My name is James Neff and I am a digital artist. I consider this medium the canvas of our times. Pigments and fabrics thrown together to punch through to the inner eye of the viewer and spark emotional response is not longer a viable method. The viewer is now a sophisticated citizen of a world of bright plastics, mirrored chrome and polished steel, neon and laser light, and the overwhelming details of mass production and advertising creating a powerful challenge to the artist of today. The hand cannot accomplish it. It must come from a merger of man and machine, because a machine has brought us all, artist and viewer alike, to this platteau of awareness. The viewers' eyes require greater stimulus. It's not that "Starry Night" by Van Gough lacks anything in vibrant complexity; rather, our eyes need all the more what Vincent's eyes struggled to capture in primitive media... light, color, intensity, strength of motion. We now have the medium to punch deeper into the inner eye and bring out colors as well as 'lights' which simply do not convey in paints or printed inks. By the amazing fire of the cathode ray tube, we are seeing the birth of 'illumined art', an entirely new and challenging expression. This is an art of electric fire. And it is a fire which does not consume the bush. It does, however, consume the artist. On Bryce: Bryce2, my program of choice, is a marvel. For me, being able to rapidly jump into a mere moment of imagination and kick it to life quickly as a draft, then push it slowly to a calculated symphony is vital. Bryce2 allows for an intuitive entrance. My visions, feelings and desires are artistically very fleeting. Holding interest in one idea for very long is difficult. I find that Bryce2 allows one to step into something akin to a holodeck and start tossing around truly quantum possibilities, toying with both elements and perspectives. One feels alot like a director blocking in scenes and with just a few mouse maneuvers, one can haul massive structures miles away... knock holes in them as wide as a gorge... suspend whole cities in mid-air until everything is 'just so.' I have never worked in a program as versitile and comfortable as Bryce2, save perhaps the very first Strata Studio Pro. It had similar, logical functions and interface (but no more). There is nothing like Bryce2 as regards comfort and ease. The boolean process is an excellent method for 3D creation. The only thing Bryce lacks is spline modeling and export/transform functions to convert creations into working .3dmf or .dxf models to be used elsewhere or by others. Perhaps that's part of the charm of Bryce2. It's a closed universe. Whereas other programs are a challange to master as regards interface functions and mathematics, Bryce is a challange to the intuitive nature, begging the left and right brain to come and play in the same sandbox. It seems Bryce2 has color and specular presets which are almost too unnatural and hideous to be used, so those who truly use Bryce to create genuine art can be spotted right away... the Bryce palette will be conspciously absent. The ability to create original textures and bump maps is also inspiring. I love the simple geometry of Bryce as the platform from which to build, break down, mix, boolen, intersect and shatter. Bryce improvements, for me, would include conversion utilities to transform the objects of Bryce to true .3dmf or .dxf formats, original fractal painting interface for textures and skies/clouds, a massive and far more complex "families" assignment method, by color, number, alphabet and combination (this is far too limited now for truly complex creations), more comprehensive reflection maps and spline modeling (the ability to grasp and move, or remove, polygonal points, sections, etc).