jval, your right Eovia did offer a killer deal on the upgrade to Carrara Studio(with Amapi5 and all the plugins), for original Carrara users it was only $99. I got my Bryce 5 upgrade for $99 which is better than the advertised $159. In my opinion it does live up to what was advertised. All in all, the Bryce 5 upgrade is not a huge disappointment, the render speed could definately be faster. But consdering the Tree lab, Depth of Field, Render options, and increased grid size for Terrains and Lattices it's not bad. Unless I run into any huge flaws or bugs, I can't bitch too much. I doubt there is a conspiracy with the platform issue, but you never know. I think it's just an issue of the possibilty of it truly running better on a Unix based platfor(Mac). I am a PC user so I can't really say one way or the other about the Mac version. At least we have a new version of Bryce, it's better than it being abandoned. I had to wait a year and a half for a patch to make Carrara work at all, and I paid $400 for it, so things could indeed be worse. kaom