I've been a fan of Bryce for a while, actually 5.0 has been around for AGES, but I don't know what new features are in 5.5. The only thing I don't like about bryce is that the renderer has always been dog slow. I'm actually subscribed to their newsletter so every once in a while I'll get an e-mail with free downloads of models, etc. By default it's pretty bland, so I would suggest finding extra texture packs. For 3D modeling however Byrce is not a good choice, it has primitives and add/subtract but no real way of editing geometry. It's more for finishing a scene with pre-rendered objects rather than creating them.

It has always looked nice for backgrounds and skyboxes, but I think it's too specialised and its functionality can be replicated in Blender scripts now.

I'm downloading it anyway

There is a way to turn on OpenGL or D3D or their proprietary S3D?? rendering and increase the wireframe resolution when rotating or when the scene is static. Even so there is no accellearation when rendering. A simple scene with water and a mountain on my 3200+ takes about 32 seconds to do a quick render (not a full render). I would probably take about 1 to 1.5 mins to render fully, not to mention the scene is only 640x480. If I wanted to render a 1680x1050 scene I might as well leave my PC on overnight Acutally I'm doing the same scene at 640x480 with the render options at max... currently while I've typed this messgage I'm at only 3% rendered . It does however allow for you to render over a network (bryce lightening) which allows you to have multiple pc's over a network render the same scene to speed things up a bit. Of course if I only had a cluster It does have it's uses however, if you want a quick object for a video game, set the background to magenta and turn off antialiasing, render at 320x240 or whichever res you want then shrink the image down and viola you have a 3D sprite for your game. You can pretty much find all sorts of nice free dxf/3ds/obj objects to use in games.

TH: I have no idea why it's failing to unstuff on your mac, I had no problem with the windows zip file though. Oh and it's technically two downloads, first you download bryce and register, then download the texture/object pack. Without textures you can't really do much

[edit]
6% now
Noticed by default the process is set to low priority - increased it to above normal, now at 10%...
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Steve: I believe 5.5 uses OpenGL but then you have to pay for the upgrade, which is their goal I presume

Neat!

Bryce is perfect for creating terrain tiles.

I dl'ed something called L3DT from http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ a week ago, it makes actual 3d terrains sorta OK. However, I'm having some trouble figuring out their heightfield file to try it in my own games. There's a viewer you can download to look at the terrains you generate, fly around at different altitudes etc. The free version is more limited than the $$$ version but it could be useful just the same.