Bryce 8 Pro Studio is nearing completion but she's a totally different beast to the Bryce you currently use.  A massive amount has been rewritten in order to bring everything up to date and to make future updates even quicker.  Can't tell you too much, but I can tell you about certain aspects of it, how she behaves and how she looks now (gorgeous springs to mind).

Visually, the off-white coloured Bryce you know, has gone for good.  She's now running full-screen and has a dark leather texture that is deep burgundy-red coloured (like a fine wine).  The trackball and all the navigation controls around it have been replaced by a large brushed-aluminium disc with precision-cut grooves in it that acts as both a navigation and a trackball tool depending on where you touch it.  It's even nicer to use than the original, seriously.

So we have a deep-red/burgundy leather interface with brushed metal buttons, but what I haven't told you yet is that the metal is tinted gold, she looks really sexy and luxurious now (imagine what gold on burgundy looks like and you'll get the idea).

The Nano preview that occupied the top left of the screen has been removed completely.  The reason is that it's no longer required as Bryce now uses a GPU accelerated renderer directly in the viewport.  And yes, that means there's no longer a render button either because the render is automatic and almost instant (like using Octane but four times quicker thanks to open CL).  There's no need to worry about Video Ram either because she doesn't use the Video RAM of the card at all.

Sadly, due to some weird technical thing, she can still only access a limited amount of system RAM for your scenes, but as the limit is now 10TB (Ten Terrabyte), that ought to keep the Brycers happy for the next twenty years.

The large navigator and a brand new timeline are visible in every Room, it never changes.  Doesn't matter whether you're in the Main Room or the Material Room, the navigator and timeline are always there ready to animate absolutely every control there's a button for in Bryce (and more besides).

Genesis is supported, and this brings us to Bryce's new Animation Room where you are able to design walks, and do mix and match blending of any figure movement you can imagine.  My personal favourite is the new Animation Matrix feature that lets you instantly route one thing to another.  For example, you can load an audio file in WAV format and have the beat control any animation parameter you want.

I've been having a great time attaching the beat of a Trance track (the source) to the Y-Scaling of a Cube (the destination).  You adjust the sensitivity control and you have a cube that dances to the beat because the Y-Scale changes with the beat.  That's just an example of what you can do, but really the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.  You have 10 Source-Destination slots to fill with any sources or destinations you wish so you can automate up to ten in a Matrix at once, you can even set multiple sources to a single destination if you want.

Speaking of cubes, Bryce also has a much more capable Primitives system.  You can do what you always could do in Bryce modeling, but now, every primitive that has a streight edge (Cubes, Pyramids etc), all have a brand new "Rounding" option that allows you to select the edges and Bryce will round the edges for you, you can even adjust the amount of divisions in the rounding.  Other Primitive features include deformers.  You can now Bend, Shear, Taper and Twist primitives, and because they're Bryce Primitives, they always look smooth no matter how far you push the deformations.  There's also some interesting new "Snapping" options in the viewport for working with Primitives.

When you add together the rounding , deformers, and the snapping I'm sure you'll get the idea of how capable Bryce is for putting models together.  I'm really pleased to see these features because people put epic effort into modeling in Bryce, like it's a cult.

The price, as you would expect after such a large and lengthy amount of development, is set at around $250 (it could change), but seriously, read back what you're getting and you just know you'll never look at another 3D program for another 20 years.  She's worth every penny.  The stability is incredible, didn't even get crashes in the Alpha nevermind the Beta, everything just works, she's lightning fast as well.

So yes, Bryce is back and she will steal your heart.
Then of course I woke up and realised it was all a bloody dream!