Ok, here's my question. What exactly is difference between Carrara and Bryce? I have Carrara and know what it does, and played with a demo copy of Bryce 2 a long time ago. Does Bryce only do rendering? With Carrara I don't see the point of Bryce (mostly cause I don't know everything it does).

Carrara is an all-purpose modeller/compositor/animation tool/renderer. Bryce does those things too, but it's modelling capabilities are severely limited. It does not do just rendering. IMHO, Bryce (in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing with it, i.e., NOT me... LOL) creates some gorgeous output. But Carrara's renderer has definitely closed the gap compared to its predecessor, RDS. Bryce is extremely good (and some say its primary purpose) is for landscape design. Yes, Carrara includes terrain modelling, but it is severely limited compared to Bryce. If I want to do something that is primarly landscape in nature, I go with Bryce, unless I have Poser importing to do (which I have a hard time with in Bryce), then I use Carrara. I would ask the folks in the Bryce forum exactly everything it can do, because they know the app better than I... I have a real hard time with objects in Bryce (simply because I do not know the app well enough), so I typically use Carrara. I LOVE Bryce landscapes though.... One other thing of note: Carrara has some cool plugins/extensions for it, and more are on the way. I am not aware of any Bryce plugins, except for Elefont which creates text models in Bryce. Anyone know of any others? Anybody else care to chime in and correct me on all my erroneous statements? 8^) HG....

I use the bryce terrain modeler to create seamless, complex compound curve meshes for machine parts. With the grayscale mapping control it's faster and more precise the the landscape modeler in Carrara. However, most of the modeling that I do is spline based which I do in Carrara; something that the current version of Bryce can't do. If the landscape isn't the focus of the image I use Carrara's tools; If landscape is THE focus (or at least atmosphere type of stuff) I'll use Bryce. The volumetric clouds in Carrara are outstanding though. Mark

There's no longer any point to buying Bryce. Carrara renders better and can handle most of what Bryce did. Those bits of landscaping it can't handle are best addressed with Vue; which renders and builds landscapes at near photo perfect quality. Build it in Carrara, pose it in Poser, then place it into a Vue scene and render.

Based on my recent reading of the manual Carrara has a terrain modeller with the same features and more than I remember from Bryce 2. I will admit that Carrara doesn't have the tree library that I remember from Bryce, but I am sure there are ways to work around that. With the volumetric clouds and fog, as well as the neat stuff you can do with light sources, and particle systems and things like that I still don't understand the point of Bryce.

Beautiful landscapes, most of all. Also for someone (like myself) who can't drop a load of money on something they might not use fully. I started out with Bryce, and still like to use it for a final render. I model in Carrera, Pose in Poser, and then bring it into my landscape.

So it's all a matter of personal preference? How do people like modelling in Carrara? I use Rhino for my modelling currently. I have only had Carrara a week so I have yet to learn how to use the 3 modellers in it.

Virtually all of my modeling is spline so I can't address the Mesh Modeler as well. (However, I haven't had any issues with it). The spline modeler has excellent control. It's kind of a different way of thinking when you get started but starts making sense. File sizes are extremely small when compared to mesh models. In the Mesh Modeler I really like the multires subdivide and sphere of attraction tools. Seems to be fairly intuitive to use. (at least for my damaged brain) I will have to say that even though Carrara boasts a 1024 terrain mesh resolution, mesh models created in Bryce at that resolution and imported to C are superior to ones made within C using the same grayscale map as a base art at the 1024 res. Don't know why that is but it's really obvious. I'll post an example later if I've got time. Bryce also has superior procedural shader tools for seamless organic and water textures. However, the shader tools in Carrara are outstanding in their own way, especially if you use any of the available plug-ins to augment them. My own biased opinions! :) Mark

I've only had Carrara for a week, so I'm not gonna say anything about it. And I never used RDS. But I will say this: 3DStudio, though less intuitive, gives you infinitlly more control. But thats just my oppinion. However, I want to learn Carrara, I'm quite sure it will be an outstanding app. in the later versions. 'm buying the Bible next week. Maybe I'll change my mind. Hmmmmm.... Maybe a bit off the subject? Oh well. : ) But I do like Bryce better than Carrara.

The Bryce renderer, although slower, is IMHO better than that of Carrara (it fakes caustics, the sun looks very realistic etc.). I own both programs, but I am having trouble with the modelers in Carrara (frequent crashes), whereas I seldom experienced crashes in Bryce. I am using Rhino as a modeler for Bryce.

On terrains, IMHO there is little difference between the programs. (Not counting shader/material issues). However, when creating non-organic shapes, at least for me, Bryce is easier to work with for mesh generation from grayscale images. My pet peeve in Carrara is that you can't easily eliminate the square portion of the imported grayscale. In Bryce, you just pull up the slider control and presto, it's gone. Also, lattice generation is easier in Bryce. I wouldn't want to try to generate these wheel objects with booleans. It can be done with spline modeling but is labor intensive. Grayscale mesh generation is by far the easiest way to handle objects like these. I guess this should go on my Carrara Wishing Well list! :) Mark

Nice modeling, Mark :-) What it you remove the base of the Carrara terrain with a boolean operation?

Depending on how complex the mesh is, sometimes it works, sometimes it leaves interesting 'artifacts'. Mark

I don't know how good of a representation that test is Mark. No offense, but I've seen Carrara do some REALLY amazing things. That Bryce render IS pretty good, but, if you'll remember, there was a thread a little while back with some test renders, the Carrara one looked better and at one minute thirty seconds as opposed to the five hours for Bryce, I don't think fake caustics are worth it. Plus with some clever tweaking you can fake caustics in Carrara too. Just my thoughts. Cool models. :) Peace, Hoborg

Oh, this one wasn't to show render capabilites; both programs are great with that. (although Carrara is faster than Bryce) This is to show just how they handle imported grayscale meshes. :) Mark

What image resolution did you use for such detailed meshes (the wheels)? Will a higher image resolution result in more detailed meshes?

I see. I've had pretty good results from the terrain editor about that. JET black takes the edge off for me. Hoborg

Hoborg, I'm not following. In my source TIFF grayscale file, the black surrounding bounding box is at 100% black. Are you able to make that surrounding box go away from the mesh on your terrains? Dethblud, the meshes are at 1024. Both Bryce and Carrara have those as maximum mesh densities. Mark

Hmm, for me it would probably be quicker to revolve a curve and do some booleans in Rhino and then render it in Carrara than it would to take the time to make the grayscale image in photoshop and then tweak the settings in Carrara to get a mesh that way.

Yeah, it's hard to get that to work and look good, dethblud. Kudos to Mark! That's a lot of work. I can have empty spaces when I have mine jet black. Like having a crater in the terrain. I don't have Carrara on this machine, but I'd be happy to take a look when I get home. Peace, Hoborg