Bryce 5.0 FREE 'til 9/6 Options

[Matthew Hampton]

Hi there,

I wasn't too sure where to put this, but DAZ Productions (the new owners of Bryce) are giving free downloads from cnet's download.com (link here).

Get it while you can.

Marketing blah, blah...
Bryce allows you to create breathtakingly realistic 3D landscapes and animations. Striking an optimum balance between power and ease of use, this innovative software is an ideal way to integrate 3D technology into your creative process. Smooth network rendering saves valuable time by letting you render images on multiple computers. The Light Lab gives you robust control over lighting direction, and the Tree Lab ensures a more accurate depiction of real-world environments. Plus, an intuitive user interface simplifies the design process.

[benbakelaar]

holy cow, thanks for the heads up!

[Jason]

Fine print:
NOTE: Bryce 5.0 does not run under Mac OS X Tiger (Mac OS 10.4 and above).

No wonder they are giving it away. On Sept. 7 they will come out with version 6 that does runs on 10.4

[Mike H]

It states the upgrade will only be 19.95 if you do the free download and join whatever this artZone group is...

m.

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A Limited Time Special In addition to being part of the hottest online art community anywhere, ArtZone members with active profiles set up before September 6, 2006, will receive a voucher to upgrade to Bryce 5.5 for only $19.95 - a $100 savings!

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[araki5]

Do a lot of people here use Bryce? I got the proggie last year and have messed with it off and on. I tried using the shaded relief tutorial on Patterson's website, but I never could get it to work right. I think I needed a (discontinued) plugin to make the dem compatible.

Still the bryce community are a lively bunch. I wish I would have waited and gotten it for free! doh, bart!

[benbakelaar]

When I used to be into 3d modeling/raytracing years ago, Bryce was considered the easy way out, if I remember correctly.. it does everything for you. And looking at it now, with its ridiculously customized interface, it reminds me of comments I've seen recently about Flash designers who get out of hand with their funky UI designs, vs. using a standard "windows" menu layout, or at least an interface familiar to the user.

Anyway, Bryce is still great to turn on and mess around with from time to time... pretty easy to get spectacular results!

[Mike H]

Bryce is the wackiest interface I've ever used, and honestly it is a bit too far out for me to grasp... I have to have the manual on my desk... but at NACIS I've seen the most spectacular maps produced by Alex Tait and Tom Patterson using Bryce... when driven correctly, it makes the most realistic landscapes I've ever seen.

m.

[Matthew Hampton]

Kai Krouse created that "brilliant" gui along with many other wacky ones for Metacreations (which became known as Metacremations b/c most of their awesome software didn't make it past 1.0 due to the dotcombust). My favorite software from them was Canoma, but I dabbled with Amorphium, Headline Studio, etc.

There are other rendering softwares that can produce (in my opinion) better terrains (VNS/World Construction Set, Maya, etc.), but Bryce seems to be more approachable if you can get past the interface. In Bryce you can often slide into the slippery timewarp of fiddling with everything ad nauseum. I think this new group (DAZ Productions) is trying to leverage that complexity with their content packs.

[Martin Gamache]

One thing I don't like about Bryce is that AFAIK it was not created with real world terrain modelling in mind, thus it has some limitations on how it uses real world GIS datasets. WCS is much better in that regards.

[Hans van der Maa...]

I'll stick with VNS (WCS's "big brother") for the moment. I've seen absolutely gorgeous results coming out of Bryce, but for the moment the interface is a bit too much for me. Not that VNS has an easy interface, but at least it looks 'standard', if you catch my drift...

[Rob]

AFAIK it was not created with real world terrain modelling in mind, thus it has some limitations on how it uses real world GIS datasets.

true dat. it doesn't know about geo-referencing, but I believe is a pretty big user Tom Patterson and it hasn't slowed him down. And it does have some size/extent limitations if I remember correctly.

but you can't beat free.

[Martin Gamache]

I won't deny that ppeople create amazing things with Bryce, however for a while unless you had a MAC it was near impossible to get 16bit PGM files into Bryce, that combined with the poor documentation ( other than Tom's tutorials and the size limtations have always kept me from investing too much time into it although I do like the interface. And I actually paid for my last version of Bryce.