On the whole, both applications produce similar results, although Bryce may offer slightly more in depth control, while Vue's material editor is easier to get around and achieve the effect you're looking for.

Despite spending countless hours trying to figure out the arcanes of Bryce's Deep Texture Editor, I have to confess that I didn't really get a complete hang of it all. In comparison, Vue's material editor is refreshingly simple to work with (meaning I could actually figure it out!). I still think Bryce offers more control (although this may be caused by my limited understanding of Vue's function editor). Again, I haven't gone through all of Vue's advanced procedurals, but you seem to be able to do quite a bit.

Bryce offers an overwhelming number of different mapping modes, ranging from standard projections to more questionable ones such as random mapping. In comparison, Vue's projection modes seem rather poor, although you can achieve fine control by mixing several materials together. The parametric projection mode is one I dearly miss in Vue.

Vue has a very cool way of presenting you with all the materials used in your scene (in a panel called 'Summary of materials'). If you click on one of the materials in this panel, all the objects in the scene that use the material will be selected. You can also modify a given material and all the objects that use the material will be affected. Pretty cool time saver!

Bryce doesn't have this, but it does group all bitmap texture maps in the "Pictures" room. Also, bitmaps are incorporated inside the scene. This is nice when you want to exchange over the internet a scene that uses bitmaps. On the other hand, it does lead to very large scene files.

On the whole, material management is much easier in Vue.

In Vue, sub-rays are limited to 25 which is usually ample except maybe when rendering extremely soft shadows or strong depth of field effects when renders come out with some graininess. Bryce lets you bump that up to a massive 256 rays per pixel for super smooth (and super-slow) rendering.

The TIR (total internal reflection) setting is new to Bryce 5. In Bryce 4, and still in Bryce 5 when using the default settings which is no TIR, Bryce will not render refractive materials correctly. You have to activate TIR to get accurate results, but this slows rendering down.

You don't have to worry about TIR in Vue. They are always rendered correctly, but you cannot set the ray depth or TIR depth.

Both programs produce very similar results, but Vue has the edge because you can disable the effect (there are certain cases when Bryce or Vue caustics really look fake, e.g. when the transparent object is far from the caustic surface).

Vue's glow effect is pretty cool. It adds a sort of halo around the objects that have glow. You can adjust the intensity and radius of the glow for each material, and you can even mix together some materials that glow with other that don't (ideal for those spaceship lights).

Bryce definitely has the edge here. You can create all sorts of amazing effects because you can define the color of the volumetric material inside the volume. With Vue, the color is the same for the entire material, and you can only vary the density. Also, shading of volumetric materials in Vue doesn't look as good as in Bryce. On the other hand, Vue's volumetric materials render quite a bit faster.

Vue doesn't have the infinite slab primitive per se, but considers instead that infinite planes "separate" the world in two halves. For instance, if you create water, all what is under the surface of the water will actually be water.