Hi Clyde Hope I can help out with this. question 1. Metaballs are used for organic modeling. Some uses would be puddles of water, drips, dew, simple fruits and vegies. Depends on how much you work with them. question 2. There are several leave presets. My suggestion to help them out a little is go outside and scan a leave in cut out the middle and add that to the preset. Some of the trees don't look very good as defaults play with the setting some and you will get excellent trees. There will be several web pages out with tree data. http://www.hinchu.com/tuts/trees/ is one (I think thats it.) question 3. All reports so far is that Bryce 5 is faster on macs. With a larger jump in speed moving from older operating systems to the newest one. 2 years is a lifetime in the pc world :) Griggs