I modeled my castle in Rhino, took about a month. That was NURBS, to scale in inches. Then I spent another month trying to make it work in Bryce. It was actually the most tedious thing I've ever done, with either app. And I can't say I didn't learn VOLUMES in this time! After I finally got the castle into Bryce, I started inserting the torches, and hit my RAM limit. (512 MB) The torches you see in the above are just placer radials where the torch groups end up going; the actual torch geometry groups have four radial instead of just one. I simply can't use the scene until I get more RAM, and all I have sitting around here is old SDRAM which won't work in my main setup... Of course, to get NURBS into Bryce you have to convert to polys. The castle had around 300K polys, with another million polys in window-work which I leave out for distance shots. Still, I got about ten torches installed before I ran out of overhead to work with the scene. 20 minute load times, 40 minute save times = unworkable, at this point. Even saving it under a different file name was useless. Bryce needs about twice as much RAM as your scene takes up to function well. Not Bryce's fault, in this case, but my lack of hardware. The imported model in Maya is ALSO "pure" polys. I didn't convert the polys to Sub-D, although Maya has the best Sub-D I've ever seen. I could have brought it in as NURBS, but then I lose my shading groups. I use shading groups much like families a la Bryce, so I can texture multiple pieces with one range of clicks... I'm also more familiar with NURBS in Rhino, which is a much more powerful standalone modeler than Maya in my unexperienced hands. The Bryce scene is 235MB. The Maya scene is 33MB. One of the main differences is that Maya doesn't actually load in your texture maps until you need them, meaning they don't take up scene size when you save the scene because they are just node-links to actual file spots on your hard drive. A big advantage, especially when working with big texture maps (2048 and higher). Also, in Bryce if you duplicate an object it creates an entire new set of vertices/polys for this duplicate, meaning each torch setup adds another 15K polys, taking up both RAM and HD space. In Maya, the torches are instances based off of a "timeline" curve, appearing all in one frame, and thus there is only one set of geometry, taking up RAM only once at a time. With 51 torches x 15K polys, you're looking at another 750,000 polys in the Bryce scene, vs. a mere 15K in Maya. The poly count is roughly the same, around 300K for the main castle. It's design advantages like these that give me more overhead room in Maya to work with. But I actually like the Brycean textures better, and haven't hit that level of detail yet in Maya. I've started exporitng all my Bryce textures on this one by rendering them one-by-one on a large 2048x2048 plane, then using those images in Maya as my texture maps. So far, my Bryce renders are more appealing to the eye, for certain. But they aren't animatable at all, whereas the Maya scene surely is! (render time differences are vast) Now why the hell is he babbling on about all this, you might ask? I'm just illustrating how DAZ could have gone about making certain changes that would benefit everyone, and so far have failed to do so. Optimized Bryce 5 engine in 5.5? Hardly. It's merely a facelift, much like what they did with Bryce 4. The only reason they didn't update the GL specs to keep up with the rest of the industry : They just didn't wanna. For another cross-reference, I'm sure you've all used the Full Tracking shaded modes in Poser 3,4,5, or 6. Have you ever seen anything like that in Bryce? I don't think so! DAZ is just being lazy.