Thanks for the welcome, Fran. I'm going to think of you all as intrepid Brycenauts, rather than Bryce nuts (though I guess you can be both).

I do indeed have more photos of fungi & will probably post some soon, though I now post all my photography in a separate gallery, under the username photosynthesis (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=708659). I find the many varieties of fungi endlessly fascinating, though I don't know how to identify them at all. Which is ok, since I'm not that fond of them as food anyway & so have no incentive to play the "food or poison" game...

Fran - Don't know about the relative processing powers of your current machine & the one you mentioned, but I do remember reading that Bryce 7 can handle up to 8 cpus, so I would expect you'd get a speed boost...

P.S. - Thanks for your mushroom identifications...

UVDan: When I first started using Bryce, overnight renders were common for me, but I no longer have the patience for that. My approach to any piece of software is to try to figure out what it does well & efficently & to try to adjust my working methods to exploit it's strengths & avoid it's weaknesses. In effect, I view it as a kind of symbotic relationship & almost equal partnership between my creative impulses & the software. I know there are a lot of much more powerful & faster renderers than Bryce out there, but I feel so comfortable with the Bryce interface that I am willing to work within it's limitations (which really aren't that limiting for me personally). And if I get a slight bump up in capability with a new release, that keeps me happy.

Trying to bend a piece of software to your will to get it to do something that it's just not powerful enough to do can lead to great frustration & banging of the head against the wall. When you have a very specific thing you want to do - as you do here obviously - that's probably of little comfort to you. Just wanted to share my approach & will leave off with a nod of sympathetic commiseration - good luck with your render...

Okay, now I'm starting to get very nervous about the Comfy Chair. What are those arm & leg restraints for? And how about that headpiece with the electrodes sticking out of it?

Seriously, though, thanks to all for the warm welcome. I've been using Bryce since the very first version for the pc came out in 1997 (Bryce 2) & have been posting my images on Renderosity since 2003. I do check into the Bryce Forum regularly to see what's going on, though I haven't posted comments very often. I'm guessing that will change now.

Though I love Bryce & am very comfortable with it after all these years, I am by no means an expert & there are entire areas I haven't explored at all (like HDRI, animation, the tree lab, etc.). But I will try to be as helpful as I can about those areas I am familiar with. And I look forward to getting to know all of you a little better & contributing my little share in maintaining this community as a place where creativity & good cheer can thrive... 

Attached Link: Chaotic Order Mandala

Using booleans with metaballs to model  isn't as easy or straightforward as using other booleans only because negative metaballs exert a "gravitational" effect, just as positive metaballs do. So the size of a negative metaball & it's distance from the positive metaball it is subtracting from affect what happens. I don't do realistic modeling, but I think it would be very challenging to do so using metaball booleans (though I'm sure more patient & skillful Brycers than me have done it). But for the kind of abstract & surreal work I do, it works just fine.

The attached link is an example in which I've used booleaned metaballs. Those depressions in which the "eyeballs" are sitting are created by negative metaballs, as are the cutout areas of the egglike shapes right below them through which the tori runs.Here's a real simple way to validate this:

Open Bryce 7. Set the edit mode to Camera Space. Create a metaball. Just to make thing easier to see, make it larger & move it up above the ground plane (or just delete the ground plane). Then duplicate it. Both metaballs are positive at this point, so what you'll get is a larger metaball. Then change the second metaball's attribute to negative. This will make them both disappear, because they exactly cancel each other out. Next, make the negative metaball much smaller - say about a quarter of the size of the positive one. You'll see one metaball again. The negative metaball doesn't seem to have any effect, because it's INSIDE the positive metaball. Now very slowly move the negative metaball towards you, while watching the nano preview. You'll see  it carve out a hollow depression. You can watch how it changes as you move it back & forth. If you change the size of the negative metaball, that will change things as well.

Hope that helps...

Bryster,

You can certainly use negative metaballs to cut away parts of positive metaballs, which is a boolean operation. And while you don't HAVE to group metaballs the way you have to group other objects to get them to boolean, you CAN group them if you want to control multiple sets of  metaballs independently. You can't use the intersect boolean function on metaballs & you can't boolean them with other types of objects, but positive/negative works just fine. This may be what you meant, but I think it's misleading to just say "You can't boolean metaballs"...

Jack - Just found some old BR3 files & tested it & it works for me. When you first open the file, you just see a blank white canvas. Hit ESC & you'll see the wireframe view of your objects or hit the render button & it will render the scene for you...

File, Open & then click on Files of Type & select Bryce3. Haven't actually tried this, but since the option is there, I assume it works...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to do, but you can copy objects (either single, multiple, or grouped) from one scene file to another. You might run into memory issues if you overdo it, but I've done it many times.

The free version is for personal, non-commercial use only.

There is both an artistic element & a social element to Renderosity. For some people, the social element takes precedence. They might comment on & praise a piece because they feel the creator is trying as hard as they can & though they may not have the skill or talent to create professional & polished art, that they should be encouraged. Or they might feel that because someone praised their work, that the sociable thing to do is to reciprocate. Or maybe they're doing it for selfish reasons - because they think their own work will be viewed & commented on more.

Personally, I don't think any of those practices are particularly helpful, but that's just the nature of social interaction here. It's perhaps more common in galleries like Bryce & Poser because they are low cost programs that many amateurs & hobbyists commonly use. Other galleries, like 3D Studio max, Cinema 4D, Zbrush, etc, tend to have a higher proportion of professional users, because they are pricier programs that most amateurs can't afford. You can complain about this kind of thing if you like, but that's just the way it is & I don't think it's likely to change. And there are still plenty of excellent Bryce artists here whose work I continue to admire & enjoy...

I very much appreciate the recognition, especially since I don't post to the photography gallery all that often. Congratulations to all the others whose fine work was selected also...

No autosave in Bryce. I've never done a render anywhere near that long, but if it was me, I would stop it, save the partial render, & then resume it.

Art students & artists have been copying other artists work for centuries. As long as you acknowledge the original source, don't pass it off as your own & don't attempt to financially profit from the work of others, I don't think there's an ethical or legal problem.

Aside from trying to recreate another artist's work as closely as possible, using another artist's work as a springboard for creating variations on a theme is also a well-worn artistic tradition, frequently in the form of homages to artists you admire. In those cases, I think it's perfectly acceptable to sell your work, though always good to acknowledge the source of your inspiration as well...

Just downloaded & installed 7.0.2.35. To my amazement, I found that a  saved file in the previous version of  Bryce 7 Pro that would invariably crash my Bryce session loaded fine in this version. I had given up on it as a lost cause & am thrilled that I can now continue with it. Maybe others here can also salvage work that  they thought was lost...