I am puzzled why the Carrara galleries/forums are so skimpy, while the Bryce ones are fluorishing like mad even though poor Bryce has been neglected and left to die by Corel. Personally I switched to Bryce for all my 3D work, including architecture, because it's so easy and elegant to use, but I miss more advanced features. I wanted to get Carrara 3 but I don't think I have the will power to tear myself away from Bryce. Perhaps Eovia should have bought Bryce, added those advanced features, and we might have had a killer 3D program by now, with a loyal following orders of magnitude greater.

"An Example is worth Ten Thousand Words"

I think a verst user of Carrara could probably do every thing that can be done in Bryce with Carrara. The rendering in Carrara is extremely superior in quality and speed to Bryce's offering. I do agree with you that Bryce fell into the worst company, at least from a Mac user stand point, and it probably would have been a lot better off if Eovia would have purchased them. I am under the impression thou that the source code for Bryce was retained by it's founder and creator and that he is planning on further developing it under a deferent name. I visited a web site from a link that allegedly claimed this. It had samples picts that looked pretty impressive. As far as Corel in concerned, I believe that they recently got bought out du to financial problems. I currently own two of their products, Painter 8 and Corel Graphic Suite 11, both for the Mac. I just hope that they keep on working on Painter and don't decided to can it for the Mac. The Graphic Suite is not as important to me. What was ironic was that I was fixing to buy Bryce 5.0 when they decided to stop development on the Mac.

The best thing that ever happened to me render-wise was Corel ceasing support for Bryce on the Mac, It forced me to concentrate on rendering in Carrara which is far superior in quality, versatility & speed (I can feel myself physically ageing while waiting for a Bryce render).
Now I simply use Bryce for creating backdrops or exporting the odd terrain, to go back to doing any kind of modelling in Bryce would be sheer folly. There's nothing worse than exporting a model to Bryce, texturing it, setting up the camera & then realising that your not able to tweak or adjust it with any kind of modeling tools.

Carrara seems to me to be the complete package for my illustrations now, but Bryce still remains a good little tool to have on my Mac.

Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing?

I guess you sort of made my point; If Carrara is so much easier and better than Bryce, then why are there so many more images being put out by Bryce artists that are simply superior? I'm just going by what I see with my own eyes. I would love to see a Carrara masterpiece blow away a Bryce masterpiece, but that just isn't happening. Perhaps a Carrara vs. Bryce contest might settle things.:)

"An Example is worth Ten Thousand Words"

Part of the reason that there's more stuff (some of it really wonderful) by Brycers on display may be because it's a good program for what it does: landscapecentric still pictures. However, part of Carrara's mission is to be an animation studio, thus it makes sense that fewer still pictures would be posted. Also Carrara has a steeper learning curve. I love Bryce, and as a hobbyist, prefer it for outdoor stuff. As much as C3 adds more for landscaping, Bryce is still better for that, unless you're looking to animate. But Carrara will take you further on everything else, especially with its newest features, like HDRI. I suspect as people digest the new version of Carrara there will be more and better pics posted. But in the end it's not a Bryce versus Carrara thing, great pictures are where you find them, whether on Bryce, Carrara or any other app.

This is a tough issue. I think to sum up, Carrara in this latest incarnation is a pretty heavy hitting package. I have owned Bryce (a few incarnations ago) and I found it to be somewhat more clumsy than Carrara. It may be better now. The one thing about Bryce that really irked me was that you needed other packages to make an image and Carrara has a lot more stuff. Now that the rendering engine is getting even better, I'm getting even more confident in the pacakages capability to out do Bryce for many kinds of things. Always remember though, no single package can do it all. Knowing more than one package is always better. -Kix

-Kix

I have been using both Bryce and RayDream since the versions of Bryce 3D and the $99 version of RayDream Studio 5 (Ray Dream 3D). I still use RDS 5.5 because of the ability to import Poser 3 files and Carrara does not. Bryce 3 (and Bryce 5) is so user friendly you can actually generate decent picture w/o having to consider your entire contents of picture. RayDream Studio is the older incarnation of Carrara. The latter two tools take more time to master due to the consideration of thinking about not only just putting your model in the scene but also the context in which your model exists, its surroundings, the lighting. The degree of control you have over your image seems daunting to the newbie 3Dphile like me. I get my copy of Carrara 3 on Monday! Laters Yall, Form Validation Error