I bought Bryce 5 some time ago, upgrading from 3, but just now got around to messing with it. Anyway, I wanted to experiment with exporting objects, because I used to make some pretty interesting things in Bryce that would be a pain in Wings. So I loaded up a Boolean object, selected it, went to the file menu...and "Export Object" was grayed out! It only exports terrains. I tried everything I could think of, but it won't let me export anything else. Is it supposed to do that? I was hoping it could export Boolean objects, although I don't think it can. A curved railing is much easier to do with Boolean operations than with polygon extrusion. =/

From the FAQ up at the top of the page... *Bryce will not export out its primitives or metaballs. And, no, there is no 3D file converter for .obp's. *Bryce can export out its Terrains, and Lattices and rocks as a generic 3D file (3ds, dxf, x, id4, lws, mts, 16-bit pgm, rds, hf, cob, dem, vsa, wrl, obj, nff) *Bryce can export its Rocks as a generic 3D file (3ds, dxf, x, id4, lws, rds, cob, vsa, wrl, obj, nff) *Un-exportable items can be saved as a Bryce .obp (object preset), and saved/exported out (again, only as an .obp) It's one of the things that really annoys me (and other people).

Aye, Snowfox... welcome to the wonderful world of cheap 3D! Don't feel bad, we've all asked this at times, but originally Bryce was only intended as a terrain editor, a way to re-create Bryce canyon itself. Funny thing is, even the highest-end packages don't really have very much exportability. They, as well as Bryce, are all about being final renderers and importing everything to themselves... I believe that the reason Bryce won't export primitive booleans is due to the boolean architecture, which hasn't changed from version 2. Amazing.

To summarize: In a modeling program (i.e. Wings3D), when you create a sphere, or any 'primitives', you are in fact creating a 3d mesh object with vertices and lines and faces and normals and smoothing and whatnot that is sphere shaped. In Bryce (which is a 3D rendering engine at heart), when you create a sphere, you create a sphere (ie. Area = pi R ^2 [is that right? been awhile since I've had to know]), with a radius. Thats it. There is no mesh to export. Things such as origin, transformations, rotations and scaling are applied to every object whether it a primitive or mesh so they don't count. My introduction to 3D art was with a program called Polyray. It had no GUI, every scene had to be described in a text editor using a C+ type syntax. To create a sphere took a line something like "SPHERE 3(radius){0,0,0(xyz center){translate 1,2,3 scale 1,1,1}matte_white(texute defined elsewhere in the file}" or something along those lines. It was a pain to get anything done and would never have been able to produce the simplest of scenes possible today, but it did force the user to understand what was going on and why. BTW the text file then got parsed from the command prompt (polyray myfile.ply). Wow, I said command prompt, I feel so old. HOWEVER; polyray could output a scene as raw triangle data, not a far cry from obj format, so why the heck Bryce can't do it is beyond me. It also did meta-cylinders, the plural of torus (torii, toruses?) and planes (infinite, not aero). Now that I mention it, there were a couple of really neat/useful things it could do that Bryce can't, yet. To re-summarize: The Bryce primitives are defined within Bryce by their definitive formulas, not by vertexes. There is no mesh to export. Should be a simple fix though and I may have heard it stated that it would be fixed in 5.5 or 6.(may be imagining that part.) ~fin~ added: the boolean architecture probably hasn't changed since version 2 on account of 1+1 still =2. ;^)