I've narrowed the Bryce wish list to just 6 wishes to keep it simple and not overwhelm the Bryce programmers.  Here they are, from 1 to 6 in order of priority:

1.  Ambient Occlusion.
2.  Instancing/cloning of objects or groups.
3.  Dynamic clothing and hair capability.
4.  Fast and usable Radiosity.
5.  Displacement mapping (if DazStudio can do it, why not Bryce!)
6.  UV texturing of select polygons.

If I just had these things I'd be jumping like a happy rabbit.

Not Radiosity, photon mapping.

My top 5 wishlist:

1. Photon Mapping (would be great w/ True Ambience)
2. Shaders (could easily include AO)
3. Displacement
4. Cloning
5. A scanliner, to take the diffuse load off the raytracer.

Quite a few of Bryce's shortcomings could be solved by complete D|S integration.

2.  Instancing/cloning of objects or groups.

Already been mentioned by DAZ that they will work for Bryce 7 to have this.
(keep those fingers crossed)

I love using DOF, so I really want F/Stop myself. After saying that, I also REALLY REALLY want displacement mapping aswell...;)

Global illumination. Radiosity. smoothing. Fresel shaders, normal maps. Ability to use Messiah as a plug in.

how about the upgraded ability to directly import objects made in  Lightwave later than version 5 that also keeps their material maps in place.

@dann-o
Smoothing?...
You mean subdividing, right?
Third party renderers would be cool. DAZ is supposed to be releasing the SDK for Bryce, so there could be a lot of plug-ins made available eventually. All kinds of shaders could become available too, if DAZ decides to put the ability to use shaders into Bryce. Seems crazy not to.

Hhhmmm plug-in renderers? Bryce meets Indigo in the battle for slowest but better looking render engine.......

Bryce meets Maxwell, from what I hear THAT would be slow...(but beautiful)

Displacement support is on most everyone's list, It's important, I just hope that the Materials Lab also gets displacement support, so displacements can be used on any mesh (like figures), not just in the Terrain Editor on a mountain.

Which would also mean (I hope) that ALL materials could start accepting higher color bit maps. I didn't think it important until recently when I had a smooth rolling gradient bump map, that comes out looking stair-stepped when rendered. (because the Mat Lab can only use 8-bit rgb images)

Maxwell for bryce has been discontinued as far as I know. And yes maxwell makes gorgeous renders, but the camera settings take getting used to. You can not avoid DOF effects, its built in the engine and cannot be disabled as far as i know. so you will need to set up your camera view to focus on your object of choise an get your DOF the way you want.
Maxwell renders ultra-slow, glass is absolute horror in maxwell. you thought bryce glass was horror? u aint seen nothin yet.

Hrm, :-)   Bryce ain't the slowest renderer? Great news!! :-)

Actually Bryce renders extremely fast.... as long as you don't use soft shadows, IBL, trees, or lots of transparent maps.

Cornell's raytracer is a fast (and very accurate) one. The problem with speed is that Bryce raytraces EVERYTHING.

Is Maxwell slower than Carrara? :unsure:
I find it hard to believe that it could be. I don't have nearly enough patience to wait for a supposed C5 'light precalculation' that is allegedly in progress to finish, before it starts crawling through the render (if it doesn't crash outright).
And I find C5's 'full raytracing' to be unbareably slow also.

Yes I did mean subdivision. Nice thing to have. Would like faster soft shadows and faster transparency masks. I think both can be done. Trans masks are done in real time in some render engines. I remember doing a WW1 fighter and trying to be quick I said hey I can do the wires with trans masks. Well took forever to render. (OK a long time) woudl have been faster to model them and place them.

Trust me, try a metropolis light transfer renderer (indigo, maxwell) and you may get fantastic accurate results, but it feels like running bryce five on a 486.....

Yup, Bryce raytraces everything.

Which is not really a neccessary thing when rendering out a mountain, lol. Glass, reflections, refractions, even shadows yes, if you want that added accuracy.

An SDK created plugin to render out a Bryce scene in a 3rd party renderer *quickly...*this would give Bryce users a freedom they haven't fully had before.

Quote - Trust me, try a metropolis light transfer renderer (indigo, maxwell) and you may get fantastic accurate results, but it feels like running bryce five on a 486.....

 
I'll stick with Monte Carlo ('jitter') and a Gauss filter (though I generally prefer to use Mitchell filters) w/ photon mapping, thanks. That might just as well be MLT, in fact it might even be technically the same thing, as Gauss functions are commonly used as the probability variant in a MLT Monte Carlo chain sampling operation.

Quote -
An SDK created plugin to render out a Bryce scene in a 3rd party renderer *quickly...*this would give Bryce users a freedom they haven't fully had before.

I'd love to see aqsis as a target (basically a RIB export), not sure what functionality wouldn't transfer though.

Quote - Actually Bryce renders extremely fast.... as long as you don't use soft shadows, IBL, trees, or lots of transparent maps.

Actually, no it doesnt. There's still lotsa render engines that do that faster also.

I don't think max meant compared to other rendering engines.

well, what does fast or slow mean if u dont have something else to compare it to? without a reference frame it would have no meaning.

When I don't use soft shadows, IBL, trees, or lots of transparent maps I can render a high polygon Bryce scene, with AA, at 4000 x 6000 resolution in under 1 hour.

Now if I try to do the same scene with, let's say,  IBL and blurry reflections, the render time would go to about 100 hours or more.

ah ok. yea i guess thats not all that bad. but depends a LOT on the textures too (AA-sensetivity and such)

How about that "MakeArt"-button...?!

Quote - Trust me, try a metropolis light transfer renderer (indigo, maxwell) and you may get fantastic accurate results, but it feels like running bryce five on a 486.....

 
O.k. I did try Kerkythea.
I did some renders with moderate AA (3x3), photon counts (100,000), and the Final Gathering on (900 rays). It wasn't so bad. I did a couple renders with the cornell box that came with the renderer.
At 800x600 it took 1:32. I would probably use higher AA setting for a serious render, so maybe double that time.

It's free.
I think It would be a nice addition to Bryce as a plug-in renderer. Maybe when the SDK gets out, somebody will write a plug-in for that.

And what more "nature" options like fluid simulation ( for rivers, oceans ...), particle system .... a fast and better render will be great, but it will be better if we have more oprions to improve what we want to render.

A 'Go Faster' button...........

I demand Glob.Illum./Glob.Radiosity, Ecosystem and a make-wet-shoreline button...now! :-)

Higher precision numbers. Instead of using an infinite plane, I want a sphere 6,378,000 m in diameter. I want to put up an actual moon 1,738,000 m in diameter 384,401,000 m distant. While we're at it shader trees, collision detection, and waves in water that respond to edges. A faster renderer is always a good thing. I use tg2 a lot, so bryce render times don't bother me that much. Oh yeah, I want a terrain editor with capabilities on the order of Daylon Leveller. I'm on a mac so...

1.) Posing in Bryce for animating, instead of using D|S (Or other 3D programs) to do the job.

Perhaps I'm being a pig, but I would also like lathe modeling. That would make my tool kit complete.