Yeah, Fran, it's most probably Cinema. Soft shadows and volumetrics are a snap. Materials are easy and intuitive. But sometimes it can take several hours to render something and you'd need Advanced Render module to get caustics or GI. I've just tried Vue. In some ways it's much more advanced than Bryce but in others it's utter crap. For instance, Ecosystems are quite nice and easy to set up. They don't take much memory and can look extremely good. OTOH, it's terrain editor is awful. Maybe I'm an idiot but I couldn't get the terrain preview pic to be bigger than its default (approximately) 350x350 pixels. Yes, you can zoom, but it's not worth much when the picture is four by four centimetres on my 1600x1200. And I'm not going to switch to a lower resolution. Also, click on Procedural Terrain and it will take ages to redraw the Terrain Editor, while the CPU occupancy goes up to 99%. Painting the effects on the terrain is terribly slow. Maybe the problem is in my graphic card, but I don't see a need for a big fast OpenGL card when they only have height colour on the 3D terrain preview. Compare it with Bryce, where you don't have the height colour on the 3D preview but which, after calculating the initial fractal, is lightningly fast. Okay, so I can't do overhangs directly in Bryce, but I can fake them. BTW, Vue tells me my graphic card should perform "correctly". Rendering in Vue is not a bed of roses, either. Click on volumetrics, GI, shadows and so on, and the Vue render might crawl possibly even slower then Bryce's. Not to mention that its translation (moving) of objects is a pain. Plus I hate PC programs that emulate the Mac appearance.

-- erlik