I have bryce 5, I use it to load up my poser figures then do the rendering. I really have 2 questions. Does carrara render faster or better than bryce 5 and is it easier to load up poser figures in carrara with textures than it is with bryce 5.

Can't speak to the ease of texturing Poser figures in Bryce vs Carrara. I used Bryce a lot but not for Poser. Rendering is much faster in Carrara. I don't know the technical specs for the Bryce render engine but I don't think it has many of the optimizations that the CS3 engine has for speed plus the Global Illumination render engine is very, very cool.

Bryce beats Carrara for skies and terrain modeling. With CS3 Carrara has comparable texturing for terrains and has always had better texturing for non-terrains.

For complex scenes such as Poser figure rendering, I much, much prefer Carrara's lighting, texturing and rendering.

I used Bryce for 4 years before finally tiring of its limitations. I switched to CS3 this summer and have never looked back.
One other point: since I switched this year, Eovia has put out a very powerful enhancement (CS3) whereas I hear Bryce may be end-of-life.

Marc

Mostly carrara, although there are a couple of things Bryce is better at - terrains and motion paths. You can now get the Ground Control plug-in for Carrara that will import Bryce terrains (including a water detecting plug-in), so you can bring your favourites over. Motion paths may take a little longer to fix... Mik

With this Ground Control plugin, what is the difference of importing Bryce exported terrains? Because that works without the plugin too. Snekkis

If you export your Bryce terrain as a DEM file, you can import it into Carrara as a Ground Control object. This will give you more control, more accurate height information and better results than just importing as a greyscale heightmap.

I thought that Bryce 4/5 exported as a mesh with textures not as a grey scale pic? My version of Bryce has different file formats to export to.

Yeah, that brings me back to my question again!