What's new in the download? is it worth to download?

Since I don't see anything within the copyright info at the bottom.. (will quote that as well, just to save my backside) or on their site with the update info.. here it is.. copied from the Readme after the 4.1 upgrade.. "The "Tech Notes" section is split into two parts, Enhancements and Problems Fixed. Enhancements: A new volume shading mode was added to enhance light interaction and self-shadowing effects. This new mode will be very useful for creating realistic clouds and gaseous forms. Also, a new shading mode option for volume materials was added which blurs the results just slightly in an effort to remove some of the banding artifacts which could occur with some volume materials. The QuickTime(R) movie exporter and the QTVR image exporter have been upgraded to work with QuickTime 4. A full installation of QuickTime is necessary to create media content. Three new exporters: 3D Studio (.3DS) , TrueSpace (.COB) and VideoScape (VSA), have been added. Two new importers: VistaPro DEM (.DEM) and World Construction Set (.ELEV) Added a new texture noise/phase type - "Distance Squared" Improved the TrueSpace importer to handle both COB and SCN file types. Improved the 3D Studio importer to handle both 3DS and PRJ file types and to handle image-based texture maps. Improved the selection palette menus to show the selection status of listed objects. In addition, the deselection behavior of the CTRL click menu was changed to match the selection palette. You now have to hold down SHIFT while deselecting an object to toggle only it's selection off. Added the ability to hold down the ALT/OPTION key while clicking the land object icon, thus causing the object(s) to be snapped to the ground rather than other objects. Improved the OBJ exporter so that only positive UV values are created. Instead of generating negative values, the associated image maps are flipped appropriately. This was the main cause of OBJ files not loading into RayDream(tm) with their image maps intact. Improved the CTRL+click object menu to show locked objects. Added custom starfield support and controls to sky model and SkyLab. Hold down the CTRL key while clicking either the "Starfield" or "Comets" button ON in the SkyLab. This will switch you to a custom starfield using the starcat.dat file located in the Data Folder. You can still control the intensity and amount of the stars just like you can with the random starfields. When you adjust the amount upwards (adding stars) you will increase the number of stars that are usually dim as seen from earth. In other words, the stars are listed in the data file in order from most bright to most dim. The actual intensity control merely lightens and darkens the stars evenly, without changing their relative intensities. To switch back to random stars, hold down the ALT/OPTION key while clicking either the "Starfield" or "Comets" button ON in the SkyLab. Additionally, if you hold down SHIFT, you will get the default random configuration (the one you get with a fresh, new sky). However, if you don't hold down SHIFT, you get a newly randomized set of stars and comets. Therefore, if you keep turning stars/comets on with just the ALT/OPTION key held down, you get a different configuration each time You can keep switching back and forth from custom to random. Added gradient support to all light objects. Conventionally, lights emit a certain amount (intensity) of colored light from their source. Both the amount of light and color of the light are constant from the point of emission. Light intensity may fall off as distance from the source increases, and the color may be altered by a texture gel placed onto the light itself. Gradient lights offer a much more exciting way to control light color and intensity. When lights have a gradient applied to them, the color and intensity of the light is determined by the distance the light travels and the color/alpha gradient that is being used. For example, say a sphere light has a color gradient applied to it that runs from red to yellow. When placed in a scene, the light will color surfaces close to it using the red color from the gradient, and surfaces farther away will be colored reddish-orange, orange, orange-yellow and finally yellow. The light actually changes color as it travels along, lighting surfaces along the way with splashes of ever-changing color! When the gradient has an alpha component, the light's intensity is altered in the same way as the color component. It's actually possible to have a light turn off, on, etc. Simply build the alpha gradient using any pattern you desire for the light's effect. One very powerful use of this feature will be to create custom light falloff patterns. (No more being stuck with just linear or squared falloff). To use this preview, simply hold down a SHIFT key while creating a light object. You will be prompted to load a gradient. We currently support Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) gradient (.grd) files. You can use Adobe Photoshop to create custom gradients, or edit existing gradient files. Please note that although gradient files can contain more than one gradient, only the first one will be used. Also, if you cancel the "Open" dialog, the light will still be created, but without a gradient. The Gradient light will not be saved, since this is a preview feature only. Added the following new mapping modes: Sinusoidal, World Front, World Side, World Cubic, Object Cubic. -Sinusoidal - This mapping format is usually used for spherical mapping. Planets and maps (atlas type) are the most common uses. -World Front & World Side - These two mapping modes are just the counterparts to World Top (which has always been available). They simply do straight parallel mapping from the specified plane in world space. Top represents the X plane, Front the BY plane, and Side the Y plane. -World Cubic & Object Cubic - These mapping modes were put in mainly to better support imported objects which used this type of mapping. However, they can be quite useful on their own. They work by mapping images from a virtual cube onto the surface of the rendered object by using the object's surface normals to determine from which side of the virtual cube to get the image data. Added new object import/export plugins: NFF (Haines & WTK) import and export, X (DirectX 3D) import and export, and VSA (VideoScape) export. NFF - This is a fairly common format with simple objects and scenes available. It's mostly an academic format, but occasionally NFF objects do show up on the free model web sites. X - This is a Microsoft 3D file format that is associated with their DirectX technology. Volume Materials The problem people have been having rendering their old volume materials with the latest Bryce patch is really not a bug at all. In fact, it's a nasty side effect of fully implementing a feature that was never finished. Let me explain; in order for the Edge Softness control (seen in the Material Composer with a Volume Material) to be fully effective, the underlying object should have a feathered starting density. What this means is that the center of the object is the most dense and it becomes less dense as you get closer to the surface. The purpose of this is to allow you to blur the edges of the object in the hopes of hiding the base shape. This is useful when rendering clouds or other gaseous shapes. The Edge Softness control is meant to raise or lower this starting density pattern. Well, the only object that properly defined its starting density pattern in Bryce 4.0.1 was the sphere. Therefore, lots of people started using volume materials with other object types and were unknowingly relying on this flaw/bug. So, when we fixed the starting densities for ALL the objects with the latest Bryce patch, many people saw major rendering differences. Keep in mind, this should only have occurred with objects other than spheres. Why you ask? Well, because now objects are less dense near their edges by default. This not only means they won't look the same, but they will take longer (MUCH longer in some cases) to render. Less density means the ray travels further through the object, and this results in longer render times. So what's the fix? There is now a new option in the shading mode menu (Material Composer). It is called "Uniform Density" and it will ensure that the object's starting density will be uniform throughout its entire shape. This is good for two things. One, it provides a way to go back to the way it was (and fix the problems people are having), and it also provides a way to make objects "harder". This is useful when trying to build "Full Shaded" volume materials. So, a general rule of thumb is use the "Uniform Density" option if you want harder looking objects/materials, or if you want to fix the "problem" described above. And guess what? There's a bonus feature for those of you who had to deal with this mess. There's another new option called "Sky Integration". Simply put, when used it will evaluate all of the sky effects while rendering volume materials! That's right, no more clouds that stand out instead of blending nicely into the haze/fog! Problems Fixed in the Bryce (R) 4.1 Updater: Fixed a bug which caused shadows from volume materials to be computed incorrectly. This resulted in heavy, dark areas with very obvious intensity stepping. Fixed a bug in the 3D Studio exporter which was causing a crash when exporting triangle mesh objects through the Edit Mesh dialogue. Fixed a bug which was causing a memory leak if the Render Movie dialogue was accessed without having any movie export plug-ins available. Fixed a bug which was causing a memory leak if textures loaded from Bryce2 for Windows scenes were never referenced by a material. Fixed a bug which was causing the "edge softness" control for volume materials to not work at all if the material was applied to a cone, cube, cylinder, pyramid, or torus object. Fixed a bug in the HeightField (HF) importer which was failing to close the file if an error occurred while checking the validity of the file. Fixed a bug when loading Bryce2 Mac scenes which improperly loaded Pyramid and Cube lights. And for ALL lights which used the diffuse color for "double gelling." Fixed image map loading through the plug-in architecture so that the alpha channel would be set opaque for the entire image if no alpha channel were loaded with the image. Fixed LightWave object exporting so that negative scaling would not be generated. Instead, the image maps are flipped to compensate. Fixed a minor bug in the "material object" plug-in utility. If a NULL material request was sent in, the resulting object didn't have the correct material attributes (defaults) defined. Fixed a bug in the calculation of bounding boxes used for depth cueing. Object trajectories were being left out, now they are included in the depth cue bounding box region. Fixed a bug in the drawing of orthographic wireframe displays (top, left, front, etc.) which caused premature clipping in scenes with extremely large objects. Fixed a bug in the ImageIO function that checks to see if a file exists. On some network volumes this function would fail and always report that the file existed. Fixed a bug in one of the plug-in interface functions which was causing the wrong resources to be used when getting file/creator types for exported object files on the Mac. Problems Fixed in both the Bryce(R) 4.1 and 4.01 Updater: Fixed a bug in the DEM importer that was causing some 10-meter DEM files to not import properly. Fixed a bug which caused objects that were constrained to a path to not stay on the path while the path geometry changed during an animation. Fixed a bug which could have potentially caused the camera placement for the "flyaround" function to be incorrect if there were objects in the scene that were linked to groups. Fixed a bug which was causing Bryce 2 Windows scenes to load with incomplete document/render size information. This resulted in resumed and batched renders that used an incorrect render size. Fixed a bug which may destroy the Ridged Multifractal terrain model. Fixed a bug which caused a crash when trying to use the "Edit 3D Textures" function with an empty texture preset file. Fixed a bug which was causing imported skies to lose their suns' "Disable Sun Light" state. The suns were always being imported with the option turned on. Fixed a bug which was causing sky memory dots to NOT be loaded properly from Bryce 3D scenes. Improved the VRML1 exporter to properly handle conversion between coordinate systems and object transformations including shear which should be compatible with most (all) VRML browsers. Fixed a bug which caused tiling of the new terrain creation models to not match perfectly. The Pict Sequence movie plug-in now appends a ".pct" to each image file name instead of ".p". Also, a bug was fixed ensuring that there would be enough space to append the additional text (XXXX.pct). Fixed a bug on the Mac which prevented images with only a ".p" extension from being loaded in association with a scene. Fixed a bug which caused movie preview frames to be rendered off-screen if the document size was too big to fit on the screen. The default Movie Preview playing mode was changed to use the main animation play mode rather than repeating. Fixed a bug which sometimes caused the cumulus/stratus clouds to be turned on while adjusting cloud cover/height from the Sky&Fog Palette, even if one of the cloud layers were already turned on. Added control to randomize the starfield in the Sky Lab. Hold down Option/ALT when turning on either the stars or the comets. Fixed a bug which failed to update the sun/moon icon when a numerical altitude value was entered in the Sky Lab. Fixed a bug which caused Bryce2 (Windows) scene files to be loaded as Bryce3D/4 scene files, thus resulting in a crash. Fixed a bug which caused control over starfields to be difficult at best. The starfields themselves were never being copied into the skies used for the nano-renderings throughout Bryce. This meant that in many cases, the stars would change from rendering to rendering. On top of that, the controls over the number of stars/comets and intensity in the Sky Lab would revert instead of staying where the user set them. You couldn't selectively turn either stars or comets on/off without changing the entire starfield. Fixed a bug which caused the AVI movie plug-in to show the wrong compression settings after they had been altered. Fixed a bug which caused a crash if you changed the AVI movie compression settings, then switched to the QuickTime movie plug-in, and tried to render a movie. This was a PC-only problem. Fixed a bug which caused playing (by clicking the PLAY button) of the Movie Preview to not use the current play mode, even when the Movie Preview option "Play Using Mode" was selected Fixed a bug which caused a crash when trying to export symmetrical lattices to some exporters such as OBJ and DXF. The random application of a material to newly created rocks, terrains, and water/cloud planes is now more random. Fixed a bug which could cause a crash when using Spherical Clouds. Fixed the zoom out command. Windows use CTRL+ALT +Space Bar. Macintosh use Option+Command+Space Bar. Fixed the zoom-in command. Windows use CTRL+Space Bar. Macintosh use Command+Space Bar. The "Cancel All Changes" command in the Terrain Editor was changed to: Windows: SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+N(Windows) Macintosh: Command+Shift+N Fixed a bug which caused the Sky&Fog Palette to not be refreshed after evaluating an animation. This would leave the controls in the Palette stale/wrong if there was any sky animation present. Fixed a bug in the Edit Light dialogue which caused the Material Presets dialogue (used when applying a texture gel) to not be initialized with the current gel. Fixed a bug which caused altitude renders and the rendering of altitude sensitive materials/textures to be incorrect if some objects were solo-ed out or hidden. Fixed a bug which caused the haze parameters to become corrupted just after loading a scene and visiting the Sky&Fog Palette or the Sky Lab. Fixed a bug which caused motion path objects to completely fall apart after adding a new control point. Fixed a bug which caused the render report to not show up after rendering to disk. This was only broken when the output resolution was changed from the default. Fixed a bug which caused the main nano preview to not always switch views if in "sky only" mode. Fixed a bug which caused the drawing of paths to crash the application if the trajectory handles had been turned off. Objects and materials loaded from the preset libraries are now named using the name of the preset being loaded. In addition, when adding a new preset to the libraries the default name of the preset will be the name of the object or material being added. Fixed a bug which caused selected group objects to be brought into the Object Presets dialogue with the wrong material. The material of the actual group object was being used, which should never be referenced. The results of objects rendered using volume materials are now composited in a new way. This eliminates the dark halos which appeared around the edges of some of these objects. Fixed a bug which caused the sky to begin rendering while in "Textures Off" mode. This would happen if the sky parameters were reset, or if a sky preset was selected while in this mode. Fixed the HTML Image Map exporter so that no "BASE HREF" statement will be written into the HTML file if the server location is NOT specified. When you reload a scene with it's associated image, the mask information used by the HTML Image Map exporter is now retained. This means you can use the exporter right after loading without having to re-render the image. An optimization was added which could greatly decrease render time on scenes which contain a large number of lights which aren't very bright and don't throw light far into the scene. These types of lights are most often used in indoor scenes for things such as lamps, candles, etc. Fixed a bug in the texture engine which was causing artifacts to appear in some of the new textures/noises. This fix increased the speed of these textures/noises as well. Fixed the two new mapping modes "World Cubic" and "Object Cubic" which had their scaling effects reversed. This has been fixed so that their scaling will behave like all the other mapping modes. To be specific, lower scaling factors should increase the frequency of the texture while higher scaling factors should decrease the frequency. Copyright (c) 2000 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved. Corel, KPT, and Painter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Corel Corporation or Corel Corporation Limited. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Macintosh and Mac are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Pentium is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. All other products, fonts, company names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies."

Oh yeah.. and they added the Corel Logo to the load/help screens. Ooo.. ahhh.. snickers

Attached Link: http://lightning.prohosting.com/~maccastl/401.html

I have'nt yet been able to get the custom starfields to work. Anyone else?

I gave up, when the upgrade kept giving me a out of memorey error importing obj, 3ds and other formats. I don't know who screwed around with the importers, but they should have left well enough alone. I've gone back to 4.0 with the old Metacreations logo ;-) But I'm willing to try again if they can tell me that this major BUG has been fixed. James

Attached Link: http://lightning.prohosting.com/~maccastl/401.html

Yeah, How nice!!!! But, I know its unbelivable,there are people in Germany, France, and they are using translated copys. And Im watching Corels site for a while, and theres only a american version update. Thats service. Like in the old days Metas service. Only curiouslabs posted a german 4.01 patch quite soon. Because egy.sys is a german company?

As to the starfields, I've gotten it to work once (that is, to go into the 'expanded' numbers.. really really high numbers). But I had to exit and restart the application to get in there again. Go figure. I've been able to pull a few COB (truespace) objects into bryce.. some pretty big ones as well. I run under Win2000 (work) & Win98 SE (at home) and haven't had the messages regarding memory (but then I also have a buttload.. 196 at work, 256 at home). I am willing to 'try' and crash it if you can give more details on size, etc. :) (always willing to try and break something). But I have to agree.. I do like the Meta version better then the Corel branded version. :) (even though I'm running the corel lol)

How did you get into the Starfields? The instructions they give do not seem to work.