Bryce 5

Rating:
Summary: A flawed favorite
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good for what it is, but ... for what it could be
Review: I've used Bryce 5 since it came out, and before it, Bryce 3. Bryce is indisputably a renderer which is the most powerful for how easy it is to use. Who wants to look at a gray, black and white interface and type in numbers, even if it looks a bit better? I don't, certainly, but what frustrates me about Bryce is ultamitely how unprofessional it is. It's the slowest renderer on the pro market, it has inummerable bugs, and the company that makes it has downright awful tech support for fixing said bugs. I've lost entire files when a bug screws up some crucial part of the file and I have to start over or am able to salvage part of it... As a speed comparison, I rendered a simple scene in Strata involving a few objects (without sky or transparency or lighting) and rendered the same scene in Bryce(Strata was on super-high quality, bryce was on standard) and it came out with the Strata image taking about 15 seconds to render as opposed to the Bryce image's 35 seconds.

The preset and object features are nice, although you should have a feature to add your own libraries. I did this myself, although I had to erase some to make room for my own.

Don't fool yourself into thinking this is a great renderer. It's very easy to use, but requires a very patient user (for all the bugs) and a very, very fast computer(since it renders so slowly).

Rating:
Summary: Creating worlds...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: What are you waiting for? ORDER IT!
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful product
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: It's Awesome
Review: It sure is hard to beat having the power to create your own world in 3D for so little money. If you want to break into 3D graphics, this is a good place to start.

However, if I had it do to over again, I would have bought a book on Bryce and read it before trying to learn by experience. That's the hard way.

Also, there are some useability issues that annoy me continually.

For example, there is a "select all" function key shortcut, but no "deselect all" function key. Why not? Photoshop does this.

Another is that they give you the ability to create trees, and they pre-load about seventy different tree templates, but in the select pull-down the don't alphabetize the tree names, so even if you know what you're looking for you have to visually scan the entire list.

Finally, and most annoying, once you get more than a few objects in your project then selecting an individual object becomes a real chore. There's a function that allowes one to select objects without clicking on them, which is rather handy.

However, if you have for example ten different cubes in your project, and you want to select one of them, you click on the little cube selector on the bottom and you can choose to select from the list of cube objects. However, there's nothing on the screen to identify the cube objects, so I have to select all the cubes until I find the one I want.

I find myself taking more time to select the objects I want to manipulate than I do actually manipulating the objects. Once I've spent a few hours with this product, I'm worn out, frusterated, and I don't want to use it again for several days.

The bottom line is that this software is powerful, affordable, but not much fun to use once you get past "Wow, I just created a mountain with a mouse-click."

Rating:
Summary: Great power for creativity and low price, but annoying...
Review: It sure is hard to beat having the power to create your own world in 3D for so little money. If you want to break into 3D graphics, this is a good place to start.

However, if I had it do to over again, I would have bought a book on Bryce and read it before trying to learn by experience. That's the hard way.

Also, there are some useability issues that annoy me continually.

For example, there is a "select all" function key shortcut, but no "deselect all" function key. Why not? Photoshop does this.

Another is that they give you the ability to create trees, and they pre-load about seventy different tree templates, but in the select pull-down the don't alphabetize the tree names, so even if you know what you're looking for you have to visually scan the entire list.

Finally, and most annoying, once you get more than a few objects in your project then selecting an individual object becomes a real chore. There's a function that allowes one to select objects without clicking on them, which is rather handy.

However, if you have for example ten different cubes in your project, and you want to select one of them, you click on the little cube selector on the bottom and you can choose to select from the list of cube objects. However, there's nothing on the screen to identify the cube objects, so I have to select all the cubes until I find the one I want.

I find myself taking more time to select the objects I want to manipulate than I do actually manipulating the objects. Once I've spent a few hours with this product, I'm worn out, frusterated, and I don't want to use it again for several days.

The bottom line is that this software is powerful, affordable, but not much fun to use once you get past "Wow, I just created a mountain with a mouse-click."

Rating:
Summary: Excellent 3D Modelling & Animation Application for Beginners
Review: Looking back on the 30 days of the program's trial version, I must admit that it has made me addicted to 3D Art and Graphics.

The interface has a) a Mac-like design :o) and is b) very easy to use. The tutorials explain briefly and sufficiently the basics of 3D landscaping and modelling, Boolean functions included. There are several 'labs', in which the light settings, tree shapes etc. can be modified. The rendered pictures have a quite good quality.

All in all I can strongly recommend Corel Bryce 5 especially to all beginners in 3D Modelling and Animation.

Rating:
Summary: I found this site very nice and looking good
Review: Sir/Ma,

I Dasola Ajayi, a Nigerian citizen. I'm one of using Corel draw to design many things because it's lovely, easier and faster.

I'm looking forward to know you better than this.

Thanks and God bless.

Dasola Ajayi.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Buy.
Review: 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.