Description:
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
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