So what are the real differences between 5.5 & 6.1? Thinking about upgrading but not sure if the differences are worth the money. In fact I'm not really sure what the differences actually are.
If you go to Daz there are a lot of platitudes & generalities given but nothing concrete.

i' still using 5... will wait till 7 to change :-P

Don't do it! You'll be sorry you did. Way too many bugs. The only thing good about it is you get some new tools in the terrain editor and HDRI.   Read the threads about all the problems everyone around here is having to know what I mean.

If 5 works for you stay with it. Wait for 7.

I dunno,..........there are workarounds for most of the bugs and the HDRI and multi-threading capabilities are worth it for me.

If you need to ask then an upgrade maybe isn't for you. It was for me and i'm happy with it.

*Times when I got a crash....
*Using metaballs, but as I don't use them generally so thats not a problem for me.

Thats it!

I still prefer and use 5.5, which i find to be the most solid version released.

6.1 works fine for me.

Hey All,

Been a while since I posted anything.  I have sinced moved in with my girlfriend and was studying ALL summer long for the sergeants promotional exam which I finally took on October 25.

Anyway, stick with 5 if it is working fine.  I had 6.1, set an image to render overnight while I went to work, maxed out the settings to make look real pretty.  When I came home, Bryce had crashed.  When I went to send the error report, IE could not connet.  When I closed IE, it Bryce went down and I blue screened.  Using XP on an UBER power system that my friend and I built.  Well, that was the last time I saw my desktop.  I MAJORLY screwed something up and is currently undergoing serious surgery.  So, stick with 5.

For me it's worth it having for Multi-processor support and IBL (and Intel native on the Mac). Right now I'm doing my scene creation in 5.5C which is much more stable and then using 6.1 for rendering and IBL. So far this has worked pretty well for me on both the Mac and PC. I solved a lot of my PC 6.1 problems by turning off the Screen and Energy Saver stuff, which interfered with rendering. While this didn't cause a crash it did suspend the rendering process till I woke the PC back up.

I liked the original Bryce 6 but the upgrade to 6.01 have made one feature that was worth it diffucult to use.Whatever they did to the IBL has made it harder to use rather than easier.However the random replication tool and the mesh export of booleans and the ability to add new categories to presets are quite nice additions that do make life easier.

In 5.5 imported objects are grey and therefore visible (unless they have UVmappng and textures applied then they are textured, B6 imports objects as totally black - like a hole in the screen - you can't see anything.  There was supposed to be an update but imported objects are still black.

However.

I do love the ability to model in Bryce and then export it to Wings3d to do some more to it, then importing it back and modeling some more in Bryce etc etc.

I've also got very used to the better lighting in B6 as I recently found out when going back to B5 to test a scene I'd been looking at in B6.  When I went into B5 it was much more difficult getting the lighting to look even halfway close to what I'd had in B6, and rendering it took much longer in B5, or at least it felt like that.

That's it really.