I always liked the default scene that Bryce 4 and Bryce 5 loaded when you started the program. It got you into the scene and allowed your to start creating immediately. Then some programmer at DAZ (or perhaps it was a marketing person) decided that the boring old grey infinite plane and the standard clouds wasn’t exciting enough and set the material of the default infinite plane to something that looked more attractive. The problem was that this particular material setting for the ground was rather processor intensive and would take a while to render – a full 2 minutes on my old 3.0GHz Pentium 4!

With Bryce 6.1, when I fired up the program, I got into the habit of immediately going into the Material editor of the ground plane, and selecting the old Bryce Default Material under the Misc…Basic… library. (it is called "Flat Grey") and then beginning my work in Bryce. The resultant render was a lot faster – only 7 seconds from beginning to end!

Very frustrating and a pain in the butt!

Then I remembered something that I had seen on a website somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind from the time of Bryce 4. Somebody had made a comment about a file called default.br4 in the root directory of of the Bryce folder (where the Bryce*.exe is found) and how it saved the defaults of the Bryce start appearence.

So I fiddled around and found out that if you create a scene with your preferred settings (camera angle, default material etc.) and save it as "default.br6" in the root folder of your Bryce installation, Bryce will start every time with this setting. A neat little trick. No doubt others have discovered it, but I wonder if it is common knowledge or documented in the DAZ manual?

Another setting that might be useful is the Edit…Preferences requester in Bryce 6, is the "Launch to previous state" option. Switching it on will set your interface, the size and orientation of the main editing window to the setting you had with the last document you worked on. (I find this useful as I mostly prefer to work in a portrait format window and not landscape.)

Here are two screen grabs comparing the default scenes rendering time as opposed to my optimised version.