Hmm...a thought on the original topic... Way back when (back when I started using 3D) "Meatcreations" had the suite; Poser for figure content and posing, Ray Dream for modelling, Bryce for landscape and final render. They didn't work together all that smoothly, but they were all in one place, from one company, and were at least grudgingly compatible. It appears that DAZ is now trying to re-create that holy trinity. They will have D/S for the content and posing application, Shade for the serious modelling, and now Bryce as the landscape generator and final render room. (Hey, Bryce may be slow, but so is Firefly -- and the Bryce engine is more powerful). They've certainly upped the ante on our friends at Eovia by making their own "Transporter" (aka Turbo), and for a quarter of the price. On the other hand, Metacreations crashed and burned. I think that was their fault, a complete mis-reading of the market (they as much as said there was no future in 3D and put everything they had into a single proprietary system for web environments). But is the market there for a similar suite now? Back ten years or so the Bryce community would have killed for this kind of support by a Poser-related company. These days the options are different. I think I can see a restaging of what defines the "semi-pro" and "amatuer" ranges; in the latter, the big guys like Max have been coming down sharply in price and are discovering more dedicated amatuers willing to spend the time (or at least the money) on a proffessional-level ap. In the beginner market, I foresee more and more extremely cheap/shareware/free applications that are easier to use than Poser but have even fewer options; true "push-button" applications for creating stereotyped content. I've watched similar happen to 2D art programs and MIDI/sampling software and I see no reason why 3D should not follow. So where do mid-range products fit in to this schema? I do not know the market well enough to say anything. If I were DAZ and could afford the engineers I'd make DAZ Studio nothing but an animation-wrangling application; set-up room for rigging new characters, dedicated animation toolset, a simple and robust real-time preview system/test render engine, and very good import/export options. Bryce stands as their best current option as the final render platform, the photo studio. What they really need to do to make it acceptable to a larger user base is to cut the render times...to offer hybrid renders, especially for animations. Bryce's problem is that it ray-traces the whole scene at a high resolution and that's gotta take time. A hybrid engine could allow it to use pre-generated shadow maps, baked textures, and so forth to speed up the renders at an acceptable sacrifice in quality. Also, Bryce's speed becomes less of an issue as CPU clock rates go up and up! With Shade for the modeller DAZ can hope to capture people who would otherwise shy at the idea of buying all their content from DAZ. But if they can offer that content -- and as they continue to give away D/S and put Bryce5 and Turbo at fire-sale prices -- they can really make their business model that of giving away the hardware then selling the software that will run on it. I expect an EXPLOSION of content in the DAZ pages in the near future, and some aggressive attempts to find new brokerage. Yow. I'll have to come back to Carrara in another post! (I'm not a professional. These are just the thoughts of someone who has been involved in the Bryce and Poser communities for over a decade).