Hope Bryce is not a swear word in these parts.....but is Carrara kind of like Bryce?....is it better in rendering realistic texture shapes and forms?.....is it faster in rendering objects, scenes etc?....thought I might purchase it, but not sure....thoughts anyone!

Mmm. Kind of. For me it is has always been a different cup of tea. Bryce for the landscapes and skies and seas, Carrara for everything but the girl (which would come from Poser). I find texturing in Carrara much easier and it has landscape tools (including trees). Check out mmoir around here for examples. But I am not very impressed by it's skies for instance, I use photographs for that. It is much faster rendering. But ofcourse it is possible to crank up everything to get Bryce-like rendertimes. If you want landscapes Carrara might not be the first logical choice, but if you want great non-organic modelling (including subdivision surfaces, vertex modelling and spline modelling) and excellent rendering (hdri, global illumination, radiosity) Carrara 3.2 is hard to beat! Especially considering the price tag. Check the Carrara yahoo group for more enthousiast users!

I was a long time Bryce user but was always disappointed with its modeling capabilities and its slow rendering. Carrara shines in both areas. I agree that landscapes are not its forte but many make do. The program has a very nice interface similar to Bryce and I quickly adapted. Version 3 is relatively free of bugs and works as advertised, I think it is a super value. Come on over!

I have only used a free version of Bryce for a small amount of time so I can't comment much on it. I do think that Carrara can do landscapes like Bryce and Vue it just may take a bit more work. This is why I started to try some landscapes in Carrara . Carrara has the benefit of having much more modelling and rendering options as well as having a brighter future. Bryce 6 may not arrive although I hope it does. Mike

So please, Antoine give us our Christmas gift, contact Corel again and buy Bryce. Please.....

Global Illumination sold me. I do lighting in the real world, and my mind's eye sees in radiosity, not in ray-tracing. I always had to work around this in Bryce with hundred-light globes around the scene, radiosity-fakers near bright objects, etc. The thing I miss most about Bryce is the materials...fabulously rich and very easy to work with. I'm waiting for the Carrara proceedurals and presets to come up that mark. Since I still own both, I'd do a strictly landscape pic or certain kinds of highly-textured abstract in Bryce....and reach for Carrara every time I care about the lighting.

Thanks for the replies, might have to download a trial, if it is available and check it out.

I have both (well, Studio 2.1, not 3) but find it very hard to tear myself away from Bryce, because I love it so much, and also I mostly use it for terrain, the area it shines in :) I'm not that experienced, particularly in animation, so tend to use Bryce for animation because it's so easy, and you can load preset paths, or save your own paths to the library. Don't everyone shout at once and tell me that you can do the same with Studio 2 - you probably can, I just haven't been motivated to find out how to do it. For animating objects/humans or morphing I use Poser4, again 'cos it's so easy. And Bryce has easy-peasy multi-rep - just wish you could export native Bryce objects as .obj, then it would be truly fantastic.

Hands down, you need both tools along with poser. A paint program is also highly recommeded. The more tools you have the more options you have. My aresenal contains every version of bryce, painter, RDS, Carrara. The freebie modelers from alias, cinema, and strata. Poser 4 through pro and 5. Many many others. Its expensive but well worth the investment to get as many of the tools as you can. If you are lucky enough to have a lab full of computers Bryce 5 lightning makes rendering movies or scenes really fast. Would love to see Carrara beat that!