"Bryce lends itself well to short-cut backdrop modeling. Imagine for a moment that you would have to construct every stream, every mountain, every tree, every cloud, every human, every animal, every grass blade from its basic foundations in the world of modeling polygons, Bryce would be hard pressed to produce these as a stand-alone, as true 3D meshes. These other packages can do that and more in capable hands, it only takes that much longer to produce. And I get the impression from what you are saying that this is what they are after." Okay. These other packages can do that with help of plugins. Yesterday I asked a colleague who uses Max how would he create a landscape. He said, I would import a terrain from Bryce. :-) And he was disgusted by the idea that he'd have to model a complex terrain in Max. Anyway, why did people create Ozone, Atmosphere, Shave And Haircut, Smoke, Pyro, XFrog, OnyxTree, Hair Department, and who knows what else? So they don't have to create all that stuff by hand. I can model a tree in Rhino, but why would I (with few possible exceptions)? Everybody is concerned with the image, not how you came to it. BTW, striving, give Bryce GI and subsurface scattering and particle system, and you'll see much better renders. I'm not saying better pictures, just better renders.

-- erlik