As per UVDan's request, I've copied my response from the Rhino post over to the Bryce forum for the benefit of all you Bryce-ers.
I have included other people's parts of the conversation in "quote boxes" to present this in some sort of coherent manner. My own words are left in regular type.

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Ok, I've tried to write a reply 3 times. Various crashes and system hangs have prevented me.
In any case I went into the technical explanation (as I usually do), and no one cares anyway. Besides I can't justify spending another 45 minutes typing.

So here's the bottom line.

Personally I use 3DS to go from Rhino to Bryce. It more accurately stores material info than OBJ (at least it seems to for me). Only real advantage to OBJ (as far as I can see) is that it has no max polygon limit (3DS limits you to 65535 polys per mesh and will break up a more bigger mesh into smaller meshes with that max number).

VRML doesn't store smoothing info. Go to the object attributes ("Ctrl+E") and click the "Smooth" sphere. Adjusting the angle slider determines what angles are preserved as hard edges; anything below the value of the slider is smoothed when shading.

Rotating an object about another is pretty easy too. Just set the base object as the parent of the orbiting object. Accomplish this from the "Linking" tab in the "Object Attributes" dialog box ("Ctrl+Alt+E"). You can make parent-child chains many layers deep for very complex motions.

REALOldNick: on 8/27/05 18:37 - - - - - -

dukduk. Sorry about your woes and thanks for your efforts.

I have not gone far enough down the track to pick up on the finer points. I will take your word for it, tech explanation or no....

My problem with rotating is not the actual doing of it, but the accurate placement of the rotation point. As far as I can see , there is none. no snap except a rudimentary grid etc. It's in tyhe nature of the beast, I think. An object is an object, rather than a lot of placeable bits etc.

UVDAN. We moved across to the Bryce forum. Sorry I did not reply to your post above. Sometimes I get emails warning me, others not....
you can easily manipulate the origin. A quick way to do it is to set it up in Rhino. Make a small sphere (or box) with a center where you want your rotation center to be mesh this with very low settings (to save on filesize) as we will be deleting it later anyway. Export this "reference point" mesh along with your other meshes. When you import into Bryce, you can view the origin of the reference point and set the origin of the object you want to rotate about that point to the same location as the reference point. (Did that make sense?) Simply delete or hide the reference mesh and you've no got accurate origin placement.

Of course you're doing all of this by entering values manually in the Object Attributes dialog box rather than trying to drag stuff around.

Another nice feature is the "Align" (All; Y-Top, -Center, -Bottom; X-Left, -Center, -Right; Z-Front, -Center, -Back) button in the edit palette. This snaps your meshes to have the same point as the align option you selected.

Oh, I forgot my main reason for using 3DS in Bryce, it imports way faster than OBJ. I mean...we're talking orders of magnitude here...

Don't believe me...try importing a complex mesh (something with more than 20k polys) in both formats.

REALOldNick: on 8/27/05 22:18 - - - - - -

dukduk

Thanks for the pointers. Very useful. I tried importing a Point, and it did not show, and even if it exists, there is no snap. So a small circle sphere is the way to go.

I had got halfway there as I made sure I placed a small bushing hole in each item so I could line them up.

I was just starting to look at using coordinates in Attributes box (only had the programme 3 days! ) although I had already started to use the coordinates to move stuff around and rotate from the Edit ribbon / toolbar. ..thingy

Only trouble is, I just tried setting the Absolute Coordinates of the Origin of two cubes to the exact same values, and they match neither each other nor their relationship to their objects!

As far as 3ds vs obj, I will have to try this out. I have now had two opposing views! You do seem to have a done a bit of thinking about this.
I actually came to Rhino from Bryce (a frustration with the lack of available models that were excatly what I needed drove me to modelling). So I feel pretty comfortable with Bryce's rendering and animation engine and thus never really bothered with Flamingo or Bongo. I am however starting to get into POV; it's just amazingly feature-rich.

UVDan: on 8/27/05 22:32 - - - - - -

Go with dukduk's observations on the 3ds files. I am partial to obj because I map everything in UV Mapper.
Yeah...UVMapper is a great tool, I'm just usually too lazy to bother mapping most of my stuff unless I have to. You know, you could map and texture in OBJ and then convert to 3DS using something like DeepExploration (or another converting app).