times superior to anything offered by a UV map. So this split approach would be better than any UV bump - even if it still relies on UV at some level.
I strongly recommend being drunk when you do. Her Majesty the Queen becoming her own queen impersonator, and the decline of Britain done as interpretive dance were quite amusing.
.
You may not have earned it but you've got it. Just as I predicted.
Predicting was easy since chohole stated the numbers of posts needed to get the next green square. Another matter are those who miss out every time when something important - for them, obviously - is posted.
@David
Sounds doable then, although I get the impression it might even be harder than just using UV's even though the textures would be better.
@Peter
It must have happened when I were sleeping, typical. And as for the Olympics, don't get me started. You obviously haven't been following the Music Video thread, a place where I've already let my feelings known about the opening ceremony :-P
Thanks for the warning, although I'm short of liquids to get drunk on tonight so will have to watch it sober. If I recall, the last part I saw was Mr Bean playing Chariots of Fire, so it sounds as if the worst is to come!
@Horo
It sounds like you posted something for either Peter or myself, and it hasn't been noticed.
Spit it out, what has been missed? :-D
RANT/
Not content with forcing TV licences out of us, the assholes at the BBC have even removed the HD version of the coverage for UK-based viewers (who are forced to pay licences for this crap). Can't be bothered to watch it, the quality is worse than even the worst mobile phones out there. It's so bad I decided to skip to bit's and pieces just to to get an idea of what I missed.
Looks like only the first hour was any good. Heard Paul McCartney "sing" (ten seconds was enough) and quickly skipped it. I couldn't find the Queen doing impressions of herself, but judging from the sheer excitement on her face the first time she appeared, that's probably just as well. The best part was the James Bond arrival (they had to do something to make their snotty-selves look cool). The rest was crap, and like I said elsewhere, how they even got "volunteers" from the NHS to do anything for them, is totally beyond me. I'm also rather pissed-off that I had to listen to French introductions before English ones, I mean WTF, it's hosted in England!!!
Perhaps we can have English before French whenever it is held in France?
Yeah right.
They should have put-up a large display of all the governmental twats we've had (and still have) running the country, every one of whom has helped destroy the hard-earned industry of Great Britain. Yes, a nice big display of them all in chronological order, something the Olympic Archers could use as target practice. Had they done so, I'm guessing the cheers would have shook the foundations and caused a quake!
And did you see that bloke in the top right while they were pointing the camera at the Queen? He actually slid down and made himself smaller just so we could see him! Well thanks for that mister stretchy, I suppose it's another selling point for whenever the BBC get hounded about licence fees.
/END RANT
Using Stonemasons Urban Future 4 and creating an early morning scene from two different angles. No sun, 138 spots, 2 radials - and 2 Victoria 3s.
Very nice, I was thinking of trying this scene myself but wasn't sure Bryce could handle it. I'm encouraged to see that it can :)
Well I did as suggested and turned off boost light and turned off the forced scattering, leaving just the scattering correction and the reflection correction check and this is the result. Seems odd but even with boost light off it still seemed to boost the light a little. Too bad it took me over 24 hours to render though.
Len,
Yes, David is more or less on the same page with me. If i am involved in the next phase of dev I am going to push for UV Mapping and texture baking. Currently, one needs a real human model lit from many angles to make a good skin map. But aside from color, a lot of what makes skin look as it does is the natural leather grain and pores patterns. The benefit of procedural grain is that it isn't slave to resolutions of uv maps.
My current notion is that one would use UV maps for color, but for bump and spec they could use procedurals which can increase the "apparent" resolution a great deal.
Lord,
Yep, Boost Light was not ideal for this darkly lit situation. I see the default TA is doing an acceptable job. It isnt worlds better than the IBL version because in this case there is little visible evidence of color bounces, still they are there. Nice work!
I know these are not skin... but these are examples of hybridized materials (been doing this all weekend) in that they incorporate both images (made from photographs taken by Horo) in an IBL background (Horo again) and procedural textures. Of course with some minor changes the images could be rearranged in more interesting ways by being under the control of the procedural components (much as could have been done with instancing (and would have been better)) but never the less - I think this shows that there it is possible to have the best of both worlds.
Interested in how I got the pearlescent effect?
Bryce 10 minute material project - red pearlescent paint - a tutorial by David Brinnen
Fighting with the store and forums has just drained me, I can't get motivated by art at all lately, just a Bryce 5.5 quickie.
Thanks for looking, comments/tips always welcome :|
*really needs to check this thread out tho*
Interesting variation on a theme.
Love playing with Bryce!:-)
I seem to have more success with seascapes than landscapes at the moment.
Nice one Wendy, you are going great guns with Bryce.
We like to see new addicts coming along.
Okay here's another one of the BCF's (Bryce Companion File) they used to package with some of the older Daz models. This one is based on RHS's Fairytale Collection - Palace Entrance. The only thing I did to alter it was to add the Royal figures and I adjusted the positioning of the candle flames a bit as they weren't lined up quite right. I also changed the light to HDRI but it didn't appear to make much of a difference so I'm not going to bother showing the scene with and without. I probably need to adjust the settings a bit more to get more noticeable differences but since this render took 16 hours that'll have to wait for some other time.
OK - like I said I am in a reflective abstract mood ...
Began with this http://c0nceptualize-3d.deviantart.com/art/Bryce-Symmetrical-Abstracts-12361909 and ehm ... wandered off ...
Adifferent view from the Fishing Boat.
Impressive, but the question I have to ask is, what provision is there for light to enter this scene from outside? If the windows are not transparent or the set behind the camera open to the sky, no light can arrive from the HDR image background to light the inside of the box. Unless... you were to reduce to shadow intensity control within the IBL tab - but that would threaten monstrous render times.
For an internal scene such as this, with many light sources (I don't know I'm guessing) conversion to a TA render setup would be tempting, but it is not an easy prospect.
@wilmap - you're doing fine, Wendy.
@Kerya - nice colours. Bryce is a great application for abstracts.
@LordHardDriven - don't bother too much with IBL for indoor scenes. The walls have self shadows on most of the time and the light doesn't penetrate them. Neither does the sun light, only the Skydome light does, but it tends to wash things out. HDRI from Inside won't do you any good either in such a scene. In this scene, you're better served with 3D Fill Lights. You could also put a low light radial in each candle, a bit tedious. Otherwise, I think your scene is quite nicely lit.
just for fun all random -
Impressive, but the question I have to ask is, what provision is there for light to enter this scene from outside? If the windows are not transparent or the set behind the camera open to the sky, no light can arrive from the HDR image background to light the inside of the box. Unless... you were to reduce to shadow intensity control within the IBL tab - but that would threaten monstrous render times.
For an internal scene such as this, with many light sources (I don't know I'm guessing) conversion to a TA render setup would be tempting, but it is not an easy prospect.
Well I don't know how I'd make it a TA only render. I did try it as a TA render but the render time was aweful, something like 4 days if I remember correctly. So I canceled that and thought I'd try HDRI. I did adjust the shadow intensity and some of the other HDRI settings after watching a Horo video on tutorials info. I just assumed the windows in the scene are transparent but now that you mention it I'm not sure. If they are then any light outside the room is darkened because the only light I see seems to be coming from the candles.
I guess I got things confused, I went with HDRI because I could have sworn it was said it was better for indoor scenes then TA. That and less then 24 hours is much better then 96 hours. Although I guess it's not really better if it doesn't make much difference.
Well all the candle flames are radial lights, 80 in total I believe. So I don't think it needs any more radial lights. In fact based on what David said and the fact that the HDRI didn't look much different then the no HDRI version I would say that the radial lights from the candles are the only light in the scene.
Good to see all these renders in this thread. Although for the purposes of getting to grips with lighting methods such as IBL or TA it is best to start off with very simple scenes to keep the render times down. A red dragon in a box for example. Then when you've got a handle on what is going on, tackle something complex. Environments from DS might be riddled with transparent textures to make up for geometry limitations, which is probably fine for DS since that render engine works very differently to Bryce's but in Bryce where every pixel is lovingly polished and passed around on velvet cushions before being dabbed onto the inside of the display, things could get a bit "grindy". Speaking of which, this dinnertimes experiment is to try and coax grass out of the DTE (I did try instancing and that's when I decided to go in search of something more render efficient) render time for this about five minutes on my i7 920.
Points taken regarding the dragon in a box. In my defense in a desire to "play" in this thread by contributing, I've been working with scenes already made and just trying different premium effect settings. I really don't have the time right now to spend too much on creating new scenes or really delving into tutorials. With these renders I'm mainly just taking a scene I've previously made and changing some settings then start it rendering and come back later. It's frustrating though in that at times when the renders are particularly long, I sometimes have free time to be working more creatively in Bryce but can't because of it being busy rendering. Kind of makes me wish I had more then one machine so I could dedicate one for actually creating things on and the other(s) to rendering or other system intensive operations. Alas I can't really afford that. Ah well, my day will come, I'll buy a winning lottery ticket or stumble across a buried treasure or do something that makes a dying billionaire indebted to me and he leaves me all his money. On that they then I too will have a multi core behemouth with all the DDR's and the Blu-Rays, and the SATA's you could possibly want. Oh and GHz and GB's and all that mumbo jumbo, it'll have a ton of all that. Heck maybe I'll even get one so powerful it can just create the art for me, concept to render?
Oh and very nice photo realistic looking scene you got there. :)
If your computer sports a multi-core multi-threadable processor, I recommend to use normal priority. On a non-hyperthreaded processor, high priority takes all available cores, normal priority half of them and low just one. If the processor can hyper-thread, it adds the same amount of virtual cores as it has real cores in high priority. The virtual cores increases render speed by 10 to 20%, average 15%. If you go for normal priority, Bryce takes all available real cores to render and is around 15% slower. You have 4 virtual cores to work on another scene and this is sufficient if there are not too many objects and you only render a short moment to see how things look. You can run as many Bryce instances as the memory of your computer permits.