I hesitated a few weeks before I finally decided to post this, not that I don't consider Bryce to be a worthy 3D tool, quite to the contrary, but because of the uproar all-knives-out it might cause here.

But with the Bryce gallery being Renderosity's gallery of the week for the umpteenth time (See Link), I thought I'll give it a go.

First-off, Bryce is far less dead than you might think. Actually Bryce is perfectly alive and kicking. Just do your own stats in Renderosity galleries, and you will see that for a given period of time there are nearly 4 times more entries in the Bryce gallery than in Carrara's.

Bryce is not so much a character animation tool per se, but it has a built-in support for Daz/Poser contents. For example you can send contents, including characters directly from Daz Studio to Bryce.

Bryce has no polygon modeler, but it has enough boolean modeling tools to let you model very sophisticated geometric shapes.

Bryce has a particularly powerful material design system. Its Deep Texture Editor, or DTE, although a bit difficult to understand, can deliver some serious punch, if you know what you are doing.

Bryce renderer, although a bit aging, can still output some breathtaking results, far better than Carrara's imho. Also Bryce has a network renderer that actually works.

You'd be surprised at how many good Bryce animations and galleries you can find on Youtube. I give a few link, but you can do your own search to see more.

Bryce 7 Demo Reel, Bryce Gallery, Bryce Animation, Bryce Animation.

If I have time, I will be posting more of my findings about Bryce because I believe that as a tool for artistic creation it makes a lot more sense than Carrara.