Sometimes a rank of identically uniformed and equipped men is needed, or some other sort of repetition. I can make up one man (perhaps the Zygote Racing Car Driver with a military or naval type texture map) and arm him, and call him X; that will be 2 or 3 of 4 megabytes or so. Then in Bryce to repeat him say 10 or 20 times in rank ... Ye gods and little fishes the storage consumption resulting. My first impulse was to put a mirror (= a vertical plane with 100% reflection and its other properties 0%) each side of him. But that will make every other image of him left and right reversed. I say that Bryce needs a way to say "put copies of object X in this and that and the other place" without actually duplicating in Bryce's memory the geometry etc information about him. Some 3D modelers can do this: I think they call it "Instances".

How about placing one of the models you want to use in your modeling program and reduce the polygons? If it is to be used as a background image the model would not suffer from the reduction. -=Nomad=-

OK, here's what you do: Render an image of army guy #1 in Bryce (export image) and then render an alpha channel of it (export image). Now Create a Picture Object in Bryce, loading the image as the diffuse map and the channel and the transperancy. You can also do a depth render and name this as the bump map for more realistic shadows. Duplicate the picture object a few dozen times for your army without adding 20 meg.

I.e. make a render of him and use it as a background tiling. That may look OK at a distance, but if I am fairly close to the rank of men, I see different men of the rank in somewhat different directions, and also one of the men or his gun/etc may cast a shadow on another of the men. I still say that Bryce needs "Instances" or whatever is called. This could be implemented by letting the Bryce menu commands "duplicate" and "replicate", when called on the object X, merely make duplicate or multiple pointers to X's geometry etc, and that geometry etc would be itself only copied (using much memory space) if (a) the user actually alters one of the multiple instances of X and also (b) the user answers "no" to a MessageBox asking him "Do you want to alter all instances of this figure?".

That would be a poser commands in Bryce :-) Picture objects still cast shadows in bryce and you could do several different men to make objects of. This isn't the same thing as background tiling (that doesn't work at all). I'll make an example scene, if you'd like.

I understand what DD is saying; but, for the effect that I was thinking of, I would still want completely solid 3-dimensional figures. Why can't Bryce and also Poser have an option for more than one visible 3D object to share the same geometry arrays to save memory space?

Poser works by having string references to the geometries and incorporating props. The cr2 files and pz3 files contain no geometry data except for morphs. All that stuff is what tells Poser how the geometry moves. Bryce would have to be completely redesigned and would take up 80 times the space on your computer if it used the geometry linking system.