That's a freakin LONG survey. Sorry, but I stopped anwering the questions after the first two. The first two movies look great though, and particularly the first one is the most convincing of those two. I don't think anyone would realize it's 3D unless they were extremely well versed in fluid dynamics. The abrupt "end" to the flow is what gives it away for me. So what fluid simulator did you use there? Looks like RealFlow to me. And yeah... this is NOT Bryce related in the least. Bryce isn't that great at fluid dynamics simulations... yet.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.