FYI Varian and the rest of the forum, Corel is offering a Competitor upgrade for Bryce 5. I currently have Bryce 2, 3D, & 4. I also have Vue d'Esprit 3 and 4. In answering the LonRanger's original question, I feel that I am basically a fairly neutral party when it comes to the two programs. I upgraded from Vue 3 to 4 instantly. I am in a wait and see mode for upgrading to Bryce 5. This is not because I do not like Bryce 4, in fact I love it, but the upgrade for Bryce 3D to 4 was in my IMO not a full upgrade. I am getting the same feeling for the Bryce 5 upgrade. So I will wait, watch, view and read a lot before handing over $149.00 to Corel. Bryce has it's good points. I think it's interface has a steeper learning curve than Vue. As a Bryce user LonRanger, you have no trouble turning out a decent render with Vue. A Vue user though I think would have some studying to do before hand to figure out Bryce's GUI interface, and in paticular Bryce's texture editor which is a monster compared to Vue's. Bryce 4's volumetrics features still have a slight edge over Vue 4's. It is dead easy to make puffy volumetric clouds and light rays by just turning on the volumetric feature in the atmoshpere editor and using the default textures that came with the program, but this really increases rendering times to the point that it can be a pain. I had one space scene in which it took around 20 hours to do a volumetric gas cloud. It was a beautiful thing to behold, but a pain to render. Vue takes the rendering times trophy hands down. When it comes to vegetation Vue just flat out clobbers Bryce. All of the pictures I have seen made with Bryce 5's tree lab, the trees looked similar but not quite as convincing as Vue's. My understanding is that the more trees you add to a Bryce 5 scene will cause the render time to increase quite a bit. This does not occur in Vue. Plus with Vue you just simply click and you a lovely tree. If you click the same tree type you will get another tree of the same type, but grown differently. Vue also has a direct import of Poser 4 scenes which Bryce 5 does not. If you use Poser a lot, this is a priceless feature. Just tell Vue to bring in the poser file and it brings in all the textures etc. with no fuss at all. Basically both programs are great pieces of software. Even if I elect to not upgrade to Bryce 5, I will not ever remove Bryce 4 from my computer, and I will continue to use it. I tend to jump to Bryce when doing indoor scenes, as I have not mastered this art in Vue yet. Happy Rendering, JAS