Customer Reviews

The Bryce 3D Handbook

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I have seen other things written by Mr. Mortimer, and I would rate them somewhere between adequate and good. This book is niether. You have to hold your nose and swallow hard to say that a bryce user is much better off with the manual than with this book--which demonstrates hardly anything with it's amatuerish exmples and near useless lessons. I really flelt ripped-off in buying this book. It showed no insight into or mastery of the great product that Bryce is. It was if Mr. Mortimer played with Bryce for a couple of days and said to himself: "I have a great idea, why not write a book." In that respect it failed too. It was little more than a grotesque collection of pictures, and paint by the numbers. Please Mr. Mortimer, we don't mind you making a living, but next time earn it. Save your money.

I was looking for a book that would both help me getting started with Bryce 3D and would later serve as a source of reference for the countless features of Bryce not covered by the manual that comes with the program. Well, when I bought this book, I got neither. The book is incomplete, pointing you to the manual in every second paragraph. It is superficial, unvariably stopping short whenever the author reaches the real intricacies of Bryce. Its editing is abysmal, with wrong pictures/captions, cut-off paragraphs and a lousy index. And worst of all: the author is a completely uninspired artist, his example artwork being at best boring but more often plain ugly. I am sorry I bought this book and strongly recommend to give it a wide berth.

Mr. Mortier simply is not a teacher. He has neither the inclination, nor the communications skills, to write a book which provides clear, concise and thoroughly-explained information. Instead, he gives us a superficial meandering through a random series of topics, with a "you work it out, and if you can't understand it, it's your fault, not mine" attitude.

The problem starts with the title: no book this superficial should be called a "Handbook." This is not a handbook, this is just a series of offhand thoughts about possible techniques.

Anyone wanting to learn how to use any program should of course become thoroughly familiar with the program's documentation. But we all know how difficult it is to learn from the index/catalog style of a manual, and how inadequate the tutorials can be for learning to use the tools. A truly well-done "handbook", such as the fine books done in the "Real World" series; or the equally excellent "3d Studio Max 2 Effects Magic" by Greg Carbonaro and "Lightwave 3d Applied" by Dave Jerrard, will provide a thorough grounding in the basics at the same time as they walk the readers (students) through a rigorous tutorial example which gives them a good hands-on training session.

Mr. Mortier completely fails to provide any basic grounding in the program. He sloughs off the presentation of the fundamentals with repeated exhortations to study the documentation.

It's not that difficult to integrate the basics into a book like this. All of the above-mentioned successful books are both thorough and concise. Mr. Mortier should be reading those books, not writing them.

If you want a truly well done "handbook" on Bryce, reserve your copy of "Real World Bryce 4" by Susan Kitchens.

I purchased this book after finding Bryce's own documentation skimpy and/or confusing on certain issues. I've been using Bryce 3D for quite a while and was hoping to furthur expand my knowledge of it. As this book was the only one on the market that I could find about Bryce 3D, I eagerly bought it. But...

The book pays a lot of lip-service to the "Planatary Traveler" video and has a short, bland, rather vague forward written by its producer/director. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it ends with a blatent sales-pitch (complete w/phone number) that's completely inappropriate for this kind of book! This is followed on the next page by the author's gushing thanks to said person for writing this "beautiful forward" that he has printed out and hung on his wall...makes one wonder.

Along with this kind of hokeyness, I found the book's overall poor grammar distracting and annoying, and the author's "I personally find this feature useless, so don't YOU even bother with it" attitude rather narrow-minded. Also, some of his techniques use over-complicated solutions that could've been dealt with more simply.

As a matter of personal taste, I wasn't very impressed with the .MOV animation examples on the book's CD-ROM. Some nice ideas there, but rendered at WAY too low a resolution (grainy to the point of distracting, and I know from experience that you can do much better than that with Bryce. It comes off as laziness more than anything, even if it really wasn't). I also found the author's over-use of a wild quirky camera-movements annoying and gratuitous (just because you have the ability to do something doesn't mean you should all the time)...but then again, that's just my own opinion based on my personal tastes. Your mileage may vary.

On the positive side: this book DOES have many good ideas and suggestions that could be used as solid starting-points rather than end-all solutions. It also does a good job of explaining some of the more esoteric functionality buried within Bryce 3D, which I have found quite useful.

So, I'd suggest this book if you're looking for some Bryce starting points if you can deal with the poor wording/grammar and general narrow-mindedness on certain issues. Otherwise, you can find a wealth of tutorials and technical tips on the Web for free.

Not very substantial. Looks like a quick rough paraphrasing of the manual.

If you are looking for a thorough handbook you can't do better than the books Susan Kitchens has written---they will open your eyes to the subject like you can't believe.

This book is rated for the intermediate and advanced user and rightly so. Straightforward technical talk with a serious focus on animation and post processing of Bryce based video this book is one that has much to teach to those who prefer the no nonsense approach to getting the information they need to move forward quickly and without a lot of chatter. It is called a handbook and that is the way it is structured--for quick reference to topics and easy access to information. There are samples and materials that one can practice with and just like Adobe Photoshop plug-ins and other fine programs that allow you the option of add-ons you do best by copying them directly to your hard drive to use them most quickly. I had no problem with any of the pictures or other included items. There is a demo version of a video editing program that people might want to try out for post-production effects though my preference would be for Adobe After Effects or Premier for such work. But if one has never used this type of software before a demo gives a good indication of what can be done to add things like transitions and titling to one's Bryce movies. I found the book well worth the money and am in fact ordering this author's book on Poser 3 in the near future. A good reference for the serious digital artist.

I eagerly bought this and wish I hadn't. The content is not useful, rather one-dimensional, and is written in an officious tone. As a "bonus", the book is replete with typos and bad grammar. The example photos of Bryce output are not shown in any useful artistic context; no image in the book compells one to explore further. The CD seems like a throw-together, with no useful content. All opposable-thumbs down...!

I'm quite disappointed, to say the least. I was expecting a book similar to Susan Kitchen's excellent book on Bryce 2, but this frankly doesn't deliver. The text has some- if few- useful ideas, but the rest of the book shows nothing new, and worse, nothing worth the excessive price. The CD itself is sloppily designed. The Materials folder had to be copied to my hard drive and the resources fixed so Bryce 3 would even recognize them; furthermore, there's a folder of very large pictures that are in the book anyway. Why weren't these made into smaller, untiled pictures? There's also a folder of peculiarly useless information on a video program where the documents are in a combination of Pagemaker and other formats. The whole project shows last minute frantic work, and the CD-Rom seems to be added just to raise the price. The best word to sum up this fiasco: disappointing.

Most definitely agree with the books stated target audience of medium to advanced users and found areas where medium users would want more detail to get the displayed results. On the other hand, the book provided idea-generating samples and did a good job of outlining how to achieve similar results. The book provides insight into the dynamic nature of the product and how other tools and files (e.g. PhotoShop, 3d models such as .dxf, etc.) could easily be incorporated into a Bryce3D scene.

Would recommend this book to experienced users wanting to increase their understanding of the flexibility of Bryce3d and the different results that can be achieved by incorporating effects created in other products. Novice users would most likely find that while piquing their interest, this book didn't provide enough detail to allow them to achieve the desired effects without additional research.

The book provides inspiration to fire the PC up and play, and immediately increases productivity by showing how to incorporate previously acquired files and skills. Raised the high bar for design by showing the possibilities of what can be created when you move beyond point and click scene design.

Chris Landes

Let me start off by saying that I know a lot of people have knocked this book for "not being like Susan's book" well I'm here to say that's the beauty of it! Despite a wonderful book by her she's not the only person out there contributing valuable insight into how this remarkable program works. I found Mr Mortier's book to be simple, straight forward and filled with plenty of easy to follow examples and I would highly recommend it to anyone out there still struggling with Bryce and not totally being helped from either Susan's book or the documentation that came with program. Thats where I was and it helped me!