Bryce 5

by Corel

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005LIKR
• Item model number: BRY50PCMENG0
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,720 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #51 in Software > Graphics > 3-D
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

There's nothing quite like building your own world, and no application makes it easier than Bryce. Now on its fifth major revision and currently owned by Corel, Bryce has grown from a fun application for building alien planets to a capable rendering tool with advanced features.

Version 5 offers numerous new features and improvements. To address the complaints of the slow rendering engine, Bryce 5 has introduced network rendering. No longer will one computer have to slave away all its own on a 10-second scene. Rendering can be distributed across as many systems as are available on your network. The number of computer slaves available for use is only limited by your own hardware, as Bryce's network rendering license is unlimited. However, Bryce still doesn't take advantage of computers with multiple CPUs--rendering on a system with two 400 MHz processors takes the same time as rendering on a system with one.

If you've got a green thumb, Bryce 5 has the Tree Lab, one of the easiest ways to grow a forest. Nearly everything about a tree is variable: number of branches, number of leaves, kind of trunk, kind of leaf, branch angle, amount of branching, etc. There are presets for dozens of common and uncommon trees, and the thumbnail preview screen lets you preview in wire-frame or rendered views.

Once the forest is grown, you might want to light it up using the tools from the Light Lab. Based on the earlier version, the new Light Lab has been redesigned to make it easier to build, adjust, and customize lights and their attributes. You can use color gradients as gels for lights, and control other attributes like shadow ambiance, soft shadows, blurry reflections, and true ambiance.

The new Light and Tree Labs, as well as metaballs and network rendering, make Bryce 5 a must-have application for old and new users alike. --Mike Caputo

Amazon.com Product Description

Bryce 5 lets you create realistic 3-D landscapes and animations. Striking an optimum balance between power and ease of use, Bryce is an ideal way to integrate 3-D technology into your creative process. Smooth network rendering saves time by letting you render images on multiple computers. The new Light Lab gives you robust control over lighting direction, and the new Tree Lab ensures a more accurate depiction of real-world environments.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SAME THING WE DO EVERYDAY PINKY! TRY & SIMULATE THE WORLD!, December 2, 2001

By 

Kevin Poe - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bryce 5 (CD-ROM)

Who needs, directors, special effect experts, location permits, robots, trained animals, movie stars, costume and set designers, etc.? Bryce 5.0 is all that in a single box and a heck of lot cheaper!

But, there's a fairly hefty learning curve! Bryce isn't easy to master. It's easy to use once you learn, but starting out on your own is tough. I did, but I wish I would have spent the money to buy Susan Kitchens book on Bryce 4.0 first! 'Would have saved me hundreds of hours.

I struggled with Bryce 4.0 in making prehistoric environments from geologic history and the plants and animals that lived in them. Bryce 4.0 easily makes phenominal landscapes, city-scapes, castles, or whatever, but just try to make a person or animal that will move through your scene and you've got your work cut out for you!

But now thanks to Bryce 5.0's Metaball technology where basic sphere shapes better blend into each other my T.Rexs look like the could stand in for those in Jurassic Park. Hopefully Bryce 6.0 will make meta technology for all the building block shapes. Perhaps Corel will even embed a sound generator in 6.0 so you don't have to dub with other software?

A lot of attention has been given to the new tree lab. As long as you don't expect the prefab trees to look anything like what they are named for you'll like it too. However as a forester I was disappointed! This is not to say you can't make fantastic looking sequoias, I'm just saying it's going to take a couple of hours of tinkering. On the other hand this is to be expected. You can't demand software "Industrial Light and Magic" powerful to be "Mickey Mouse" easy.

What I'm most thrilled by is the power and beauty of the animation capability. Long gone are the days of frame by frame adjustments. To make my T. Rex walk all I have to do is carefully link objects together, then show Bryce what I want my dinosaur to look like at this place at this moment in time and than what I want it to look like at a new place, a few seconds later. Then pitch, yaw, roll, zoom the camera as desired or set it to auto track and the software smoothly animates the 100 frames in between. It short you make and put the parts together to make a body and Bryce will bring it to life and make it a movie star!

I've worked with a lot of graphic design and animation software and all others (for public consumption anyway) pale by comparison. Here's the fun thing! Once you get to know Bryce, you'll see it everywhere. It's technology is used extensively in "B" Fantasy & SciFi movies and on prime-time Fantasy & SciFi TV shows.

The old philospher once said, "Give me a fulcurm and a big enough lever and I could move the world." With Bryce 5.0 I say "Give me enough time and enough hard drive space and I can simulate the world!" at any time period.....

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What are you waiting for? ORDER IT!, August 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Bryce 5 (CD-ROM)

If you have Bryce 3D, don't hesistate, UPGRADE NOW! If you have Bryce 2, UPGRADE YESTERDAY!

This release is awesome, Corel has done a bang-up job! When Metacreations started selling things off I figured, "this is it, it's over for Bryce" I never bothered with Bryce 4 because it was in that in-between sell-off phase. One box was MetaCreation, the other was Corel. Bryce 5 is light years ahead of Bryce 3D!

Now you can design trees! I've seen the demos version of tree designers, now we've got a better tool as part of the package! over 50 tree types and 50 leaf types and endless tweaking options in between. As with any new feature, it IS a bit rough around the edges. Don't expect to set the settings to Scotch Pine, and the leaf to Scotch Pine, and get a Scotch Pine. Instead you wind up with more of a maple tree with Scotch Pine leaves and trunk! But with some tweaking, guess what? You get... A SCOTCH PINE! These trees are CPU hungry though, don't expect to create trees and get blazing renders, it ain't gonna happen. But it beats the heck out of importing DXFs and OBJs.

Speaking of importing, WOW! Bryce 5 handles a ton of import options, even full Lightwave scenes!

Metaballs are another new feature, don't expect a full blown modeler implementation though. You're stuck with positive spheres unless you use the "secret" (undocumented) shift-click to create negative spheres (nice to see Corel is keeping the tradition of undocumented features!). Hopefully Corel will keep going with Bryce and Bryce 6 will offer the remainder of the primitives as meta-objects!

The terrain editor has really improved... Now you can create terrains up to 2048x2048 (although these took a while to generate on my 1Ghz Athlon). The terrain editor has greatly improved though, much more user friendly.

Guess what??? No more limit on materials! or objects, or textures! Now if you create a subdirectory in your materials folder you can create another set of materials! The default is to have an "installed" folder, and a "user" folder, but another undocumented feature lets you create more folders and VIOLA! they appear. Simply copy over the OBP or MAT files, clear them out, and you've got new settings, same with textures! AWESOME! No more cramming everything under one category. Want a category called "Walls", make it! And no more clicking on an arrow and holding til things speed up, you can just click & drag now, be at the bottom of the list in an instant, no more scrolling endlessly!

The Sky lab is awesome, lots of new features there too!

So needless to say, if you're waiting to upgrade, spend the $$$'s now. Don't bother waiting, this is a 6 star product on a 5 star scale!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A flawed favorite, April 17, 2003

By 

x_bruce (Oak Park, ILLINOIS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bryce 5 (CD-ROM)

I've been using Bryce since it was ported to Windows at version 2.0. My impressions were, this is great but I can spend a brief eternity waiting for it to render. As features were added and stability was addressed we get to Bryce 5 which does a nice job of creating interesting 3D images. Created to be a nature designer Bryce 5 offers import and texture mapping of several 3D objects. This is important as it's nice to sometimes add buildings, animals or humans to pictures you design. The modeling tools are designed for natural scene creation but it is easy to create indoor scenes, 2D style studies and combinations of styles.

The renderer is excellent with many options for developing your world. Bryce's interface has always been unique but intuitive. Still you will want to read the bland manual. After market books are poor to acceptable - beware of books depending on you purchasing modeling packages or 3D clip art.

The animation options are acceptable for a program in this price range but aren't really suitable for much more than short clips, say 5 to 30 seconds. Even with a very fast, highly tweaked computer Bryce can crawl when rendering.

Some solutions are to keep your animations simple and turn off the antiailising, on smaller frame sizes it is harder to notice and saves between 20 to 60% of render time. If developing stills make your picture slightly larger and don't use antiailising, go into your favorite graphics editor and resize. You will get faster renders and usually no jagged edges. For fun and small projects Bryce is great. It is priced to be appealing to the home user that isn't necessarily an artist but will certainly learn as they compose and develop scenes and animations.

Bryce 5 is getting old and lacking in many modern features including the inability to take advantage of modern processors. Still, it is fun to work with and can create some of the most realistic landscapes or abstracts you can imagine. Bryce 5 expects little from the user, even it's learning curve is simple, especially for a 3D program, and has impressive results. Because of it's slow renderer it is not really a good professional solution although pro quality landscaping tools for high quality 3D programs cost three times Bryce's price and demand a general purpose 3D program well into the high hundred dollar to multi-thousand dollar solution.

If you were curious what you could do in the visual arts but currently don't have the talent you can realize many of your ideas in Bryce 5. Much of 3D graphics have more to do with physics than artistic skills. If you are good at visualizing Bryce 5 is an excellent and modest costing program.