I figure using Bryce 4, ZBrush, Poser 5, Photoshop, and Premire to make an .mpeg worth viewing for an opening movie.

are you going to do the animating in bryce?
you can import poser figures, but bryce can''t animate them. The two are great at making still shots, but not animation.
What you could do (with some work), is to animate your scene in bryce without the figures and then animate the figures in poser with a black background.
Take the 2 movies and use a movie editor to place the figures (alpha out the black) on top of the background.

So here is the method. I use Bryce 4 to create a background sequence and save it as an .avi file . Then I use Zbrush to create a more organic creature from a poser character to use as a character, save that as an .obj file or several .obj files to export it to Poser 5. Once in Poser 5, I'll use the .avi I created in Bryce 4 as a background, use the .obj I created in Zbrush (along with the texture file it automaticly creates) and morph it to the creature from the original file I used earlier in Zbrush. Then I can use Poser 5 to create an animation sequence for the characters from the models over the .avi background, and when I'm done, I can export the whole thing as an .avi file and open it in Premire or After Effects to be used in the next cut.

[edited by - smiley4 on March 25, 2003 9:19:39 AM]

All those are good programs, i especially like ZBrush, but for what all of those will cost you could get 3dsmax, with which you could do both your background and figure modelling/animation at once.

True, but each program is more intuitive than 3DS Max and I can''t run it on XP. I guess I could use Lightwave instead.