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If you just want to change spheres to metaballs, just ungroup and select all the spheres and click the edit tab and with your mouse hold down the arrows and move the mouse along to the metaball icon and that should change all to meta's. However, metaballs are smaller than regular bryce spheres so you will have to re-arrange!

Thanks, yes, it does. I either had forgotten -- or never knew -- about that "convert" feature.

I should say that I'm not converting Bryce spheres . . . what I'm trying to do is to use the array and layout tools of Lightwave, and then bring the geometries into Bryce (nothing I've ever found does the complex material blending that Bryce metaballs do)

When bringing geometries into Bryce, Bryce seems to default to creating one mesh out many objects, in an imported multi object mesh -- unless you've assigned different materials in the original OBJ. In that case, you can ungroup the objects and then convert them to metaballs. If you convert without ungrouping, you just get one big metaball occupying the bounding box for the group.