My copy of Bryce 5 is still "on the truck" as they say, but here's my guess - it'll be about the same as long as you keep the rendering options exactly the same as they were in Bryce 4. Bryce 5 adds in soft shadows, high-detail textures, and other things that will totally slam your render times if not used judiciously. There is a chance that your average render time will go down slightly because of changes made to the render code to accomodate the additional options, but that's hard to say. Bryce is a real ray-tracer and a CPU power hog. IMHO it does a damn good job for what its doing at the price point its at. For reference, I work in a shop were the real artists (me, I write for a living) use Max4 and Maya in a production environment, and believe me, their real raytracing options are slow too. :-) TomD

Generally speaking, 3D acceleration only helps 3D authoring, which is to say the redraw and display properties of the program while you are building the scene. 3D acceleration does not assist in rendering, which is pure CPU horsepower. The Direct X and Open GL modes in Bryce 4 are authoring modes, not rendering modes. Even the highest end 3D cards that you'll pay thousands of dollars for only help in rendering, not authoring. TomD

Yea, in Bryce you can get at each of the sub-object parts of the eye pretty easily, but not so in Carrara. You can make the Eyeball element 100% transparent, but even that does not fix the black eyeball problem. I hit that a few weeks back and wasn't able to resolve it before I had to move on to other things... Tom D

A agree on all accounts. And yea, Clay, how about some tutorials so that the rest of us can pretend we can get that good too... ;-) TD

What's interesting is that the poses (Maxim calendar shot vs nude) are not exactly the same. They're real close, but not the same. Look at - The tilt and pitch of her head. The edge of her hair on the right side and the position of it on her shoulder on the left. The position of her thumb on her right hip. She also shows more thigh length in the nude. Given how much else is the same I'd suspect an early comp of the image. But that's just my studied guess. :-) TD

Warder, that seems to be a problem that you are experiencing (saw your post elsewhere). I spent most of last night importing OBJ files into Bryce and slapping textures on them. :-) Tom D

Well, I suspect some of us are interested. :-) TD

Marigold, if you are using Bryce 4 open the Sky/Fog Lab (open the Sky/Fog Palette and click on the little cute cloud...) Then click on Sun and Moon to bring up those controls. In the lower right hand corner is a numerical control for setting the Azimuth and Altitude of the sun sphere in your shot. Azimuth is where on the horizon (angle) it is and Altidude is how high above the horizon (angle again). You can also use the track ball, but I use the numbers. Easier to control changes (to me at least). You can also control the size of the sun and the apparent size of the solar disk on the horizon on that screen too... Tom D

It took me awhile to figure it out too, but Bryce gets its Bump Map information from the Alpha Channel slot of the Materials Editor. For my own sanity I usually create it as a seperate material and assign that to the Bump channel. Tom D

Yes, setting that outer shell as transparent is the trick in Bryce, you can also play with its specularity and such... Not so easy (yet) in Carrara....will try more tonight. :-) Tom D

Dr. Zik, I've begun experimenting with Poser more seriously lately and just got the RDS--> Carrara Studio upgrade and started playing with that. Earlier today I exported a Vicki II figure with Figure clothing all texture mapped - all the maps came through fine, without trasparency. The immediate odd thing that I found was a similar problem to Bryce imports, which is problems with the eyes. They do not map properly initially in either program, but while I can solve the problem in Bryce I haven't been able to in Carrara. The REye and LEye objects seem to be made of subobjects (eyeball, iris, pupil, eyewhite - as per the Poser Material assignments) and these all automatically get their own shaders when imported. The eye, however, remains opaque no matter what I do... Still working on it, however. Initial test renders, with nothing done except importing and default render setting looked good, if not a little satin. I have not yet started playing with OBJ imports specifically... Tom D

Without seeing an image, I would guess that the transparency map isn't coming across - it has to be manually applied. Take a look at the various Poser --> Bryce tutorials on this site as I'm pretty sure one of them has step by step instructions on what to do. Does that help? Tom D