Hey Scoleman, I'm not the best source of info as I am very much a newbie myself, but I might have some suggestions: 1. I think coming up with an avg time would be very difficult unless you were comparing apples-to-apples. This would take into account your hardware and what sorts of effects you use in your project (ie. volumetric materials/world, etc...) Maybe if you post more details on what you have, someone with a similar situation could give you more accurate estimates. 2. Text tool - you mean to create text as 3d objects? Not built into Bryce (that I know of), but if you come across any, let us know. You could probably build up an alphabet of letters by mapping images onto lattices, etc... but my guess is that they would still look rather "organic". But if you just want "flat" text to appear, you can create an image in a 2D program (Photoshop, etc...) and use it as a texture on a 2D surface object (not sure exactly the name for this in Bryce, but I know its there). 3. Again, like #2, you can "draw" text to an image in a paint program and if you assign the same image (but in black/white version with white being the text) to the transparency channel when you are creating a material from this then the alpha will make the non-text part transparent. 4. Wish I knew - maybe use a sphere(s) and apply some sort of cloud texture for the mist (whether surface or volumetric you'ld have to test). I think I saw a tutorial somewhere though on splashing (running) water. 5. Haven't needed them yet myself. There is a bunch of free stuff on this site and others, though. I think there is also a very good stand-alone tree-generating program too (not sure the name - maybe Plant Studio?). 6. I've been doing an underwater scene and have been using some free models. Check both here and other sites. One in particular is at http://www.planit3d.com/source/meshes_files/meshes.html 7. Not sure what you mean. I know Bryce is bringing my Athlon 1.33 GHz to its knees at times, but I don't know if you can govern how much processor time (priority) that Bryce can consume vs other apps (maybe in a multi-processor environment, but a stand-alone???) Anyway, hope some of this may help from a newcomer :-) Happy Brycing - Dave