If you know Bryce, and know texturing and animating in Bryce, then go with Bryce. If you know Max, and can texture and animate in Max, than go with it. I recently had to do a 30-second animation in Max... It wasn't fun, mainly from the fact that I had limited experience in Max. It did, however, render fairly quickly. It may depend upon the timeframe. Bryce takes a long time to render, whereas Max renders are often quicker. It also depends upon which package you are more comfortable in. Good luck.

Uh, are you running Windows 98 or Windows 98, Second Edition? If you right click on My Computer and select properties, it should tell you there (or run Start menu->Help). If you've bought you computer recently, you should have Win 98 SE. Supposedly, the first Windows 98 had memory problems (I think). If you have that, it may be the cause of your memory problems. Does the computer crash a lot and give error messages and stuff? Or it it just with Bryce?

I'd always suggest backing up your presets folder before reinstalling - just in case. Just save the presets folder into another directory, and you should be set. As for kern32.dll... that might be the Windows kernel... I'm not sure why it would be giving you errors, but try only running Bryce (close Photoshop and other memory-intensive programs). Try updating your drivers for your video card and run any critical updates from Windows Update (I'm assuming some version of Windows here). Good luck.

Attached Link: http://forums.delphi.com/bryce/

No, this is it! Kidding, there are plenty. I'm sure 3D Commune has something similar. There's also the Bryce Forum on Delphi- http://forums.delphi.com/bryce/ (you'll need a free account to post messages, but can log in and view stuff as a guest), http://www.halcyon.com/alrives/brycetips/messageboards/main.html (a lot of messages and lots of spam/warez, but the KPT ImageTalk board is fairly popular), http://www.bryce5.net (free membership to post, no spam, well run), apparently a low volume forum/web board at http://www.postforum.com/forums/list.php?f=13. Pretty much, you should be able to do a search and come up with a few more (in other languages, some smaller ones are other sites catering to higher-end apps, etc). I try to keep current with some of the happenings at the Delphi Bryce Forum, and check for new questions at the KPT boards (www.halcyon.com/...). There are also a few newsgroup people use to ask questions, but they're not really forums. My favorite has to be the Delphi one- a lot of great artists there, no spam (but lots of ads unless you pay for the Delphi Plus service). Good luck,

As for Bryce 4, as far as I know, they have only given away the demo not a full version. If they have, I doubly bummed (first for not being able to upgrade from 3D to 5 and then missing out on 4).< Uh, I really thought you could upgrade to B5 from B3D...? It was my understanding that once you bought it, you'd have to call Corel and they would authorize the previous serial number and provide you with a good B5 upgrade serial.

Wow, I'm surprised you packed all the options into one post (image, a link, nudity AND violence. Well done. On another note, I'll have to check through that tute you posted.

Oh, and I should note that I have no more ideas on this... It may be something funky in Bryce Lightning...

...Rich (the IT guy developing the service for me) to either sell the code her [sic] writes...< Should I know what code you're speaking of?

Attached Link: http://www.milamberart.com/

I had heard about this thread... Now I have a few questions- 1- You really create a Lightning service in the Services part of the Control Panel? In your first thread you made reference to it running in the taskbar- normally I don't think of services running in the taskbar if they're started automatically... is it really a service? 2- You can use the Lightning client in a render before any user has logged in? Just trying to clarify what you said before. 3- I know why you can't kill Lightning through the task manager- services don't show up there. You need to go into the Control Panel, Administrative Utilities/Tools, Services, and Stop/Restart/changes settings in there (assuming that Lightning really is running as a service). 4- Not really a question, just from my experiences- my friend helped me set up a service on my computer yesterday, which works with Apache. When Apache is installed, it is setup as a Service in the Control Panel. It can be set to automatically run whenever the computer is turned on. My friend helped me setup Jakarta/Tomcat to run as a service, with a utility called "jk_nt_service.exe". The file, when run from the command line, will set up your executable as a service according to the parameters defined in a configuration file you specify. I know have Tomcat running as a Service, nothing in the taskbar. Would something like this be possible with Bryce Lightning? I don't know. You should be able to let the user log off by stopping the Lightning Service in the Control Panel. This isn't an elegant solution, but it may work in the short, short term. BTW, I liked the illustration and digital work on your website- very well done.

Let me explain myself- I believe if you set the soft shadows in the skylab it'll essentially enable them for the lights in the scene as well as the sun and possibly the moon. That control in the initial release is broken/buggy. Grigg's suggestion may help to solve your problem.

I'm not sure what you mean about "safer." If you really want to have a document who's resolution matches the nano-preview window, you could do a screenshot of the main interface, then crop down the image in an image editor to see the height and width of the nano-preview. Once you know these, you can find the ratio of heighth to width. Enter that into the Aspect Ratio in the Document Setup in Bryce. The document setup has a bunch of different presets which will produce different looks in the document resolution. I don't know offhand if any match the nano-window aspect ratio. You may just have to enter the ratio youself and play with the document size/resolution.

Can you post an example image? I don't think I've seen what you're refering to...

Attached Link: http://www.milamberart.com

Yes there's a bug with the soft shadows. You will have to enable soft shadows for each light you want to have the softer shadows for. Wgreen- Bryce 5 renders scenes a bit faster than 4 did, and is a good deal stabler than 4 was when it was released. Yes, there a some bugs, but you have to take the good with the bad. What settings and what scenes gave you long render times? Bryce 4 scenes supposedly render a bit slower in Bryce 5 than native Bryce 5 scenes. Adding lights will dramatically increase render times, especially with soft shadows. Materials and volume materials can also hurt rendering times. Bryce 5 also offers more flexibility with the premium render settings, as well as the ability to change ray depth and total internal reflection. You can also take advantage of network rendering if you have multiple computers. What are you doing in B5 which is convincing you to switch to Vue?

Attached Link: http://www.milamberart.com

Unless you change the dimensions that you render to the screen (i.e. you render to a 400x100 widescreen image), the preview thumbnail should match the rendered document pretty closely. What is different about the preview and the actual render? As for the apparent deformation- that's because of the camera's Field of View- you can adjust it by clicking one of the little sphere controls around the trackball. Note that the sphere isn't deformed, but the camera's projection changes it. Tweak the FOV and you should be able to make stuff at the edges look more better :-)