Mapmaking in Bryce. Any advice?

[ManOfSteel]

Unfortunately, Bryce is not suited to a super high polygon count and large textures. It's my favorite 3D program but it has its limits. Here are a few things you can do to manage memory better.

1) Let Bryce do the material if possible. Bryce is great at doing glass, metals, stone, etc. By contrast, applying an image texture requires more memory and looks terrible. So forget using a picture of glass, or a picture of water, or a picture of brass.

2) Scale down certain oversized textures. You don't need a 4000 X 4000 pixel picture of a doorknob handle or a porch step. Again, if possible, let Bryce handle those with a suitable procedural texture, or reduce the 4000 X 4000 image to maybe 2000 X 2000. Depending on the complexity of the image, that's about a quarter size (in memory) of the original and you might not even be able to tell the difference even at a close zoom.

3) Download and install the Large Address Aware plugin. Bryce is a 32 bit program and thus is wired to only recognize a maximum of 2 gigabytes of memory. By installing this little program, you can enable 32 bit programs to recognize more memory, in most cases (as I understand it) up to a little over 3 gigabytes. I don't have time to look for the download page now, but I'll look for it and post it here. I noticed a definite improvement when I enabled it for Bryce.

I'm back. Here's the download page for the Large Address Aware program.
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=112556