Customer Reviews

Corel Bryce 5.0 Upgrade

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Corel Bryce 5 is what every hard core Bryce user has been asking for! Network rendering on multiple machines, new rendering options, metaballs (organic shapes), a new tree lab, new light lab... the list goes on and on! The best enhancements in my opinion has got to be Network Rendering and the Tree Lab (real trees not the preset ones!). This uprage is smokin'. Check it out you WON'T be disappointed!!!

As an artist who has used Bryce 3D and upgraded to Bryce 4, I was satisfied with the product's ability to render realistic worlds and 3D special effects, even before I upgraded to Bryce 5. But for all the beauty I have been able to create with this affordable yet powerful software, there has been one increasingly prominent sour-note that may pretty much kill-joy everything else I liked.

I am currently rendering a sixteen-second animation using Bryce 5 on a WindowsME PC. The animation is 320-by-240 pixels resolution per frame, and has a frame rate of thirty frames per second. The PC has a Pentium III, 256 megabytes of RAM, a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and on-board 24-bit graphics acceleration. Nevertheless, because the animation includes six to eight transparent metaballs with a marble texture and the refractive properties of water, Bryce tells me that the animation will take at least fifteen DAYS to finish. To make a long story short, Bryce 5 will punish you in slow rendering time for the same intricacy of creativity the software claims to reward.

At first, I wondered whether or not Bryce's rendering engine was software-intensive (i.e. all of the complex floating-point calculations involving exponents, roots, logarithms, trigonometry, and so on are all carried out by the software) or hardware-intensive (i.e. the same complex calculations are passed to and from the CPU's Floating-Point Unit, which is MILLIONS of times faster than the software-intensive method). All Pentium CPU's have an FPU, and since Bryce 5 requires that the PC in question have a Pentium, one would think that Bryce's rendering engine would be hardware-intensive, taking advantage of the FPU's speed and power. Nevertheless, other users have told me that the Bryce 5 rendering engine is only software-intensive, hence the incredibly long rendering times on simple animations that were cursed with having too many complex props and actors in the scene. Other users have advised me to make use of Network Rendering, where several computers sharing a network link carry out the same rendering project together. But it totally defeats the purpose of purchasing an inexpensive yet powerful 3D world-rendering tool when you have to spend tons of extra money on other computers simply to render a scene or animation at a decent rate.

Ultimately, because my work is deadline-driven, I have found that Bryce's dismal rendering times have become absolutely unacceptable. I am already doing research on another 3D-rendering software package that has a considerably faster rendering engine, one that makes use of the FPU. Bryce 5 is excellent for rendering phenomenal 3D worlds and animations, but only if you have a day's, a week's, or even a month's patience, because that's exactly how long it may take.

I bought this product to upgrade my exsiting version of Bryce 4. After many major headaches and constant calls to the manufacturer I still failed to get it to work. Save your money.

Upgrades these days aren't even worth the money. When I first heard that Bryce 4 had an upgrade, however, I couldn't wait to try it. I downloaded the trial version, which is essentially the same as the full, with a thirty day restriction. This program is amazing! The tree lab, new presets, and simplified User Interface all made this even better than Bryce 4. Additionally, it renders more quickly. It even looks more realistic. Buy this program, or at least get the trial. You will not believe it was possible to create such lifelike imgages.

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.

When I purchased Bryce 5, the first 3d graphics and animation program I ever used, it was wonderful. I had no problem creating my own world. Bryce 5 is very easy to use and, once you learn more about how to use it, you can create life-like scenes and animations. About the render time: it only takes a long time if you have complicated scenes with many polygons, reflections, objects that have high refraction, and gasses. Other than that, it's been fast for me. Bryce 5 has only crashed twice in the seven months that I've had it. Corel Bryce 5 is perfect, in my opinion, for beginners. Like I said before, it's VERY easy to use and it's nowhere near as complicated as I thought it would be. I've never used Bryce 4 or Bryce 3D, so, I have nothing to compair Bryce 5 to. However, I'm very happy that I purchased this and I will continue to use it. I've yet to encounter any bugs whatsoever. (The reason it crashed is because I had a virus on my computer.) If you're a beginner, I STRONGLY reccomend this program. If you're an advanced user, well, it's your choice.

This iteration of Bryce has been in the wings for a few years, and was in a sense a test to see what Corel would do to the product line when it was acquired from Metacreations. The quality of the rendering engine has been greatly improved and lacks nothing apart from speed. The rendering time (the amount of time the software takes to create a finished picture from the designed 3D scene) takes significantly longer than the previous 4.x version. Serious 3D enthusiasts might look askance at the model forms, as instead of creating and editing the model forms themselves, Bryce is reliant upon primative booleans. However, there are many importable object file options and a terrain editor that almost makes up for this lack. Those new to 3D designing and hobbyists will find no features missing from the Bryce 5.0 package.