After using Bryce for almost a year or so, I switched to Vue, and I'll never be sorry I did. This last weekend I made a model in a modeling program, exported it for testing in Bryce, Vue and Poser and Vue was the only one that smoothed it correctly without tweaking. Also going back to Bryce seemed to make it even more slow and bulky than before.

The renderer is just so much crisper and faster, the plants more realistic, the effects are great, and the lighting renders faster so that it's possible to actually use multiple lighting setups without bogging down the preview.

Like any program, Vue has it's idiosyncracies and I am still learning many of the things that I need to know, so some may be my fault, so I won't list them here. The only one that really bugs me is the anti-aliasing thing, where broadcast mode seems to be the only mode that actually does anti-aliasing correctly. For instance, Traveler's balloon has ropes on it from the basket to the balloon. When I render those ropes in any other mode than broadcast, I get dotted lines instead of solid ropes. Broadcast though does significantly raise the render time and seems to crash in the anti-aliasing on large renders (3200x2400x300DPI). However, I've found a workaround for it (1600x1200x300DPI and then resample at 3200x2400x150 for print sizes), and in all fairness to E-On, I can't use this computer strictly for rendering, so it's possible that background tasks in long renders have to do with the problems I'm experiencing there.

Vue just makes life so much easier, it imports Poser 4 stuff great, it imports LWO files. Once you get used to the interface, it seems much better layed out. I never realized how bulky Bryce seemed until going back to it this weekend from an interface POV.

Anyway, I highly recommend Vue over Bryce...I just wish I'd known what Vue was when I got the Bryce 5 upgrade, or I never would have upgraded...Oh well...