Ok, I've upgraded to Bryce 5. I've also noticed that things have greatly slowed down. Though I'm delighted with the addition of soft shadows. It seems that they've not taken any great action to improve the render engine. Simple renders with soft shadows are taking hours now even at low render settings. And they've not sped up anything concerning volumetric renders. rendering a volumetric scene still scares me in that it takes forever to render. I have to render things over 1500 x 1500 pixels often, and I just go out for the day and come back in hopes that it will be done. But enough about that. I still think Bryce is an incredible product and highly endorse it to anyone. Now onto the NEW tree designer. Has anyone had any luck in ...oh I don't know.. say creating a xmas tree? No matter what settings I choose I can't seem to get things looking right. I get the leaf system fine but when I try to get the trunk and branches looking like a spruce or any conifer, I have no luck. And yes I know about the presets. But those don't seem to work at all. Is there a site that has some sample tree settings? Any help would be greatly apprecieated. Thanks. James

James, I am thinking of getting Bryce5 myself and after looking at your post I have to ask - what type of system are you rendering on? Processor, speed? If it is going to take hours to render I'm not going to waste my money. Sorry to answer your questions with one of my own... :>) Syd

Not for nothing, but I've also upgraded and I feel just as ripped off when I upgraded to 4. In my opinion, Bryce 3 was Metacreations most successful version. It was fast and simple.

Sydney, don't be put off by that too much. I still think the upgrade was well worth it. But I've always been upset that trying to do a volumetric render has always been excruceatingly slow. And I'm on a Mac G4 Cube at 450 Mhz (comprable to a 900 Mhz PC) with 320 mb RAM and a Dell 850 Mhz PC (which is slower). Here is a render that took all night and i forgot to turn on the sun. Without the sun on, you won't get shadows. :( But even so, I think this is far superior a rendering than Bryce 4 can do. this has no post work except the hair around the hat. James

This site has some tree preset info: http://www.hinchu.com/tuts/trees/ Nice render even without the shadows.