Ray, you don't need to buy DS. It's free. It has the same basic abilities like Poser. Not all of them, but the posing it does have. I have to admit I was also a bit disappointed what Bryce 5.5 will do now. But then I thought better of it. 5.5 will be an incremental upgrade. So we should accept it as such. Yeah, some incremental upgrades are more equal than others, but still, an incremental upgrade is an incremental upgrade. Bug fixes, minor things. Occasionally major things. DS integration is clearly a major thing. Another major thing is the multithreading. Yeah, 3D Studio Max supports multithreading since version 2, but look how much it costs. And look what it could do with multithreading: "Max2 can be searching the drawing database, updating the video display, performing rendering calculations, and doing many other simultaneous operations, each of which can be "threaded," or assigned, to two or more CPUs under Windows NT 4.0." I'll have to ask whether the multithreading will support the Hyperthreading processors, too, but it's clearly a progress. Finally, I think we went slightly overboard with the wishlist. At least for one incremental upgrade. OTOH, version 6 should clearly have many more things that we wish for. In the same vein, you (or I for that matter) don't need to use Bryce 5.5 at all. We can wait for 6.

-- erlik