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?