Hi All,

I have a couple of questions you might have some answers to:

This is more curiosity than anything else, but does anyone know of speed benchmarks for Bryce rendering on MAC and Windows platforms?

Apple constantly claims their G4 is faster than any Pentium, and Intel makes the same claim against MAC. There's more to it than just processor speed, and these guys use Photoshop as a standard.

I was curious how Bryce performed on the two platforms, if anyone ever tested it anyway.

My second question is about 3-D software in general.

Do you find you need a bunch of programs to get things done, because no one (affordable, or available on MAC, or Windows) program can do quite everything needed?

I'm using Bryce, Poser, Amorphium (moving up to Amorphium Pro) and Strata 3-D to get things done. This is possible because of .obj and .dxf file formats being supported (thank goodness!)

While I can model quite a few things in Bryce, it is limited, but I am comfortable with scene manipulation in it, camera moves, animation, and so on, and am getting quite friendly with the terrain editor! Material/texture mapping is another adventure altogether! Thanks goodness Bryce supports PICT images!

While I have greater modeling flexibility in Strata 3-D, I find it too awkward for scene manipulation, so I make objects in that and bring them to Bryce.

I do the same thing with Poser because modeling anything like a scene in that is unbelievably cumbersome for me (Poser seems to be a very awkward program--does it have to be?) I have no trouble bringing Poser characters to Bryce, and I can even animate them there, although it is more awkward sometimes than animating in Poser (which can be awful at animating when it wants to be).

Then, for organic and oddly shaped items, there's Amorphium because it can sculpt images (getting this to work takes a huge amount of practice, but once I "got" it, it became easier).

Of course, I read about much more expensive, high-end programs (such as Electric Image's Universe, Rhino (which doesn't run on MAC, does it?) and so on.

I find it all amazingly confusing!

And, of course, without Photoshop, a lot of what I do wouldn't work because I have to post process for effects I can't seem to get otherwise. Image Ready, which comes bundled with Photoshop allows one to bring in a movie as frames and then paint on them. Awkward, but effective in the end product. Plus, I can sharpen images and change lighting effects in these programs.

Do you all run into this as well?

This isn't a complaint, just a question. I'd be interested in your comments. So many of you do such high end work, I wonder how this all works for your projects.

I hope I didn't open a can of worms. Just curious as to what others are struglging with.

Thanks!