Can anyone give me a rundown on how to use metaballs, and what kind of effects they can achieve....

Do a search for metaballs on the forum. Lots of examples from a few months ago. Right now I'm working on a human character using metaballs. Metaballs are spheres which when rendered "melt" into each other, the amount is determined by the objects bounding box (i.e. if both balls are outside of each other's bounding box no "melting" occurs). To get negative metaballs (since they can't be booleaned) hold down shift while clicking on the create metaball icon. Grouped metaballs will not interact with other metaballs, only those withing the group will interact. That's about all the basics I can think of.

Hey, metaballs are great with other textures in Bryce with a major but weird exception: the VOLUME textures like puffy clouds (not the clouds & fogs textures). When you apply a Volume texture on a metaball, it produce an unusual weird result unlike other non-Volume textures like it doesn't show the whole volume texture unless you move down to the ground level. If you create 2 or more metaballs and apply a puffy cloud volume texture, you get nothing out of it. Weird, eh?

Yeah, some volume materials work with metaballs and some don't (like clouds). You have to experiment to see which do and don't. Annoying I know, I have no idea why clouds don't work.

Aye, it's because Bryce 5 I believe uses filters to create it's effects, as opposed to actual geometry. This is also true with regular Boolean object groups... I noticed it first when I was working on this Mojoworld contest pic at home. If you take a sphere, hollow it with a negative one, set it to NOT transfer the neg material, and cut the sphere in half... well all of that, with a voumetric texture, the volume texture will render on the OUTSIDE of the sphere, but not on the holow inside. It sucks, but I'm creating a workaround. Maybe I should have posted it separately, sorry if it seems unrelated...

Attached Link: http://www.annsartgallery.com/Tutorals.html

I use a freeware program (pc only) that has all the primitives available for metaball, allows stretching and reshaping, and allows negative effects (seems like true boolean to me) then I convert to polygonal mesh and export for use in Bryce. The freeware version of Metasequoia is the one that exports. The program is undocumented and I did a couple of tuts already. Might do one on metaballs this weekend so keep an eye out.

You understand metasequoia? cool! This is a great idea!! - thanks !!!

Thanks all will check out all the tips.