Hi ariannah,

I too have both Vue (V5I) & Bryce (although I've only got Bryce 3).
Both have their virtues and vices. Vue is a bit less stable than Bryce, but I find it easier to use for some things.
The eco-system rocks! And trees, too :biggrin:

Yes, you can apply bit-mapped textures (including photos) into V5I.

In my opinion, the vegetation for Vue seems better than that for Bryce (from what I've seen of other people's renders), but can't give definitive opinion on that, only a feeling.

Personally, I now prefer to use Vue. I like the support for Poser PZ3 scenes and Vue's function editor, as opposed to Bryce's DTE (which I never really got to grips with).

Within just a few days of getting Vue, I'd created a couple of (satisfactory) scenes that I'd been struggling to create in Bryce for months.
OTOH: There are some things that Bryce does better. The "Background Update" of Vue can slow things down to a crawl; I don't really like the way that booleans work in Vue; and of course, it's a whole new interface and approach to have to learn...

Plus the rendering systems. Two similar scenes rendered with (approximately) equivalent render settings might look entirely different in Bryce compared to Vue (I think this is because Bryce seems to be fairly aggressive when anti-aliasing, but don't know enough to be that specific).

But, on the whole, I'd say, if you can afford V5I, go for it! (But make sure you also have a high-spec. machine 1st!)

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Diolma