I have Tree Druid too. I've done some neat fun stuff with it, but not very good trees. Treelab in Bryce 5 runs circles around it...and with a lesser polygon count! Spit

I have a lot of Bryce 5 images using trees and bushes and weeds I've made from trees in the treelab. All thumbnailed for your convenience: http://www.thecricketcage.com/new.html Check them out and tell me they're better than Vue LOL Spit

I was just checking out e-on's site again. When you're looking at the VUE 4 features, the page that has '40% increase in speed' (or something like that) info has a thumbnail of their test project and a table of the rendertimes between Vue 2, 3, and 4. What I didn't see was the size of the rendered image. And I'm not sure if the figures are hours/minutes or minutes/seconds but it would be hours/minutes in English but that's a French site. Done on a 900mz Athlon. So (bear with me here) I realize my machine renders at about 1/5th to 1/6th the speed of 900mz Athlon (PPII 450 and I've checked render benchmark times for Bryce). So that image, under Vue 4 would take my machine 25 to 30 hours. I know Bryce very well, and doing a similar scene would not take that long. Of course...it MIGHT mean 25 to 30 minutes!! LOL in which case it would be faster than Bryce because that image would take me about an hour or more in Bryce at 640x480. I bought Vue 2 but it was so slow rendering I stopped using it. So it's good they speeded it up and it may very well be faster than Bryce...depends totally on what those figures are on that page. Sorry for the long post. Spit

I would imagine in a production environment, you have a network. So network rendering to the rescue. I have a slow machine so everything is slow for me, but I manage to do my Bryce renders mostly in under an hour. I even did an 800x600 indoor scene with soft shadows that only took 4 hours. If you are in a situation where time really really counts you use tricks. If it's your own artwork then speed is only a convenience not a necessity. Spit

That reminds me. For Real World Bryce 2 I had to call Peachpit 'cause I had a problem with the CD. They sent me one immediately. Two weeks later I got another. Two weeks later I got another! LOL So keep checking your mail. Spit

Sharen If you had Corel Bryce 4 no problem as I understand. There were problems with some Metacreations Bryce 4 serial numbers. Hey Kaom...congrats on the purchase! Spit

Joke...do you HAVE Bryce 5? Some people have posted that Bryce 5 rendering time on a specific Bryce 4 scene was a bit slower. Not on all scenes. In fact others have posted that Bryce 5 renders most Bryce 4 scenes slightly faster. If you add premium options it does slow the render, or you can reduce the RPP etc and speed it up...at the cost of quality. For soft shadows in Bryce 4 many used light arrays which slowed rendering times to a crawl. It's simply the nature of the beast. Other packages which claim fast speeds at ray-tracing are actually using hybrid renderers and shadow mapping..not true ray tracing...and the quality difference often shows. Spit

It's not native OSX as mentioned. I find it interesting that the big Corel bashers are Mac users. Almost like the PC users who bash Adobe. Different strokes I guess. I can't stand Adobe interfaces on the PC just as Mac folks don't like the Corel ones. It's all in how we're used to using our 'puters and nothing more. For every horror story I've heard about Corel, I've heard one about Adobe so after a while it's all just noise. Spit

Wihtout having Bryce 5 open right now, I'll just say that you should start by setting a low Branch angle so everything is pointing up. Then choose whatever leaf type you want and will look good, and size the leaves to taste. I just shove the trunks underground. It takes playing around and experimenting but that's what Bryce is all about. Spit

Kaom wrote: That's just nonsense. Corel has nothing to do with it. It's the resellers that are scrambling to get your bucks. Spit

Think in Bryce. There are many things you can do with mixing tree types, leaf types. You can get weedlike things and multirep to your heart's content. With the instancing of the leaves, the polygon hit is minimal. I've seen renders with 400 trees. These could be 400 weeds. I myself have done bushes/weeds and filled up areas with them. Flexibilty is why Corel did what they did and the tree lab is very flexible. Spit

Pagzone...network rendering does work on a still. Use the tiling option. And for anyone bemoaning Bryce render times, remember, Bryce is and will always be a pure raytracer. No hybrid renders here. Corel Photopaint is my favorite program after Bryce and just before Poser. I prefer its features, functions, interface, ease of use, over Photoshop by miles. As for Corel's updater to Bryce 4, there were some problems with their initial patch which were fixed within days. Bryce 5 has new features that people have been screaming for for ages now. As well as some interface and usability tweaks that Metacreations never bothered to fix. Basic things like honoring the task bar in Windows which should have been there all along but weren't...now they are. Render progress in the taskbar, save and open dialogs that remember their last used directories even between sessions. No more 20 pixel limit for the brush in the TE. etc. etc. As for usability, this is the best Bryce yet. Of course there's more to do but now we can be quite sure we'll get a Bryce 6. Just a year ago we didn't even know if there ever would be a Bryce 5. Spit

LOLOL Kaom I have the Amapi 4x already. Really like it! Spit

Thanks! Wow...what a picture. Spit

I really think defrag and scandisk are way overrated. My machine is
nice and stable and I defrag about once a year. I think it's a
Bryce 3D spurious keyframe problem. The symptoms are exactly those
exhibited with the original release. The things it did to terrains.
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