Guess this question has been asked quit often... after long years as a Bryce user, I finally could not withstand and bought a copy of Vue 5 Esprit... while struggling with the handbook and trying to map the two application's features to each other, I thought I could cut it short and try to ask the pros: Where are the biggest differences between Vue and Bryce (except the better control of ambient light)?

...The biggest difference, I think, is the user interface. Bryce was "cutting edge" when guru Kai Krause got his hands on the UI- and made it somewhat of a "Mystical Experience" to user Bryce (in fact- in "those days" the MYST game was a big hit and people seemed to accept quirky, exploratory UI's as a "game") But- over time, the Bryce UI became more of a hinderance than a help. This is why, as a Long Time Brycer, I bought Vue 2, at the recommendation of a Swiss friend working for a US software company. I IMMEDIATELY liked the easy to use, and understand Vue user interface. It seemed to take all of the standard 3D UI's around and make everything SIMPLE to use and find. I was making great scenes in MINUTES with Vue 2 (and Vue 3, which was released a few months later) compared to what took me hours to do in Bryce. I fully realized that Bryce's UI was actually HOLDING ME BACK from doing what I wanted to do. (However, E-on DID adopt the "Trackball" idea from Bryce-Poser by Vue 4. This was a really good idea.) Of course the other obvious thing is that Vue's Plants-Trees remain the best to use and work with- compared to Bryce. One other thing- I (and I think other people) liked Vue's way of handling LIGHTING (i.e.- "color temperature). Bryce has always had a COLD rendering look, where Vue has a WARM rendering look. This is why I think Bryce's most LOYAL Professional followers tend to like doing Architectural work with it, while Vue users are most like doing Landscape work. Of course- both programs can be TWEAKED to look very similiar in looks once you have learned to use them. But Newbies like Vue mostly for its quick, pleasant looking results...

I have Bryce 5.5 and Vue 5, I have used Bryce for years and tho I am stll not an expert. I find it relatvely easy to use, especially in positioning object/terrains etc. I do like Vue but find it hard to actually get something to go where I want it to i.e. terrains in the distance perhaps I am missing something!! But I agree Vue trees/plants are better.

Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face. I am a traveler of both time and space ....Kashmir, Led Zeppelin

Vue will import Poser objects (.pz3) in one step. If you want Bryce to do it you have to go through Daz Studio, which is buggy as hell...distorts clothed figures, miserable to work with, etc. Or you import them as .3ds or .obj figures but, no matter what the documentation tells you, the textures do NOT come through consistently. You can work around the vegetation with Bryce. Import plants, etc. You just can't do anything with it to help you build a decent scene with Poser figures.

Oh dear, what misleading answers! 1) The Bryce UI is actually very cleverly designed, and has a lot of tricks that Vue has not (I have written on this extensively). But you have to understand how to use it to best advantage. When you understand that, it flies along. 2) The difference in lighting is also knowledge-based. Bryce renders do look cold if you don't handle the ambient channel properly. 3) On http://phantast.actionbabecentral.com you will find procedures for getting Poser figures into Bryce with the minimum trouble and best results. You certainly can build complex scenes with multiple Poser figures in Bryce. A problem I am having with Vue is that a scene with two high-end Poser figures (V3 or M3) brings Vue to its knees. Nevertheless, the fact that Vue will read pz3 files is very useful. I just wish it would handle reflection and specularity better. (I don't see why it can't interpret the Poser values for these parameters, they are there in plain ASCII in the pz3 file). 4) The key differences, besides direct Poser import, are firstly that Vue has quite a few features that Bryce just doesn't have, like glowing materials. Secondly, terrains and skies and to some extent plants are better implemented in Vue. Thirdly, and very important for me, Vue is about ten times faster to render complex scenes, especially ones with many transparent or reflective surfaces.

i find the colors of vue more muddy, but it has nice other options. I tried buying vue 5 online but when i saw there was almost 50 euro (1/3 of the full prize) added in the end i thought forget it. why dont they have downloadable versions of vue 5 too as they have of easel?

for some free stuff i made
and for almost daily fotos

So much of how a scene looks is due to how you light it, though.

Phantast, I've already spent a lot of time getting my figures posed and textured the way I want them. Why should I have to spend that much time AGAIN in order to get them to work in Bryce?

Simple - don't bother spending ANY time texturing the figures in Poser. Import the untextured figures to Bryce and do all the texturing there. This was very much the best practice with Poser 4, which had a horrible materials system. One could easily save a library of Poser textures within Bryce to make things even easier. Now I prefer to use Vue, though, since the materials editor in Poser 5 and 6 is vastly improved. But you STILL have to retexture most materials to get them to work in Vue. Firstly, everything comes across with a shininess of 20, which is frequently not what you want. Secondly, anything with any reflectivity in Poser comes over as totally mirror-like. So unless your materials in Poser have no specularity and no reflectivity, expect more work. I just don't understand why e-on don't do something about this - it's not as if pz3 was an encrypted format. The material values are sitting there in the pz3 file and just have to be converted into the Vue equivalents. It should be a simple task.

Thank you all for your answers, lots of food for thought. But sadly enough - having had some time to fiddle around with Vue 5 - the biggest difference to Bryce seems to be that it crashes unpredictably. While I can really live with the re-texturing of imported objects (it can indeed be fun and an inspiring process adapting materials to a specific rendering system), I can't live with that. While I mostly knew why I'd driven Bryce into another crash (adding the twenty-1st of a 30 billion polygon object, having a 256MB worth of jpg textures in the library and then hit undo twice or such foolishness), I wasn't able to figure out what Vue dislikes about what I'm doing. I begin to believe that there is a very ugly bug in internal memory management, and that it hits at random...

The two occasions when I can consistently crash Vue 5 are pasting very large objects from the clipboard, and creating complex textures that have bump maps. I always save before either of these operations. It's always a memory-related error message, so I think you are right about that - but I don't find it random.