I
haven't even looked at Bryce since version 1 or so, so when
I got a hold of Bryce 5, I was, needless to say, pleasantly
surprised. Bryce 5 is Corel's 3D landscaping, modeling, animation
and rendering suite that the company acquired during the dissolution
of Metacreations. As with an awful lot of tools originally
developed by Metacreations, Bryce has achieved something of
a cult status among users, along with Painter (which Corel
also owns), Poser (now owned by Curious Labs) and Carrara
(now owned by TGS). There's better reason for this now than
ever, as we'll get to below, as well as more reason than ever
for professional 3D artists to consider Bryce as an addition
to their toolset.
First
off, I should note that Bryce 5 is Corel's first Mac OS X-native
application. However, I'm reviewing it under Mac OS 9.0.4
because, as with most applications running under OS X, there
are still some limitations attributable to the OS itself that
won't be worked out until the OS X 10.1 release due in September.
These are chiefly related to OpenGL, but there are also some
quirks in the OS X interface and device support that simply
make working in OS 9 better for the time being. In OS X, this
translates to slightly longer render times, which can create
unnecessary problems for those working on multi-frame pieces,
and a lack of support for some input devices, such as pressure-sensitive
tablets.
All of
this said, it should also be noted that Bryce 5 is Carbonized
for OS X, meaning that you simply install the OS 9 version,
which will then work natively in OS X as well without any
further installation or hassles.
At any
rate, kudos to Corel for putting out an OS X version for what
is right now a very limited subset of the Macintosh market.
This is the kind of move that shows when a company's interested
in serving the customer's needs, even customers in a small
niche. It takes time and money to port applications to OS
X, and it says a lot about a company that chooses to do so.
What
it does
Bryce is a tool for creating terrestrial, atmospheric and
astronomical features in 3D and rendering scenes either as
still images or as QuickTime movies (including QuickTime VR).
While it is possible to do some modeling with the primitives
and new metaballs in Bryce 5, the program is geared much more
heavily toward landscapes and seascapes than anything else.
Ideally, the output from Bryce would be used for compositing
with the output from another 3D package, and the program offers
a number of masking options to make the process easier. It's
also possible to export some (but not all) of Bryce's objects
into popular 3D formats or import 3D objects into Bryce.
I see
Bryce as a tremendous tool for creating mattes/backdrops for
film or video work to be incorporated into either live action
or animated pieces. I think it would be even better if it
could be hosted from within other 3D packages (a la Poser)
or gain better integration with other programs (as detailed
below), but, as it stands, it's still quite a useful, professional-level
tool.
Bryce 5's new interface
Now I
already know what a lot of 3D artists out there are thinking.
First, they're very attached to their 3D package. They've
invested years of training to master it; no other tool can
do what it can do; and they surely do not want to leave it
to do a portion of a project in another application. Add to
this the fact that Bryce is almost never the topic of interest
in professional discussions, and they have lots of fuel for
skepticism. These seem to be fairly common attitudes for 3D
artists, but they're also very impractical and limiting views.
If you're a little more open-minded, I suggest simply going
to Corel's site and downloading the 30-day trial version.
It's more than enough time to learn the basics of the program
and give you enough information to tell you whether it will
be useful for your needs. Couldn't hurt, right?
New
and improved
Version 5.0 adds major new features and minor tweaks that
make this a very worthy upgrade for users of previous versions.
It would simply take too long to cover every feature of this
program, but we'll take a look at some of the major functions
and enhancements that appear in this latest release.
Rendering
As a whole, rendering has gained several improvements, including
volume lighting, volume objects and volume blending for both
altitude and distance from the camera. Camera features, such
as depth of field, improve the photorealism of the render.
And new shadow and light features, such as self-shadowing
and light falloff, add to the options.
Volume blending and depth
of field add to Bryce's render capabilities.
Click for the full-size image (680 KB).
But by
far the most appreciated new rendering feature is network
rendering, which allows Bryce's rendering client—Bryce
Lightning—to aid in the rendering of still images or
animation files across a network, including the Internet.
All you have to do is run the client on a networked device
(regardless of platform) and enter the client's IP address
in the network rendering setup dialog. Each client can also
be set to render tiles of a single frame so that even still
images can benefit from additional processors.
This is
particularly important with the new, higher-quality dithering,
256 ray-per-pixel tracing and more processor-intensive optimizations,
render times are longer in version 5 than in version 4. You
can also very easily set a project to render only on client
machines, freeing up your primary computer so that you can
continue modeling or move on to another project.
Tree
Lab
Version 5.0 also adds a new Tree Lab, which allows you not
only to place procedural trees into your scene, but also to
add a high degree of customization to them. You can also multi-replicate
your trees to populate a forest or jungle.
The negative
of trees in Bryce is that they can't be exported into other
formats. So, basically, if you want to use Bryce's trees,
you're going to have to do your final render in Bryce as well.
I happen to think that Bryce's rendering is better than at
least one popular, "high-end" package out there,
but you may think differently. (I'll let you guess which one.
Hint: It's not available for the Mac.)
At any
rate, if you do plan to render from Bryce, the Tree Lab is
a great tool for creating custom trees rather than going to
the trouble of downloading polygonal trees, importing them
and then customizing each one to prevent them from looking
like duplicates of one another.
Light
Lab
The Light Lab is another new workspace introduced in version
5.0. It allows for the creation of custom lights. This, again,
is another great addition to Bryce's toolset because it pulls
together everything you could possibly want to control about
a light into a single interface.
This includes
intensity, softness, shadow ambiance and softness, volume,
falloff, color and gel type. (Gels can include textures and
images.) It also provides a space for animating a light's
properties outside the main timeline and away from the clutter
of the Advanced Motion Lab. (Actually, the Motion Lab isn't
cluttered, but, since the window can't be resized, it's just
easier to work in the Light Lab for animating light properties.)
Sky
Lab
Not new to Bryce 5, though certainly improved, is the Sky
Lab. The Sky Lab allows you to customize the look of the atmosphere
in your scene and position celestial bodies (sun, moon and
stars). If you're familiar at all with the KPT 6 Sky Effects
filter for Adobe Photoshop, using the Sky Lab in Bryce will
be a no-brainer. It functions almost exactly the same way—not
surprising, since both KPT and Bryce came from the same developer,
and they're both now owned by Corel—but works in 3D space.
It also gives you a few added tools, including cloud cover
and atmospheric conditions.
Many of
the features in the Sky Lab are accessible directly in the
main composition workspace, but the Lab itself offers more
options for customizing the scene, including animating cloud
movement, adding volume to the atmosphere, etc. For night
scenes, you can also add custom star fields or select a field
based on the stars that are visible from the earth.
And
the rest
Over the four weeks that I've had Bryce 5 on my system, I've
had a chance to test a good bulk of the new features in various
scenes. There's really so much that's new that I can't cover
it all adequately. So I'll just cover a few of the more major
ones here.
First
there's new support for metaballs. For me, Bryce is first
and foremost a landscaping program, and I won't pretend that
it would be a great environment for doing character modeling
or anything like that. Still, the addition of metaballs does
give Bryce users one more tool to work with in the creation
of their worlds, and that can't be bad.
There
are new import and export filters for supporting a broad range
of objects from popular (and not so popular) commercial 3D
programs. These include everything from LightWave scenes and
objects (but not LightWave 6 or above), OBJ, DFX, NFX, VRML,
U.S. Geological Survey DEM and DDF and a whole lot more. I
do hope that in a future release users will be able to export
entire scenes to popular formats, especially the trees that
Bryce creates.
It also
includes new terrain grid resolutions (up to 4,096 for planetary
scale) and five
new mapping modes, including Sinusoidal, World Front, World
Side, World Cubic and Object Cubic.
Room
for improvement
I've mentioned already several features that I think could
be added in future updates of Bryce 5. These suggestions are
not to detract at all from what the program can do right now;
they just seem like features that could help the landscaping
process along.
I have
to say that in terms of disappointments, which I include in
every review, Bryce offered very few. Rendering speed, of
course, can always be improved. And more procedural objects
could always be added. But for me the one thing that I think
detracted from the experience of using Bryce was the interface.
It's been improved, no doubt, but there's still room for more
improvement.
In terms
of appearance, the interface is actually quite nice. But in
terms of function, in many cases, you'll find that functions
can be accessed only through little dots or icons not really
related to the function they represent. I would like to see
a customizable interface in the next update, including the
ability to add nested functions to the main interface and
the ability to add text labels to icons.
Second,
when you mouse over an icon in the main interface, explanatory
text appears in the lower left corner of the screen; however,
in subsections, such as the Motion Lab and Sky Lab, you get
no indication whatsoever as to the function of a given button.
Third,
I would like some standard interface elements added in, such
as the ability to move and resize windows, more functions
accessible via menus, etc.
I'm not
saying that every interface should resemble Photoshop. Just
that icons should be linked to function in a memorable and
logical manner, that users should be able to make adjustments
to the interface to make it work better for them and that
in no case should interface design get in the way of the work.
The
bottom line
Bryce is by no means the only dedicated landscaping tool on
the market, but in its own right it has matured into an elegant
tool for composing 3D landscapes and terrestrial, atmospheric
and astronomical features. As I say, the interface will take
some getting used to for those who are unfamiliar with Bryce,
as, in my case, I would often find a feature after much searching,
only to forget where I found it the next time I needed to
access it. Nevertheless, the world of 3D is littered with
highly stylized interfaces. If you can get used to any other
3D application's workflow, you can get used to Bryce.
As for
the capabilities of the program, I have to give high marks.
As it should be, the creation of hills, plains and bodies
of water is simple but with enough customizability to allow
you to be as creative as you want to be. Beyond simple terrestrial
features, I also have to give high marks to all of the individual
workspaces (Light Lab, Sky Lab, etc.) for their ease of use
and sophistication. Animation is also very easy, with several
automatic animation features (such as cloud movement), which
can also be keyframed. In other words, you can set the rate
of movement for clouds and then keyframe the rate of movement
later in the timeline, all within the Sky Lab workspace.
Finally,
the rendering features in version 5 have gained some great
additions, particularly in the areas of depth of field and
volume lighting and atmospheres. The network renderer is also
a critical addition to this process for times when you need
to render large, complex files with maximum ray tracing (256
rays per pixel), which can take an enormous amount of time
to complete on a single machine. I really came into this review
expecting not too terribly much from Bryce's rendering capabilities,
figuring I'd focus more on the creation and editing tools.
But, in the end, the renderer impressed me. It puts out some
very nice looking images. The improvements to the quality
of the renders have made the rendering engine a bit on the
slow side, but hopefully this is a matter of optimization
for a forthcoming update.
Corel
has done a great job of taking Bryce to the next level in
version 5 and bringing it further into the realm of professional
3D tools. Long-time Bryce users will appreciate all of the
new features of the program, and new users should be delighted
by the sophistication of this program. For those who need
software for developing 3D worlds and animating them, I give
Bryce 5 a strong buy recommendation.
Bryce
5 is available for Macintosh, Mac OS X and Windows for $299
for the full version, $149 for the upgrade. For more information,
visit http://www.corel.com.
