If you want a converter for just the geometry (no textures/uvmaps) on the Mac you might be able to work with 3dmf and many other formats with Amapi 3D v6.1 which is available as a free download somehere at evia3d.net aka polyloop.com  or look for links in http://www.thebest3d.com/amapi

A friend of mine is quite an expert for Flightsim and Trainsim conversions. He's created many tools for image conversion and manipulation/viewing/printing of extended bitmap formats used in Flightsim and also Trainsim. He's also created plugin for Project Dogwaffle to load those formats into PD directly.

I don't know if he also does 3D stuff for Flightsim/Trainsim, but you might want to contact him about it, his name is Martin Wright (another Wright brother :-)   I forgot his website details but you can probably find it through the links to his plugins at www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/3rdpartyplugins - look for Martin Wright's Flightsim plugin, or for MultiPrint

Another thing you might want to do is check if Milkshape3D has it, or ask the mstrainsim forum at Yahoogroups.com

good point. If you plan on putting together a system from scratch, don't stick with the old-days 300W power supplies, go with a 500W or close enough. Especially if you plan on loading a lot more than basic stuff in there, such as a second graphic cards, memory on all slots and two or more disk drives.

yeah, felt like dricing a new car from the dealer lot.

This one is a Toshiba, I love it, by-the-way.  Got it at BestBuy.

Are you thinking of getting just the computer box, a desktop?  or a laptop?

If you get something like a core 2 duo, or AMD Turion X2 or similar, whatever it is, strive for a system with fastest possible RAM, i.e. 667 MHz DDR2.  And start with at least 1 GB, preferably 2. You can surely reuse your disks or get a smaller one like 40 to 80 GB, no need to get a 250 GB right away if money is tight. Speed is what matters, and dissks are not where speed is at. Get something with 2000 MB/s bus bandwidth or close to that, DDR2 at 533 MHz at least, preferably 667 or more (when available), and a decent PCIE (PCI express) card. Unless you're re-using existing parts there?

If you buy at BestBuy, get the refrent buyer card so you can get you credit for that purchase towards whatever you buy there later within a year. On a $1000 purchase you might get something like $50 credit if I recall.

whether you have a single core or multiple cores, you can multi-thread. The thing is, it runs faster when multiple threads have their own processor or core to run on.

Project Dogwaffle 4 now has a new framework for multithreading, and detects how many logical cores there are on the system. Some filters then already use that to run in that many threads, and split the work over the two or more cores. If you have a Pentium 4 with HT, same thing.

In some cases we've seen a filter take almost half the time whgen running on dual core systems. On small images it's not important but if you have an animation and throw the filter  over each frame or if you have print res images at 6000x4000 pixels or alike, it's nice to see a filter go down from 10 secs to 5.5, and on a quad it is expected to go down to 2.5 to 3. Oct-processors will be even faster.

Yeah, if it's in your budget,. wait a month. ut you'll pay a premum for the new stuff. I have a Centrino duo laptop that 3 mkonths ago I paid $1150 for (with 1.5 GB DDR2 ram). Nowadays I see similar laptops for $900 or so, perhaps even less.

wow that's pretty elaborate for a metaball obejct.

it doesn't appear to me that these are really good comparisons, regardless of which one might prefer. The texture sizes are different on the ground, and there appears to be a front light source showing specular reflection on the Carrara scene, or am I wrong?

Both renderings are decent in their own way, it shows that Carrara is a good renderer, and as you noted a very fast one too, and it also  shows that Bryce is not a bad alternative either, when it comes to rendering with global illumination from a HDRI. But there is sooooo much more to it before doing a comparison of C vs B.

you might want to have the same spaceship rendered standing on a plain grey (50%)  or white ground, no texture on the ground, and making sure there's no lights in the scene, and no ambient component in the rendering or scene, and leave it all only to the GI lighting, with  and another without indirect lighting.  Try one at lowest/fastest parameter settings, and another at highest levels (for nuymber of rays, depth of rays reflections, anti-aliasing and shadow quality etc...

Quote - Now I haven't read any of the documentation, including the new features list, but.....

Agents Smiths marbles picture seems to have caustics.    Can this be true, or does it just look like caustics and it's actually just refraction?

how could it be refraction? what is 'just refraction'? the spherical distortion you see through the glass marbles, yes, that's refraction, but the brightening spot nearby under those same spheres, I don't think that's possible other than through some form of caustics, faked or precise, or through some post work (easy enough in a case like this to lighten up an elliptical shape).

Quote - Came accross this link for Bryce 5 training on CD. Seems to be a little expensive seeing that its more than what the software itself costs, but it may interest some.

good find, but I'm not sure I follow the reasoning regarding the 'pricey' thing. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean the training for it should be cheaper. Free software doesn't get much free training. Linux training is something that corporations pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for. But of course there's also lots of free training on that. So yeah....

$99 is pretty much the price of most titles at VTC. See www.vtc.com  by-the-way and you can search for other Bryce tutorials, including on Bryce 3/4.

Oh, and you can have it much cheaper: instead of buying the CD (or DVD), subscribe to their service on a monthly basis. After 3 months when you're done you might cancel. Even after a month. You'll have spent about $25. And you have access to all training they offer,not just Bryce. For a quick learning it's the way to go. I suppose you could even spend some time viewing all chapters of the training that interests you, playing them all into the browser's cache for later reviewing. Not sure if that works, but worth a try if you're very tight on the money.

I have been recommending VTC for a while also for Poser and Carrara training:
http://www.thebest3d.com/carrara/vtcCarrara.html

Beautiful cat!, sorry to hear about your loss. I had a great cat who ran out of his 9 lives after 17 human years.  He's at www.staigerland.com - I used to plyfully wrestle him and he'd bite me hard, clinging on to my arm.... I still have a scarr on my right upper arm.

Your cat's face reminds me a lot of my first cat.

Right now I'm looking at that young female finicky and very smart long hair tabby, she's sleepy, and looking at me like "what the HELL are you talkin about?!"

very good example - I was hoping to see examples like this when I first popped the question, why export from Bryce. I do like the multi-tool philosophy, meaning that you want to have an arsenal of various tools, each fit for their perfect job. There is somuch more to a terrain modeler than making terrains.

Quote - staigermanus - i know it'll be OT, but let us all know how your experiences with the new Mac Pro tower goes; your thoughts, likes/dislikes, etc. O.K.?

you bet, I will. And for those who haven't seen it, PD Particles is at www.thebest3d.com/pdp and I have some Bryce related tutorials there too.

I did run an earlier version of Project Dogwaffle on a Mac a while ago with Virtual PC, but that was a G3 ibook or something alike, essentially way too slow, in terms of clockspeed and FSB, and the ram speed. It's probably still not the best solution to run Virtual PC on such machines nowaways, but on high end systems, desktops with top memory speeds and bandwidth, I'd expect it to work at least usably fast.

I have heard that Parallels is much better for performance, and that it's been called 'what Virtual PC was meant to be '

Then again, in the last few years there have been tremendous speed improvements with CPUs, memory, front system bus bandwidth etc... so that's also a big factor. Anyone coming out with a new solution now has the benefit of better systems overall.

Quote - Don't everybody gang up on me but... I'm using a Macintosh with a head xploding 368mb RAM running at the blistering speed of 450mHz. Virtual memory is set to max at 990MB and running Bryce after a fresh bootup. I suspect that the export feature has been disabled. This was, after all, the free version that DAZ was giving away. staigermanus - "I want the Core 2 Duo now and I want an Nvidia chip on it or Ati, something with real opengl T&L." The new desktop Mac Pros have: TWO duel-core Intel Xeon 5100 processors (the Xeon speaks to the rest of the Mac Pro through dual independant buses that run at 1.3GHz each, with the capability of transfering data at a peak rate of 21GB per second). That's just insane! 1 GB RAM standard (16 max) either a nVidia GeForce 7300GT 256MB -or- ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB OpenGL is built into the operating system (OpenGL drives the MaxOS X display). ports: 2-independant 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet 5-USB 2.0 (2 on front, 3 on back) 4-Firewire (2 on front, 2 on back) these USB and Firewire ports do NOT share bandwidth, they each have their own dedicated controllers. and all the analog and optical audio input and output ports you could expect on a top-end Mac, including a headphone jack. And with Apple's software "Boot Camp", you can boot into Windows and run your PC software. So what are you waiting for?!?!? If I had the money...sigh : (

yeah, the problem is just that, too expensive.

I'm scheduled to do some test runs on a DualCore MacIntel shortly, not in bootcamp reboot mode, but with virtualization software such as crossover or in this case Parallels (www.parallels.com) which should let me run something like win98 or winXP in its own window while MacOS is running. Also Linux and Dos are possible. Essentially once it's an Intel or similar, various OS'es can co-exist. Sweet. Parallels costs $79, plus add the windows CD but if you've got it already you're all set. I want to find out how well Project Dogwaffle's PD Particles and PD Artist or PD Pro will run under Parallels. Evidently it's great under bootcamp reboot, but many may not want to reboot. It's better if you can run both at the same time, like in VirtualPC, and pass images created in Windows over to the Mac desktop and send it into Photoshop or Brycve or whatever on the MacOS side.

Quote - staigermanus - Wow! You've a beast of a machine! I'm envious.  My poor little box has a 2ghz Celeron with 256m of ram, not much virtual either and Windows XP. I uses B5.5 and/or B5 and both work fine to export from either the file menu or the terrain editor.

and it was brand new 2 months ago and like a car depreciates really quickly. It's fast and good alright but I want the Core 2 Duo now and I want an Nvidia chip on it or Ati, something with real opengl T&L. Intel 945 doesn't do that. I heard they're coming out with their own T&L capable opengl chip though.
BestBuy was selling this 'beast' about $1100, now I see better ones below $1000 even as low as $900. The 1.5 GB DDR2 memory is what's significant in price. It added $150 over the 512 MB config.

many systems are offered with 1 GB these days, I still prefer 1.5 or more. And don't keep your Virtual memory at the WIndows recommended level: set it to the Max, in case you ever need it. 4 GB on WInbdows XP I think is the max. 64-bit should be higher.

Quote - staigermanus - Exporting the terrain from within the terrain editor does not work either (see pic). The dialog box says, "An unexpected error has occurred (failed creation)." Mahray - Nothing else is selected, other than the terrain itself.

ok, then that's just something broken on your system, not in Bryce itself. Since it works ok for many others.

You might want to check if you have enough memory, I mean not just Ram, but also virtual memory.  Sometimes after running so man y other things there's so much memory allocated to Ram and in virtual memory that the virtual side saturates and can't accept more. Programs will fail or misbehave when that happens, often with crypting or weird messages, unexpected condition etc.. because developers ususally assume there's enough memory to keep going.

What's your system specs?

I'm using Bryce 5.0. I also installed 5.5 but it fails on missing an entry point in a library. Not sure yet why, or if it's a bad OpenGL driver on my Intel chip's side. I have WIndows XP and 1.5 GB Ram and 4 GB virtual memory, Core Duo Centrino. Some opengl things are iffy and I can usually work around it for other applications, by reducing the level of acceeration in the driver (Desktop Properties/Settings/Advanced....) but not in this case. I may need to re-install 5.5