I have had no problems with Bryce 4.1 in Win2000 sp1. In fact, it seems to be significantly more stable than in WinNTsp6.

Look in the "tutorials" link on the sidebar of this page. Search hard enough, and a tutorial for importing poser figures and textures is there. --flick

Nope: No can do. I'd love to have a refractive volume textures, but again... no can do. (would be great to create heat ripples, eh?) Bryce categorizes reflection, refraction, and transparency as surface characteristics only. It would be really nice if we could get surface characteristics on hard-shaded volume materials too, wouldn't it?

well, the current version of Bryce works fine on a multiprocessor, it just doesn't take advantage of it. And unless they completely re-wrote bryce 4.1 to be fully multithreaded (which I'm highly doubting), then the performance improvement should only be marginal. The big gain you'll see is using Bryce and some other program at the same time. Hopefully, the next version of Bryce will be niftier and will try to render multiple passes all-at-once with the multiple processors. I don't think that capability is in the 4.1.1 release, because that would be a major re-write.

1337 comes from l33t (that's an 'L'), which means "elite" in gamer-geek-speak. QNA is question-and-answer. So, it reads... "Fear my elite question-and-answer skills!" I've got a friend who's a hard-core gamer geek: he kept sending me these indecipherable e-mails and instant messages, so I made him explain what they all meant. You can keep trying, but you'll likely never be as goofy as me!!!!! Now if I could only master Cockney Rhyming Slang I could throw you all for alleyoops.

mwahahaha.... ph33r my 1337 QNA sk!llZ lol ...just a little bit of gamer-geek-speak to brighten your afternoon. And if you can translate that, then you're as goofy as me! --flick

If you can get a back issue of 3D Zine magazine, one of them has a complete version (not a demo) of Bryce 3D (which is very similar to bryce 4) on the magazine CD, for free.

go to File/Render to Disk, and you'll find all the tidbits you need.

There is nothing new. Supposedly the app is a demo: save/export is disabled, and the feature set is the same as Bryce 4.1, although some things are broken. The only new thing is that it is 'carbonized' to work on OS X natively, instead of through the Mac OS 9 Classic environment. Supposedly, it doesn't even run on OS 9.

I don't think it will produce a quicker re-draw, but it will produce a quicker load when you open a large file.

true. But I'm not sure... if you used boolean operations on the primitives, will the results of the operations be exported? Or would the importing program have to re-booleanize the objects? I've never played with Caligula's mesh primitives.

yup, that's the only way to do it. Note that what you'll get is a 2-D texture map 'skin' that you can wrap an object... there is no way to transfer Bryce's 3D texture mapping stuff into another program. It is for this reason that many people choose to do their modelling in 3DSmax and import the models into Bryce for texturing and rendering.

you can significantly decrease load time by UN-checking "auto-key" in the animation palette menu. Then you need to delete all the keyframes -- hit the minus sign next to the key picture. This is, of course, assuming that you're working on a still image and not an animation. The auto-key option is turned on by default: whenever you create an object, it allocates a big swath of space to track the changes that the object might make in the future. Since you're not doing an animation, this is just useless garbage. The behavior of the auto-key function is wacky... turn it off (and delete the keyframe it's already created at time 0:00). Turning off auto-keying can save over 50% of the time it takes to load up the image: in some case 90%. Your file size will shrink, too. Another technique for editing quickly is to work in Solo mode. Select only the stuff you're interested in, and then hit solo mode: your re-draws will be much quicker, and you won't be distracted by the rest of the stuff on screen.

you can export terrains (fully-shaded) and imported meshes ONLY. You cannot export cubes, spheres, other primitives, rocks, or any booleanized object. To export a terrain, create your terrain, go to the Terrain Editor room, and RTFM. To export a mesh which was previously imported (exactly why you'd want to do this, I'm not sure), Edit the mesh, and then in that dialog box, hit control-D, and you'll be presented with a save as... box. (this is a hidden item that isn't in the manual). You can save a Bryce object as a 'preset', in Bryce-proprietary .obp format. To do this, select your object, click the little triangle next to the "create" palette tab, let the image render, and hit "add". RTFM for details. These presets, however, can NOT be imported by other programs, because .obp is a custom format.

Bryce is more full-featured and user-friendly. And the texture & terrain engines are simply the best around. It does not, however, do greenery very well. Many people have come up with ways to 'fake it' to get trees, bushes, grass, etc. but it IS more work. Vue handles greenery better... it even includes some built-in tools for handling that stuff. Renders are faster, but IMHO of lower quality, although I think it does support soft shadows (wish Bryce would do that!). Also, the user interface is a bit obscure, and the textures/materials are ho-hum. Vue is earlier on in the product development than Bryce... if they continue to develop it well, it could become much better.