Thank you all for your answers, lots of food for thought. But sadly enough - having had some time to fiddle around with Vue 5 - the biggest difference to Bryce seems to be that it crashes unpredictably. While I can really live with the re-texturing of imported objects (it can indeed be fun and an inspiring process adapting materials to a specific rendering system), I can't live with that. While I mostly knew why I'd driven Bryce into another crash (adding the twenty-1st of a 30 billion polygon object, having a 256MB worth of jpg textures in the library and then hit undo twice or such foolishness), I wasn't able to figure out what Vue dislikes about what I'm doing. I begin to believe that there is a very ugly bug in internal memory management, and that it hits at random...