Customer Reviews

Bryce 5

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.....

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!

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.

If your on any kind of budget and start choking when you see $500 or $1,000 for 3D software this is an excellent product. Bryce 5 has an easy to learn interface that allows you to move and alter objects, change atmosphere, and change camera views without having to beat it with a stick. The program lets you save objects, textures, and atmospheres you've created into the program so that they're always there when you come back. It also comes with alot of preset object and textures you can use, so you can create an image the first time you open the program. This isn't the program you want if your trying to do complex character animation, but it's really good for landscapes, architecture, and background. If your not sure this product is for you go to a few 3D sites and look at images people have made with Bryce 5. I've been using it for a year and I'm really happy with it.

If you don't want to learn a high end 3D program like Lightwave or Studio Max which have high learning curves this is good for creating landscapes and building environments. However Bryce has a major downfall: if you are rendering an image that is to be used in a print publication or in a high resolution output, this program takes a huge amount of time to render a premium result. For online stuff I rendered images at low quality and it wasn't too bad, but when it came to images for newspaper print quality, each image took over a day to re-render at 1200 res. I couldn't do anything else while the render was taking place, like check my email because it would interupt the process. The plus side is, I do have Lightwave but because it is so difficult to learn, I find myself using Bryce anyways. If you own poser, you can import your models into the program as well as other program files like obj. and studio. You can break your import up into pieces once inside of Bryce to edit the materials for each part individually and group them back together, this is very useful. The interface is very intuitive and easy to learn. The manual with five is electronic, so I often find myself looking in the users guide that came with Bryce4.

Awesome, not as customizable as 3ds max, but what is? Anyway if you get this, you need photoshop (for 2d image4 effects), and poser or lightwave for models. Although you can create simple to fairly complex boolean shapes, you can't create complex models (such as a human face). If you're a 3d artist, save yourself time (3ds max can do anything here, but the built in textures are amazing), money (only a few thousand less than either light wave or 3ds), and get great results!!

Bryce, the 3D landscape animation package has finally incorporated trees!

Once you get used to the user interface, Bryce is actually quite an easy application to use. I had my first scence up and ready for some brief animating in about an hour.

In terms of lanscapes and simple animation, the potential of Bryce is as limitless as your own imagination. I am a true fan of Bryce and recommend it to anyone wholeheartedly.

My only criticism is the lack of grasses and ground foilage. I think this is something that the makers of Bryce need to address. I would, without hesitation, give Bryce five stars if it incorporated these things into its next release.

Have you always wanted to create realistic looking 3D landscapes? Well this is your program. Bryce offers it's users the ability to create beautifully rendered 3D landscapes. The program is fairly easy to learn and can be used by everyone from beginners to experts. The new interface makes Bryce even easier to use. Also, the new additions of the Tree Lab and Metaballs add an unlimited amount of new ideas and creations one can come up with. It comes highly recommened.

This program is mostly intuitive and easy to use and learn. Great program to use when starting 3D graphics. I have used it (and bryce 4) for several years now, and my only complaint is my slow computer. Network rendering helps with that a lot though. THe problems would be: if you want complex lighting, this is a slow program; light does not act like it should (like off of mirrors and such); making a good texture adds a lot of render time; and this program ensures that it is the only thing you are using on your computer when it is running (locks taskbar in windows until you alt-tab to another program). Other than those things which I rarely have a problem with, I really like the program.

This is a great program. Throughout all the modelling and landscaping I have done, I have faithfully turned to Bryce.

It offers the basics shapes (spheres, cubes...), but its real power is in landscaping and scenary renders, offering you many filters and tools to creat unique and detailed mountains.

The simple set-up of this program makes it easy for everyone to use. I have to agree that rendering takes longer than I would like, but you can always buy more RAM and increase your speed.

I did switch over to Lightwave and 3dsmax for a while; however, I did not like the four screen set-up, and returned once again to Bryce for it's nifty camera switches.

All and all, it's a wonderful program for those looking to pick up this hobby.