Golden Rules

• Plan your scenes carefully

• First make yourself clear what you want to create. Usually it helps me to get a picture of a similar    scene.Or If you're more talented take your scratchbook and a pencil. For me it is easier to work with a picture.If it helps you, scan the picture and you can use it in Truespace as a background picture.
  
  
  

• Avoid to much lights
  As a rule of thumb use only one light in your scene, that cast's shadows. More shadow casting lights need more render time and tend to give your picture an unnatuaral look.
  Use the other lights as filler lights to brighten areas of your scene, which aren't reached by the main light. Ok I know that there might be situation for using more shadow casting lights. For example at home all electric lights (and the sunlight shining through your windows) create shadows. In Truespace you have the choice of ray-mapped and ray-traced shadows. (You only see ray-traced shadows, if you turn on the raytracing-render option.I usually use the ray traced shadows for still pictures, because for me they look more natural. In comparsion to the ray-mapped shadows they take a longer time to render. It's not a bad idea to use the ray-mapped shadows in animations. You usually don't notice the difference there. Altough volumetric lights look very cool, they need a lot of render time, especially if you're going for an animation.

• Keep your scenes as simple as possible What I mean is, the more complex your scene is, the more time it will need to render. It makes no sense to set the terrain resolution to the maximum in Bryce for a background mountain. You can't see the difference to a normal setting in the finished picture. Believe me, it's very easy to get the fastest machine to it knees in 3d.
• BTW you can't get enough of RAM.
• If you're working on a animation, there's usually no need to set the antialias setting to maximum.
• Compression tips Usually I'll do some post procession on your animation, for example adding some sound effect's or music. So in Truespace and in Bryce I render uncompressed animations for the best output quality. After all post processing work is done, I compress my animations. Play with the compression settings to get a good balance between quality and file size. I usually use the indeo codec with a quality setting between 75 and 100.

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