Well I thought it really hit the spot and had me laughing my head off, it was a top jape. That said I've always worked with a bunch pranksters and this was pretty timid compared to some of the tricks they've done.

General Rule for 3d graphics apps, PC/windoze = fast/lower stability, PC Linux = fastest and stable, Mac = slower but more stable No bryce for linux tho :-((((( (at least until wonderbryce comes along :-) Cost of a 2.5G+ AMD machine is stupidly low at the moment and it'll outperform all G3 and most G4 macs at rendering.

ROFLMAO Great thread, where did you get the venture capital?

I'd go with:- export everything proper mesh modelling metaball->mesh converter choice between 4 pane and single pane views UVW unwrap (proper texture unwrapping LINUX SUPPORT !!!!!!!

Lol as I said I just wanted to see if I could do justice to metaball modelling.

Cool, metaballs are pretty good fun and can create some good effects

Believe it or not, about 7 hours, only an hour to render as it's not got any complex textures. As I said in the notes, I've not used Metaballs before, although I'd used Blobs (basically same thing although you can define strength as well as size) back in my early 3d days of using POVRay.

*** IMPORTANT: Bryce 5.01 will not be able to use older Bryce Lightning clients for network rendering. You must download and install the 5.01 Lightning client to use the Bryce network rendering solution. *** Many many bugs have been fixed and issues addressed in this release. Of particular note, the following issues have been fixed: --Artifacts occasionally appeared on transparent objects when using lights that have soft shadows. --Bitmap sequence output was only rendering one frame of a network rendered animation. NOTE: Images are not assembled until after the animation render has been completed, so you will not see any image files until the animation sequence has finished rendering. --Many bad things that were happening in the Tree Lab. --Metaballs and grouping workflows were leading to crashes. --Camera tracking problems and associated crashes have been addressed. --The clipping bracket in the terrain Editor was acting strange on occasion. --A persistent and annoying row of white pixels at the top of the Terrain Canvas in the Terrain Editor was sometimes produced. --The Light Lab no longer explodes when playing with animation there. --Update and feedback in the Network Render Manager has been substantially improved. --Depth of Field and Panoramic rendering now play well together. --And many more issues... Bryce 5 and Mac OS X: The 10.1 Mac OS X update addressed many issues that impeded Bryce's functionality on that platform. In particular, the following issues have "gone away": --Rendering an animation to a network location was not possible. --The PICT selection available in the Save Image As... dialog box may have led to a crash Bryce when the Low Quality JPEG Compression option was used. --When rendering an animation as a PICT sequence, files may have been produced that were unreadable by a Windows platform application. :-)) I especially liked the bit about tree lab!

But who would want to use Corel Linux anyway, it's not one of the top distro's.

Just finished a scene with 2500+ metaballs in it , that got hard to work with, they're all part of the same creature so no final grouping but lots of group, adjust ungroup going on. Horrid to work with (mainly due to machine limitations -600M pIII with 256M Ram) I prolly could have used less - but it's my first serious use of metaballs in Bryce so lack of experience. The image is for a competition so I can't post it for a week or two until the compo is over.

Why not buy a back issue of a magazine with poser 3 (full version) on it, there was a spate of it being the featured freeby towards the end of last year. (for Example Computer Arts/ PC Format / PC Pro - I'm thinking UK here but there must be equivalents if you're not UK based.

It's a shame you can't specify the strength of metaballs (you can with blobs in povray and povray is free!!)

Problem is after the FBI recently having the wrong guy seized and imprisoned while he was on holiday and then kept in jail for weeks, it brings into light questions about their working methods and reliability. That errors may be made is acceptable, to keep the wrong 70 year old in an african prison for several weeks, when the mistake was absolutely obvious is not!

Nvidia Quadro 2 GTS OOohhh I'd like a Quadro FX 2000.....

Have an old version of view and never used it a great deal. Future enhancements for Bryce, what about a decent edit mesh facility :-)