That's simply brutal... 

If one version of Maya had such a bug, the entire userbase would boycott it outright.  Wait, Maya 2010 was identical to Maya 2009!  We DID boycott it outright!  (well, everyone who wasn't on subscription, anyway...)

Sounds to me like not only has the Bryce development team dwindled, they aren't even testing their updates anymore.

Indeed, Bryce hasn't had a decent beta test system since it's dawn, as far as I know.

The tech is so far behind now, Bryce 7 would have to be almost a completely different application to keep up with Vue and Terragen.

**"The special things, Vue allows me to do, plus handling billions of polygons - i'm not sure, if it's that easy, to keep everything perfect clean in the memory organization. It must be pretty complicated, to write the code for the program, to do all that and the same time write routines, which suppose to decide, what's still needed or not. What should be kept in storage or not. Which parts of the scene, erased or not, are still related to each other.
And all that with endless possible given situations or scenery setups ...

That you will have your memory filled with certain things after a while working and changing many different or a few heavy impact details, is logical. And if i notice, that resources get lower, well, the cleanest way really is to save the scene (then only the scene related data will be saved) and restart (taking just seconds), to get the most resources back and use only what's needed.

And - i'm not sure, if they ever will be able to work out a perfect resources routine, which can decide by itself, what to keep or not to keep in memory ...
(Just let C4D, 3DSMax or whatever the big 3D packages are called, create and handle procedural terrains and special texturing and immense plant use - and keep their memory handling clean. Since they don't use special stuff like ecosystem and whatever Vue is specialized in, than those application for sure have an easier job, to handle their resources ... and make them look good, in whatever they can do ...)."**

I have to disagree entirely.  Vue doesn't do anything "special".  It's math; it's instancing.  All of the major 3D packages have instancing, and none of them handle it as poorly as Vue does.  The high-end packages all handle memory better, especially at rendertime.  They can all handle far more vegetation than Vue.  And without bogging down or crashing.  AND, on top of that, while actually giving you the geometry you're working with instead of dodgy, nebulous wireframes that barely give you an idea where each plant is going to go.  You can even select ANY single vertex on ANY single leaf, or change the material of one leaf or all or just a few...  And proxies!  Vue doesn't even touch upon proxies, binary or otherwise.  And you don't have to restart them to get them back under control; you have full control of your memory allocation every step of the way, especially in Maya and Max.

Ecosystems aren't special at all; Maya for example has no problem painting massive plant systems on all kinds of geometry.   And also no problem handling huge datasets, billions of polys,  fractal procedural terrains or ANY kind of object, and ridiculously complex displacements.  And mental ray renders far, far faster and better than Vue's renderer, with full-on GI/FG, physcially accurate materials and caustics, and all kinds of other features.  I'm actually surprised E-on hasn't purchased MR as an optional renderer for Vue.

Simple example scene I've been working on (Maya viewport):

This scene isn't finished obviously, but a good example of vegetation-painting and instancing.

And if you want to see how realistic such scenes can get, check this thread at CGTalk:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=132&t=754315&page=1&pp=15

Example render (NOT mine, by the way!):

I'm not stating all this to say that Vue isn't a useful tool.  Vue is awesome and has MANY great features, especially when it comes to parametrics!  The skies are amazing; it takes much, much more work to make such skies with other packages.  It's much easier to start up and far easier to learn, of course.  But when comparing Vue to the major 3D packages, I just believe that you are inexperienced or uneducated on their capabilities.  There is nothing Max or Maya can't do that Vue can; there are millions of things that they CAN do that Vue can't.

Please take this post with a grain of salt... Just clearing up misconceptions; I love Vue too!

"I'll say 7 will be heaven:-P Well a nice pat on the butt maybe, but hold your shorts itsa comin!"

Been saying that since version 3...  And Bryce 7 has been "coming" for years!  I still feel like Bryce 5 was the most solid of all their releases.

Well I was mostly joking about waiting for later versions...  Waiting for Vue to "figure it out".  Maya does most of what I need to do, and it's not for lack of hardware that Vue chokes up on imported geometry...

Great program, just too buggy for production use.

No problems passing 6GB here in Vue 7.2.  Simply try importing a Mudbox .obj sculpt and adding some Vue displacement...  Or any high poly object, for that matter.

Vue doesn't handle imported geo very well at all.  But I suppose most of their customers don't use high-poly geometry, either.  It'd be nice, though!  I have some rather decent scenes waiting for Vue 8 or 9 to catch up before I can actually work on them or render them...

You can easily disable Vue from using all your cores with TaskMan (Ctrl-Shift-Esc), but Vue is by default set to low priority mode.  Right-click Vue's process and select "Affinity", and it will show you checkboxes for each core.

If you have 8 cores, simply uncheck a core, and you should be able to watch movies, burn whatever, and do anything else you want!  That said, the i7 isn't the most efficient of CPU's, but at least it's fast.

All except, "Do you believe that Oblivion is that small?"
(smirks)

Indeed, Realtime engines are merely modified scanliners.  Bryce, for example, has no scanline optimization but raytraces everything, which is why it's the slowest renderer on the planet.  Vue has many optimizations for it's raytracing but I'm not certain if it can be turned off entirely...

"*Trying to compare mental ray to Vues renderer is an unfair comparison."

Then your comparison to another unnamed renderer is fair?  I'm not sure where the logic is in that one...

"I am rendering out 400 frames at high quality in another 3D application in about 1.5 hrs."

*That's less than 1/4 minute per frame.  Obviously not a very complex scene.  Why it took 2 days in Vue is anyone's guess.  Perhaps you are using a Mac or some type of hardware that isn't optimal for raytacing?

*"...not fair to say Vue can render out billions of polygons and mental ray cannot..."

*Mental ray cannot, short of having 16+ GB of RAM.  Mental ray chokes on 1 million polys with 2GB of RAM.  And the landscape (terrain) objects are the hi-poly displacement objects in Vue, not the Ecosystem instances.  Those aren't instanced terrains, they are displacement objects.  I have no problem pushing 2 billion polys through Vue in mere seconds, or minutes at high quality.  This is due to BSP optimization, more than anything, of course.  If I export said terrains to Maya, there's no chance  mental ray would render them.

But I mostly just wanted to point out the differences between Realtime (Crysis) and raytracing...  I think that point was pretty clear?

AO in Vue is also kinda tricky...  Unlike other programs (not Poser) it doesn't have any options other than size.  So you'll have to tweak the other options in other ways, otherwise you're looking at horrific render times for complex scenes with lots of Ecosystem instances and such.

I generally render out an AO pass with no textures, so it's just the light and dark values, then use that pass in composition.  Works really well, too!  It's both faster to render two images this way and also in Photoshop you can adjust the AO's strength afterwards as a separate layer...

I'm not certain any of these would accelerate your workflow.  Vue XStream still uses Vue to render the Vue elements, so you wouldn't find any acceleration there at all.  If you're considering a professional package, all three are excellent in different ways.  Maya has mental ray though, which is a big plus if you're doing realism.  C4D is steadily creeping up to "high end" status.  Lightwave is a great program (one of my first!) but has many limitations and much less web support, and will likely be the first of the three to fall off the planet entirely...

There are many pros and cons.  You'll find Maya support everywhere, but on the technical end Autodesk / mental images are notorious for not caring about their users.  It also has a much higher learning curve then, say, every other package available, combined. 

I think, as respectfully as possible LMcLean, that e-on has made Vue extremely fast.  It's among the fastest around, given it's functionality.  Much faster than most of "the Big Dogs", in many cases, and especially when dealing with hundreds of millions and even billions of polys.

Vue has many optimizations that other renderers lack, but also lacks a few itself.  As far as I know, it doesn't have per-object render overrides, which is something you get used to in more expensive studio applications.  It also lacks the GI and radiosity optimizations you'd see in mental ray or Vray, but also costs far less than either, and I daresay mental ray is incapable of rendering billions of polys short of having 64GB of RAM or more.  On my 2GB home machine, I can't even get 1 million polys out of mental ray / Maya.  But Vue's still ruthlessly fast when rendering spectral and volumetric scenes, especially considering

It's one thing to wish for something irrational, but entirely different to expect something impossible.  To put it bluntly : get a faster computer.  Or invest in some cheap AMD boxes and use them for network rendering, where AMD's really shine.  Another option is to study up on Vue's current optimizations and try to utilize them more.

I'm certain we'd all like to see Crysis / Unreal quality in preview mode though, but then again...  That's almost entirely GPU-dependant, and Vue has to be compatible with every OpenGL-capable GPU, not just top-end Geforces and Radeons.  So people with Geforce 8600's or less would be left in the cold.  Does that make sense?

In short, Vue can't expect average users (hobbyists) to buy it if it had a requirement that you also needed 1 or 2 $500 graphics cards to make it functional.  Just like Maya comes with the obvious disclaimer : **no Quadro, garbage preview mode. ** If Vue's makers expected you to have a $1500 graphics card to go with it, I think it would leave a great many users in the dust!  And that's not really Vue's price range; studios using 3DS or Maya have already spent several thousand dollars per license, so spending more on Quadros will already be in the budget, and aren't a big deal for professional users...

To sum up, you get what you pay for.  Vue is only as fast as your CPU/RAM will allow it to be, and that's true of every software package available.

Indeed, I am more than familiar with Rhino...  It's the most powerful NURBS modeler around, on par with SolidWorks and AliasStudio with plenty of power and options to set it aside!

I just don't think everything there needs to be chamfered / filleted, for example.  Sometimes poly modeling is more efficient than NURBS for that reason.  But you've done an excellent job, regardless, so keep at it!

Hah!  I love your quote there, Silverblade33...

I also started with Bryce 3(d!), and RayDream Studio 5.  You're right about coding though...  Truth is there aren't many differences between Vue's (or other rendering engines) abilities and CryEngine's or Unreal's when it comes to output, mostly just heavy-duty functions, but the difference is that Crysis and Unreal are still obviously video games, no matter what machine they are running on.  Vue and many other packages are capable of photorealism if not actual realism, or at the very least painterism.

I like the new generation of video games a lot too, but I don't think they're any more groundbreaking than Unreal 1 or the Quake 3 engine from 1999 in terms of their impact on the VFX industry.