Corel Bryce 5.0 Upgrade

by Corel

Product Details

Product Manual [5.51mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005LD1F
• Item model number: BRY50PCMUGENG0
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,290 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• 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 5.0 lets you create realistic 3-D landscapes and animations.Striking an optimum balance between power and ease of use, Bryce is anideal way to integrate 3-D technology into your creative process.Smooth Network Rendering saves time by letting you render images onmultiple computers. A new Light Lab gives you robust control over lightingdirection, and the new Tree Lab ensures a more accurate depiction ofreal-world environments.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Buggy...don't buy it yet!, November 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Corel Bryce 5.0 Upgrade (CD-ROM)

As a user of Bryce 3D and Bryce 4, and very satisfied with them, I'm very disappointed that Corel apparently felt they had to rush this release out before they debugged it. On 3D graphics discussion boards across the internet, folks are saying they had to deinstall it.
There are several serious problems with this release. It renders extremely slow; at least twice as slow as Bryce 4. It hangs machines (I've had this experience with W2K machine with 512 memory), crashes machines, loses track of where files are. The tree lab has possibilities, but the trees are still extremely polygon intensive, and more than a few trees duplicated in your scene may cause a crash, or rendering errors that leave parts of the trees missing.
Corel is supposedly working on a patch right now; I'd advise that if you have Bryce 4, keep it...don't bother with Bryce 5 until they get the problems ironed out.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not there yet, January 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Corel Bryce 5.0 Upgrade (CD-ROM)

I have Bryce 4 which I'm running on a 600MHz cpu with 128RAM and I recently got a chance to play with B5 on a 1.8 GHz machine with 512RAM. Incredibly, the new version on hardware with 3x the oomph of my own system was SLOWER to render!!...and boys 'n girls, Bryce's slow rendering engine is already the ickiest, least acceptable part of the package. Okay, so you can supposedly distribute the rendering chores over multiple computers in a network now but y'know, I only have the one machine and it's the same story for most home users, I'd suspect. This is a really inadequate "fix" for the software's worst problem.

Yes, there's good stuff here, too. :) The new tree lab is a significant improvement but again, you'll just add to the rendering nightmare if you use it. I like the new light controls, too, and the terrain editor is better. The disappointment in Bryce comes from seeing the potential for glory, the means by which you can play God and create your own worlds in convincing detail, but not quite being able to get there and having to skimp on the details in an eternal battle to keep down the rendering times. Much of what you'll want to do with it can be achieved if you only do web graphics and keep to relatively low resolutions: go no higher than 800x600 pixels for wallpaper or whatever and a fairly complex creation will take hours to render, but if you want to do a 300dpi file for a 5"x7" print...2100x1500 pixels...you need to keep the composition very simple, no plants, minimal glass, metal and reflective stuff...and you'll probably need to leave your 'puter on overnight, anyway. :( Turn off your wallpaper, turn off your screensaver, close everything else you can (basically, burn all the furniture in your house to keep warm!), whisper prayers and incantations, do whatever you have to do to give every spare ounce of processor power to Bryce while it's rendering. *sigh* Maybe you'll avoid a crash, at least.

Final note: I know this is for the home user, not for pros, but that doesn't mean it can't get a lot better than it is and I'm thinking good thoughts for the next few releases--but saving my $$ for now. I've been a CorelDRAW! and Photo-Paint user for years and I have every confidence Corel will do great things with Bryce, but they're not there yet.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Smooth Upgrade, August 3, 2001

By 

M. Granderson "mg" (APO, AE United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Corel Bryce 5.0 Upgrade (CD-ROM)

I must say that I was a bit poisoned against the idea of corel continuing the legacy of bryce. Somehow it seemed that metacreations was at it's heart. But I have had to eat some words after checking this upgrade out. Really it is about the best thing to happen to bryce since it's creation. The animation and surfacing tools are greatly improved. It still has lots of pretty interface but seems to be more productivity geared. The new tree system is a BIG plus. Before there was only one tree I found useful and it was only 2d! Now you can crack up any tree, entirely unique. If you are or ever were a bryce person you will defiantly want to check this out.

I've moved on as well to bigger and better programs but bryce will always occupy a special place on my hard drive. It is always a great tool to create great results in a short space of time.