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.

Personally I wouldn't buy ANY light set and the ones shown above I wouldn't download for free. I am quite ignorant of the behaviour imputed to Bebop that got him banned. The one thing I do know is that the wonderful textures he has generously made available for free have given me much pleasure. I think the Poser community is the main loser here.

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.

This is all about a LIGHT SET?? Remind me to copyright the arrangement of items on my desk sometime.

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.

Have a look at the collages of Max Ernst. They should answer your question.

I've seen one high price item that was a very attractively presented character, but when you read carefully, for your money you get ONLY the .cr2, no texture, no hair, no props, just the dial-twiddling bit. The seller offered to include "advice" as to which textures and hair to add to your purchase! You can often do better in the free stuff.

I love things like this - thanks.

Even if there's no obvious battle in Bambam131's picture, it's much the best and gets my vote. When will people realise that explosions in space are not like the one depicted in Vile's picture? There is no gravity and no atmosphere to produce the cauliflower effect beloved of Hollywood.

Transparency can be imported into Bryce if it is specified correctly in the .mtl file accompanying the .obj. Poser omits this information when creating .obj files. It's not Bryce's fault!

But, yes, if you want to do scenes with people in, you really should buy a copy of Poser. If you are really too hard up to afford Poser 4, get the free copy of Poser 3 with Computer Arts. Poser 4 is well worth the outlay, though.

Excellent; such things are always welcome.

You can get Poser figures into Bryce 3 but it is SLOW. I used B3 for quite some time, but found B4 a big improvement.

I find it difficult to get Bryce to recognise the material names assigned in Rhino. The only workaround I've discovered is to import the mesh into Poser and then export it again.

I must admit I've not tried to collect much for P4M; and as I don't have Mike, nothing for him. So I can only rely on my subjective impression that more people are releasing Mike stuff than P4M stuff. But I take your word for it. Is there a good site for P4M textures? I never seem to see them.