here ya go, sparky: Before I give an update, I wanted to quickly introduce myself. My name is Brett Nord and I have been with DAZ for about 6 months. Since I have been at DAZ, I have been focused on distribution and setting up retail channels (commercial, education, govt) for DAZs products (my background is 10 years of retail sales with three different software companies). I also have been involved with training retail employees and sales reps on the virtues of Bryce and have really enjoyed getting to know Bryce. Since December, I have moved into Product Marketing for Bryce. Im really excited to focus on Bryce strategy and to have such great resources (thats you) to help assist us take it to the next level. Im amazed at how much brand awareness there is for Bryce and how loyal its users are. I see it every day as I work with educators from around the world that are using Bryce year after year in their curriculum. ok, enough of that...now on to the update on the progress of Bryce 5.5. Both the programmers and the beta testers have been hard at work testing Bryce, tracking down bugs, fixing bugs, etc. We'd like to tell you a bit about what has already been fixed/added in Bryce 5.5. The PC version is extremely stable with a few bugs being tracked down, while the Mac version is fighting us almost every step of the way - but it's losing and we're winning! Now on to the good stuff ... are you ready? Well, so far Bryce 5.5 has implemented the following: 1. The Windows Taskbar is no longer locked while Bryce is active. 2. New OpenGL options have been added: Textured Shaded, Wireframe, Lit Wireframe, Hidden Line, Wire Shaded, Smooth Shaded, and Wire Textured Shaded. 3. Bryce 5.5 scenes, materials, skies, and objects can be opened up in Bryce 5.01. 4. The Turbo Importer has been added as the default OBJ import plugin. 5. Integration with DAZ|Studio - now this doesn't mean that Bryce and DS are one program ... far from it. Instead, a Create DAZ Object button has been added to the Create panel. You click on the button and DS opens up. Load your saved Poser scene or create a scene from scratch. Add figures, clothing, hair, textures, objects, pose the figures, etc. (just don't load dynamic hair or cloth), then close DS and the scene is loaded in Bryce. You'll even get an import status message in Bryce telling you what percentage of the objects have been converted. Just remember that the more items you have in the scene, the longer it takes to import into Bryce (just like it does in Bryce 3, 4, and 5.01). Now say you want to change the pose of one of the figures ... well, click on the DS button, the scene will be loaded back up in DS, change the pose, close DS, and Bryce will be updated. By the way, any Bryce objects, terrains, lights, and sky settings aren't affected by the DS import so if you've set up your lighting already, that won't be affected. 6. Rendering is faster depending on the objects, materials, lights, and render options selected. For example: the first image below is the original scene saved in Bryce 4 format with imported trees and default Bryce materials: - Bryce 4 Render to Screen - 5:47 - Bryce 4 Render to Disk - 5:32 - Bryce 5.01 Render to Screen - 8:03 - Bryce 5.01 Render to Disk - 7:47 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Screen - 3:35 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Disk - 3:16 The second image below shows the same scene modified in Bryce 5.01 with the imported trees replaced with Bryce 5 trees, more detailed textures from Jonathan Allen, and a different sky: - Bryce 5.01 Render to Screen - 33:20 - Bryce 5.01 Render to Disk - 29:58 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Screen - 21:56 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Disk - 19:10 Of course, a scene that takes up a lot of your RAM because of complexity may not show as much of a difference, such as Darlisa's Gothic Cathedral which consists of 744 lattices, 1,310 spheres, 787 tori, 2,727 cylinders, 3,410 cubes, 16 pyramids, 88 cones, and 12 lights with a total file size of 204 MB: - Bryce 5.01 Render to Screen - 1:24:02 - Bryce 5.01 Render to Disk - 1:20:24 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Screen - 1:15:57 - Bryce 5.5 Render to Disk - 1:19:39 Rendering is also more efficient as shown by the third image from a beta tester. The CPU Usage History is for the same scene rendered in 5.01 and 5.5. Notice how the 5.01 graph wanders all over the place (the beginning of the render has already scrolled off the screen) while the 5.5 graph goes up, stays up, then drops when the render is finished. 7. Multi-Threaded, which means it is up to the OS to determine how to distribute thread tasks between multiple CPUs. There are some bugs being worked with these features and some other bugs as well, but overall, the features work well. Again, thank you for your continued support of Bryce. I can assure you that we will work hard at it to assure a strong future. I'll be back with more info soon. Sincerely, Brett Bryce Product Manager DAZ Productions