"IF you know 3rd party renderers at all, what would be your (or anyone elses) opinion on any decent freeware renderers that Bryce could be plugged into? (in the hopeful future)" Most of the best freeware renderers were mentioned above, but if I were a regular Bryce user, I'd push for getting a plugin to the Vray engine. They've already made one for Truespace 7 I believe, and one is in the works for Maya (if it's not already released). It started as a 3dsmax plugin. The benefit here is that Vray, unlike Maxwell, is very very fast at rendering GI, and raytracing. It may not be as physically accurate, but the results are top-notch, with highly impressive rendertime benchmarks. Production proven, it's also very easy to use compared to most other renderers in it's class (Brazil, FinalRender, etc.). The price is reasonable too... $800 for full version, and there's a free version (which is minus SSS and some other things) as well.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.