I have some space ships I modelled in Bryce 5 a while back that I want to export  for use in 3DS Max 6. Is there a way to do that I.E., Plugin or something?

Unfortunately no. But that capability is one of the features listed as included in the (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Bryce6. Read some of the threads here about the impending B6; one of which has a link demonstrating the export and import of a Bryce boolean-made model converted to a mesh.

Yeah, that's the one ray of light.

Bryce 6 can take booleans made from (Bryce) primitives, "collapse" them, and export them out as generic meshes for use in any 3D program.

The story doesnt tell though how much complexity that functionality can handle. I wonder if it collapses correctly also if I take a booleaned group and boolean it with another booleaned group...

I would assume;

-unlimtited complexity (?), but I bet you'll be waiting a while for it to compute & collapse.

-Yes, boolean one collapsed group with another collapsed group. I mean Bryce can already boolean a couple of imported meshes, so why not its own?

Keyword here is assume, lol.

haha yea, one would assume that it should work. Yet one would also assume the renderengine could be made much faster :tongue1:

Well, how fast can you make a raytracer without strarting to make shortcuts in how accurate it is? Eventually, with enough shortcuts for speed you have a scanline renderer.

I mean isn't raytracing basically pure "math"? Any shortcuts would be "less than pure" raytracing.

(just thinking out loud)

Well, there's a number of things you can do to increase speed. You can use adaptive sampling, which can be especially handy with things such as indirect lighting and soft shadows or blurry reflections and refractions and such.

Also you can use quasi-random sampling (like for instance monte-carlo raytracing) to reduce artefacts near corners which should make it possible to render with less samples.

And ofcourse there's always shortcuts such as scanline rendering yea. Also you could use hybrid systems that use scanline technology where possible and only introduce raytracing when neccesary.

Things such as TA could be done with more efficient algorithms such as Final Gathering or GI. These algorithms allow for use of samples in scene space rather then in pixels, so you can blur them in scene space and reduce noise. High sampling rates is often only needed in small corners, on larger surfaces larger blurred samples are just fine.

I'm sure there's more that can be done but that goes beyond my knowledge of mathematics and computer graphics technology.