I have both Bryce 5 and Cinema XL8 plus Bodypaint. Sorry in advance for saying this on this forum..I really do not want to start any fights but Cinema XL is superior to Bryce in almost every feature they share. They are hard to compare because Bryce is just a fractal landscape program where Cinema is a high end Modelling,rendering and animation suite. Bryce is probably the best program for generating fractal landscapes for export. Cinema generates landscapes but nowhere near as good. Yes,Cinema can export metaballs as a mesh. When I bought Cinema I bought it to build models for import into Bryce but within a month I only use Bryce to build terrains for export into Cinema. I went from a Bryce nut to being in truth pretty underwhelmed by its features as an artists tool in a very short space of time. This happened to me because once I tried one of these high end programs and invested the time to dig into its huge feature set I realised what I was missing with Bryce. Still like Bryce by the way so don't hate me.I just realised that it was very good at a pretty small range of things.