Anybody know how Corel Graphics purchase of Bryce, Painter and KPT is going to affect those programs?

Dear Valued Customer, An exciting agreement has been reached between MetaCreations Corporation and Corel Corporation! Three well-established, highly popular professional graphics product lines from MetaCreations have been acquired by Corel: MetaCreations Painter(TM), Kai's Power Tools(R) (KPT(R)) and Bryce(R). Corel has a rich history of developing and marketing successful graphics software for fine artists, creative professionals and hobbyists. We look forward to working with you, as loyal users of Bryce, KPT and MetaCreations Painter, and we plan to develop some innovative products in the near future. We'd like to reassure you that Corel is completely committed to continuing the development of these products on various platforms, including Mac(R), PC and possibly Linux(R). To ensure a smooth transition, Corel has contracted Mark Zimmer, Tom Hedges and John Derry, the creators of MetaCreations Painter. Corel also plans to contract additional MetaCreations engineers to assist in the development of the MetaCreations Painter, KPT and Bryce product lines. MetaCreations will continue to handle customer service for the MetaCreations Painter, KPT and Bryce family of products until June 30, 2000 after which time Corel will provide full customer support. In addition, MetaCreations will provide technical support until May 19, 2000, and will continue to respond to all technical support inquiries until June 30, 2000, from customers with whom it has annual support agreements. Corel will handle technical support starting May 20, 2000, and respond to customers with annual support agreements with MetaCreations effective July 1, 2000. Corel has also agreed to honor support and upgrade privileges to registered owners of Bryce 4, KPT 5, KPT 6, KPT Vector Effects and MetaCreations Painter 6, subject to proof of purchase and within applicable time limits. For more information on support for these products, please visit: http://corel.flonetwork.com/cgi-demo/flo?x=dAuuoBEwomBug Corel would like to extend to you a warm welcome, and hopes this will be the beginning of a lasting relationship. For more information, we invite you to visit both Web sites located at www.corel.com and www.metacreations.com. Sincerely, Mr. Mark Zimmer Dr. Michael Cowpland Creator of MetaCreations Painter President and CEO, Corel Corporation That was a copy of a letter I recieved from Corel, I think anyone who owns a registered copy of Bryce will get this letter in thier email

yeah, I received the same e-mail, I was wondering how it will affect us in terms of customer support and the like? Pat

Corel will handle the customer support on pc/mac versions of Bryce and they don't plan on any major changes to the program. Neal

As a LightWaver who uses Bryce to create terrain's... all I care about is will it work the same! Will it still export just as well? The Terrain editor that exports LWO/LWS files is the whole reason why I have Bryce! It's a hardy little stand-alone program that does one thing and does it vary well! I can have it running on a Pentium Pro 266mgH with 128megs of RAM with LightWave, and there is no lag in Either Program! Things get done with Bryce! What I want to know is why didn't Adobe purchase Kai Power Tools?

Will Corel cooperate with Curious Labs on animating Poser life within Bryce? Bryce is much more than a terrain generator. Undefinable surrealism has always been Bryce's great strength. I work with ElectricImage 2.9 every day, but there is something about Bryce that "changes" your mind. The animation of Poser characters within Bryce by importing a pre-animated sequence of 3D files into contiguous frames is extremely time consuming, but the results are almost always beyond description. An entire branch of digital cartooning is lost to us if integration never takes place. -Gear

From what I know Metacreations gave up on that. There was to much of a coding issue between Bryce & Poser and they just couldn't get it to work. Now that Poser & Bryce have gone there separate ways to different companies I wouldn't count on it happening. Neal