I am interested in your opinions about whether Bryce or Vue d'Esprit is better for importing Poser objects and creating the landscape context. What are the main differences between the two programs from your experience and what is the learning curve like? - Thanks for your input.

Fact: Vue imports Poser files directly; Bryce doesn't. Opinion: Vue is easier to learn and use by a factor of about ten. (I've used both programs.)

I have both and I use Vue more than Bryce. Just like the interface, ease of use, low leaning curve, renders faster, looks cooler. Oh, and the Poser import is a biggie. I bought the program that creates the scripts to import animations from Poser to Bryce and wasn't real impressed with it. Marque

I am learning Vue, but haven't tried Bryce. Vue is also good for rendering inside scenes as well as landscapes. It also comes with furniture models in it's model library. I don't know about Bryce, but Vue has point lighting as well, which is good for creating indoor light sources like lamps, etc. Bryce does metaballs now, which Vue doesn't do. Vue doesn't offer much in the way of modeling tools, but neither does Bryce. It does have primatives and booleans. I like the way my Poser figures import into Vue. One thing to consider, your video card. There are some issues with GE Force cards with open gl--you can work around this, but I found it to be annoying. If you don't have a GE Force card, no problem!

I have the geforce cards and as yet haven't had any problems with either program. Just make sure all your drivers are up to date. Marque

Reports suggest that Bryce is more stable than Vue; I haven't enough experience with Vue to comment. I would say that Vue is probably better for landscape scenes, but Bryce is better for interiors. With Bryce it is easier to get fine control over placing and details. For example, constructing a room out of box primitives is much easier. Also, once you have got used to the Bryce interface, and learnt the tricks of the trade, you can work more efficiently than you can with Vue. The Poser import is a plus for Vue, BUT it does mean you must do all or most of your texturing in Poser. Once you get the hang of Bryce's materials editor you can do lots of nice things which you can't do in Poser and can't do so easily in Vue. Note: Poser to Bryce is much easier when you use the Grouper pre-processing program (see previous threads on the topic). The programs have different strengths, and it really depends on what sort of pictures you want to do most.

I use Bryce extensively and I love it, but I've never used Vue. In perusing the Vue gallery here (which I recommend if you want to see what can be done with it) I'm pretty impressed. I didn't know until reading this thread that you could import poser scenes directly into Vue and now I'm considering giving it a try (is it available for Macs?). I started with Bryce 1 back in the old days, so learning each upgrade was fairly easy, but there is a lot of complicated stuff about it. The above comments seem to lean in favor of Vue for ease of use, but I'd say go completely through each gallery looking for Poser content. By looking at all of it, you get a good cross section because there are some very talented artist in each gallery. I saw a few images done with vue and thought they looked like crap. Then I saw a few more that floored me. All depends on the talent of the artist. Seems like they both have their strong points and their weak points (importing poser into Bryce can be tedious. Anybody know what the price difference is? Bryce is $299 full or $149 upgrade. If you want to see interior work, this link is to my gallery, there are only a few images there, but with two exceptions, they were all rendered in Bryce.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Hiram

I think Vue goes for $199 full; $99 upgrade. Not sure, tho. I must say that, prior to getting Vue, I was a Bryce user and loved it. But I was frusterated about many things...too many to list here. When I learned the new version of Bryce (ver 5) wasn't going to support Poser, I switched to Vue. All the frusterations I had with Bryce were gone. Within a week I was able to do things in Vue that I could never do in Bryce. I haven't loaded Bryce since.

I'm saving my pennies. I think I'll always like Bryce (I'm using 5) but I'm always open to trying something that might be better. Mmmmmmm... Lightwave... drool.

Hiram, Vue has just become available for Mac. If you buy it from Daz3d you can get a $20.00 voucher good towards any non-brokered item on their site. Vue does render Poser figures well. It is a good program, it's ability to work well with Poser is why I bought it in the first place. I've been a little frustrated with the Vue manual, but there are tutorials here and out there to help with the learning curve. In regards to the video card issue, I am glad that someone with a GE Force card has had better luck than me. I have a GE Force 2, maybe the 3s are better. At any rate I have updated my drivers, but had to remove a dll (as specified by the Vue FAQ's for view to display 3D properly on my computer. This forces a Windows open GL driver to be used instead, I understand that this could affect some games that use open GL, but I haven't had any problems. Of course the proof is in the renderings. Go to www.e-onsoftware.com to see some excellent examples of Vue 4.0 work.

I have used both and Vue is my favorite so far, essentially for the direct import from Poser, the materials editor and the multiple views interface. About the video issue, I finally found a winning combination with GeForce cards : windows 2000, latest drivers from NVidia and Vue with patch 4.03. Since I got this combination, OpenGL works fine with Vue.

I went to e-on and looked through the gallery. There's an indefinable something about the ambient light quality in almost all Vue images that I don't like. I don't know if it's a user problem or not (I've seen the same efect in Bryce from less experienced users). It seems like what happend in Bryce when you have the ambience settings on all your materials too high. Dunno, just an observation.

Before I bought Vue (I bought 3.1 without Poser Import) I tried both Bryce and Vue as Test Versions. I liked the Vue Interface much better, with 4 Viewports and without the big Controls in Bryce. The renderer is faster and I found the material editor easier to manage. So I bought Vue and was not disappointed. The new version has some additional advantages. I would never change to Bryce.

I bought Bryce. Bryce is hard to learn, renders ridiculously slow and produces strange flat looking landscapes and flat looking skies. Also very hard to import Poser into it. Was very disappointed about the tree lab too. Vue is doing most of its stuff volumetric avoiding flatness of sky and landscape. Just having a look at demonstrations of Vue proves that Vue does not have this drawbacks. Had the chance too witness it work, was very much impressed and now I am saving money to buy it. In short: choose vue ! (Vue sales people reading this, still need some bucks, please help a poor but sincere non-warez artist ...)

I have used Bryce since version 2 and recently switched to Vue. I couldn't take the interface anymore. It's very pretty but at the cost of practicality. I like the interface of Vue and the scene management, selecting your objects is a breeze compared to Bryce. I have the same complaint about the interface in Poser, I only use the dials. Give me precise numerical input any day over these cute little icons! That is why I like Lightwave so much, ugly interface but very practical since you can customize your interface and your keyboard shortcuts.

I have and like Bryce4. (I do like the gooey interface for landscapes, but prefer numerical constraints for ANYTHING which must be precise.) Since I've been a MetaCreations suite user since their early days (about 3 names ago), there wasn't much of a learning curve between these programs. I was tempted to go to 5 for the new features, but will wait. I bought Vue4 at MacWorld simply because it does import Poser people directly (the show special was about $150). It also gives us variation in skies (as does Terragen... otherwise, even with tweaking the scenes start looking the same, and people shouldn't be able to name your software by looking at an image). It only works with Mac OSX, and I've ordered that (time to upgrade since PhotoShop is now compliant, too), so haven't played with Vue yet. However, they sent me a disk last week with a patch and an apology... they were really rushing to make the show. It looks like there will be good product support. (The patch is downloadable, but sending the disk is nice.) I'll echo the comments above: go through the galleries and stop when you see an image which compares favorably with what you want to accomplish and see what software they used. Also, there are lots of Bryce freebies and community support... I haven't checked yet to see what the Vue user group is like, but that may be another consideration for you. We all learn from each other. Carolly

Vue and Bryce seem to use different approaches to the behaviour of textures with respect to light. Bryce has diffuse and ambient settings, Vue has diffuse, ambient and luminescent. Luminescent seems to be what is ambient in Bryce. If you import your Poser model all textures are set to 60% diffuse and 40% ambient and changing these settings is either extremely tedious or I never found the quick way to do it. Note: the Vue 4 demo has no bitmap texture bump mapping, but I'm told this is present in the full version.

Phantast: Poser textures always look fine to me upon import. However, if you want to change their settings, there is an easy way. Press F6 and a scrollable box will appear containing all the textures in the scene. You will see that many of the parts have the same texture but are listed separately. You can change one or change them all if you like. Just edit one and paste that change into the others. Takes about a minute. It's certainly much easier than what you have to go through in Bryce.

A typical Poser import, after running through Grouper, comes in with about six meshes (depending on the number of clothes). After editing the textures for the first appearance of the figure, for subsequent imports six times Ctrl-Alt-C and Ctrl-Alt-V will completely re-texture the new model. From my limited experience of Vue I agree that the initial texture settings look OK, but that 60-40 would not look good in Bryce. The two programs evidently have different ideas what ambience means. But I like the things you can do with Bryce texturing that you can't do in Poser, so really I prefer to do the texturing in Bryce.

I have never had any trouble importing things into Bryce. Do it all the time in about 5 minutes tops. Never been a huge fan of Vue renders either .. They also have some trouble with a lot of transparancies. Haven't liked what I have seen from the Vue interface but I haven't tried it yet since it jsut came to OSX.