isn't it true that 3DSMax is a high-end 3D graphics computer program? Even with student discounts and everything else, a new version would be somewhere in the area of 2-3000 dollars, no? I received hate mail today from a couple of certain someones that, dear oh dear, I had alienated a potential Bryce user by implying that he or she was a software pirate. Well bend me over and call me spanky, what the hell would YOU think when someone without a clue in Bryce asks for help for a 3DS Max conversion? It's really silly in my mind... I mean they'll supposedly spend 2-20,000 dollars on a piece of software, and won't know how to make some bloody mountains in it, prefering to make them in Bryce? How much sense does that make? Okay, so they've just bought 3DS Max, paid the price of a screaming computer on it, sit down with their mug of coffee and the 3DS Max bible next to them, think they're cool, and then get stuck on making a simple terrain? So they go out and buy Bryce, naturally, since that makes so much sense... I understand that certain people have bought Bryce AND 3dsMax, either through their companies, or through student discounts, or even through freebie offers or what not (it doesn't have to be the latest version). But when someone comes in and asks how you can copy a mountain with a texture on it into 3DSMax, I get two thoughts: a) the person doesn't know how to use Bryce, let alone something like 3DSMax, yet he or she has both programs somehow. b) the person doesn't have a clue about 3DSMax, since he or she wants to copy a terrain WITH the textures on it. That shows that they're a complete newb. Yet they're proud owners of both Bryce AND 3DS Max. Throughout the internet you see these 12-16 year olds who say that they want to learn about computer graphics and so on, and they show you a piece of work they've done, beaming that it's made in 3DS Max. Give me a farking break... Like how dense do you have to be to understand that it's obviously pirated? But okay, innocent until proven guilty. I've alienated someone from Bryce. I'm sure he or she is just a GREAT user of 3DSMax and that they'll benefit that community instead. But wait a second... the guy doesn't even have a gallery to speak of. I KNOW!!!! He's obviously working for Industrial Light and Magic or Dreamworks, and he's not allowed to show his work, which is really world class? But then why ask for help in a bloody online forum, and why would you use Bryce if you can't even bloody control 3DS Max, which I'm SURE that you bought through legitimate means. For those of you who attempted to bite my head off for being anti-social with a green-as-grass newbie, I would venture to ask you to bite me, lest I say something worse. Mihnea

And yes, I am quite aware that there really are people out there who own both Bryce and 3DSMax. And they don't have to be software pirates. In the same way that I wouldn't know if someone IS such a character, I would however challenge you to prove me that he ISN'T. Blow me away with the incredible uses 3DSMax has for Bryce, and I'll say that indeed, you have a point. But I really think that when you try to export a simple bloody mountain which by all possibilities is probably a randomly-generated one, then you have NO business in playing with 3DS Max. Anyway, that's that.

Unless you are aware that 3DS Max need some plug-ins to generate terrains, i.e : "dreamScape2" and it needs a plug-in too work on procedural texture with elevation. and Bryce is cheaper than those 3DS plugins.

"DreamScape2 "cost 595$ ..

Gee, I dont know Drac, if people IMed you or sent you email in private, I would tend to believe that they didnt want to turn the situation into a public circus out of respect for everyone concerned but now here you come along and make it public anyway. So I must have to ask you, what was the sense for those people to IM or email you in the first place? Im certainly glad I wasnt one of those people who emailed you, otherwise I would feel offended that this couldnt have been taken care of between us in private like mature adults. Certainly theres no call for hate mail and such, or for people to become hostile since the original thread pretty much speaks for itself and I personally dont see any reason for a follow-up discussion, its opened and shut. Im sure there was at least one person offended and I would think that would have been the person who originally started the thread when they suddenly found himself or herself in front of the software inquisition and I couldnt very well blame them for feeling like theyve been singled out. Drac, just let me say that at first, I had no clue at what you were driving at in your post. When you made your accusations and spewed your assumptions concerning the software piracy issue, you were most definitely off base. If software piracy is a sticking point with you, then, by all means open an Off Topic thread somewhere and let it all hang out. I understand that software piracy is a big issue but to come out from left field without any evidence whatsoever and make personal accusations is not really the way to receive a newbie or anyone else for that matter into our forum. You have no idea of what people can or cant afford to have! You kind of left me wondering who had died and made this guy the software police? What grants this fellow the authority to even pretend that hes on some esteemed graphics plateau, some pinnacle somewhere overseeing and passing judgments on people and whos using what software to do what with and why? How people get their software and what they do with it, is not really anyones concern unless, of course, youre undercover and working for the FEDs. So yeah, if the accused person had been me, you would have most definitely heard from me. I cant say as I blame them, but hate mail? I wouldnt have wasted my time spouting hate especially over such petty stuff. As far as asking people to bite you, who dont agree with you, well, lets see, thats about as mature as silly puddy.

If you insist.... "stupid". Sorry couldn't resist an invitation like that ;) :D

As for the rest of what you said... I know over here a few courses and uni's use 3dsmax for teaching purposes in the uni labs, so its possible to be using max with out needing to buy it. If the person has bryce at home and they are familiar with it how to do the basics in it, I can definitely see why they would want to export bryce terrains to max simply for ease. Just my .03$ (inflation)

Yes, but pidjy, you can generate terrains in max, I'm pretty sure you just apply a height map to an image of your choice. As for procedural textures with elevation, there are probably plugins that can 'help' with that, but really everything is included in max. Secondly, any max user knows that terragen (free) is a far better terrain exporter than bryce. Both resolution and feature wise. That's its sole purpose. I think drac's point is a valid one, it's something that buggers me too. A: 3dsm users wouldn't dare ask questions in a bryce forum, wouldn't it be more intelligent to ask other 3dsm users who are more likely to have bryce, than bryce users to have 3dsm. nevermind I'm not going on because I don't want to end up in the dog-house again. The whole situation is fishy, and i only suggest the other thread get deleted because we don't want more immature unintelligent 15 year olds 'buying' 3dsm from various unmentionable establishments.

BTW I found 3DS MAX 5+ Character studio4 for only $220 (second hand) .. and Ornlu, the height map in max is good for adding some extra bump details to a model.. but you wont get something such as a Bryce terrain.. or even a terragen one.

pidjy, obviously i have made this matter public with a reason for it. also, i can ask whomever i want to bite me. it might be silly putty, but it's my silly putty. so bite me :)

LOL...no one said you can't ask you're certainly free to do that but you know where you can put your silly puddy. :)

ROFL... yeah.

oh yeah, btw, pidjy, considering this matter doesn't actually have anything to do with you and you accuse me of being childish (BITE ME!), you seem to have pretty serious issues about it. In fact, despite this matter not having anything to do with it, you choose to take it rather personally and drop some pretty heavy words in my direction. Who's the childish one? I'm reacting to certain people who have written to me. and yeah, I'm bringing it public, but only as a larger discussion on the matter.

Any regular Max user is likely to have Effectware's Mountain Object Plug In anyway, but the bryce terrrain -> Max still has it's use. Pidjy, I believe that part of the licence T&C for Max is that it's non - transferable (ie you'd have to pay Discreet a fee to legally use that second hand copy of Max)

It may not be a strange as you might think. My son bought 3dmax and learnt it from scratch. He goes through tut after tut and is starting to come up with amazing things. For instance, he showed me a short anim he's building in 3dm, I was blown away..........In about 9 months he knows 3dm like the back of his hand and yet I couldn't find the materials or primitives when I had a gleg at it! Go figure....

You can generate terrains in 3dsmax using a displacement map based on either a heighmap image or it's own procedural noise. It is FAR easier to generate height maps in bryce and use them in 3dsmax. In fact, many hollywood visual effects labs do this all the time, as it is easier and cheaper to make a grayscale map in bryce than to fiddle with 3dsmax's procedurals to try and come up with something useful. Might I remind you that many of the terrains in the Final Fantasy movie were generated in bryce, as well as a few in the LOTR series. It is not something childish, jut a tool. I find it humorous that you will be an avid bryce supporter, making petitions and chat rooms and such, but then the moment someone asks a question about bryce realtion to another app you accuse the of software piracy. What next, are you going to accuse me of stealing electricity the next time I have a black-out? I have 3dsmax, through my school, and I regularly use bryce grayscale maps as terrains. First of all i spent hours online looking for a terrain plugin for 3dsmax, and the only one I found was the aforementioned $600 dreamscape. And it took some thinking to work it out correctly. I did not have photoshop on the windows machine I was running 3dsm on, so I could not copy and paste the terrain from the terrain editor. Instead, I crafted a vertical orthographic scene in bryce and did a mask render at 2048x2048 resolution. It needed to be orthographic so that there would be no perspective distortion whilst rendering. If you can call that a newbie thing to set up then i'd like to see you try. But oh, wait....your just too good to need to do this. The hand of the 3d god will magically pass through your scene and terraform your terrains for you, and surely anyone else who wonders how you do it it stealing expensive software. Consider yourself BITTEN

The student/faculty ulimited version of Max is under $600. A one-year term is less that $200! When you consider just one book for one semester of college typically runs $75-$125, it's not at all a high price for a college student with a good "book money" budget on hand. My wife is faculty for University of Pheonix Online, which qualified her to buy 3DMax4, which was under $500 at the time. I have very little free time to work with it though, so after a full year with the program, I'm only jsut now finally beginning to grok the modelling tools. Then I just feed the models over to Bryce for Texturing and rendering. (It's frustrating to wait for the renders, but the work of creating and applying the materials and lighting is much fasting for me in Bryce since I'm already comfortable with it.) I've yet to use anything from Max in commissioned work. (At which point I'd technically have to buy the full version.) I also know of several pro 3dMax users that keep Bryce on hand as a "add-on" for Max. The Terrain editor in Bryce is EXTEMELY powerful and worth the price of the product to these guys. Personally, I've found that the even the inner workings of the DTE are significantly more user friendly that the Max toolset. (Just MHO though.) Have fun.

Drac....I didn't accuse you of anything.. and haven't had any heavy words (in your direction or another). read again my messages.. or take some pills against paranoia! ROFL! Cheers!

Drac: I think you were aiming at Quest and hit pidjy by mistake.

Got my particules-ray-gun (modeled in 3DS and rendered in Bryce) .. and just when Drac turn into a bat.. I shoot him!.. (ray made with particule illusion and the bat explosion flare with after-effects and mac-paint!)

Ya know...if someone was punctuationally challenged...they might think you were wanting to be called a "stupid butt"... (avoids the obvious lateral leap to "dumb-ass") Let us imagine someone has Bryce...used it occassionally... then gets Max... I've been in Bryce since Bryce 2, up until this past year I wouldn't have known how to export a terrain out of any of the versions, let alone get the mat to go with it, becuase I never bothered to figure out how to do it. Doubt that I could have found that info in the manual either in anyway that was helpful. Our hypothetical person would know.."Hey, Bryce does terrains." And ask themselves, "Wonder if I can get them over to Max? Simpler than figuring out how to build one there for the moment." Then they come here and get blasted for asking? Bad form that. Too much eastern european cynicism. Remove the silly putty, un-wad your undies, and relax a bit.

I thought that being stupid was a Poser thing (ever notice all the threads that start with stupid there?..but I digress..;)
In a world where Truespace is considered easier than Max, I'll stick with Truespace (if I'm not using something else..;)..all the software I can afford nowadays comes on the front covers of magazines..;) Probably why I don't have Rhino, either (but it looks like fun).

As I said in the other thread Drac, how can you just jump to such conclusions. Whatever happened to being innocent until proven guilty, you didn't give them a chance and just bit their head off. The term kangaroo court comes to mind. We were all newbies at one time and I think that maybe a reason that they asked the question here instead of the 3DSM forum is that generally we are more ameniable than over there, in fact in my experience they can be downright rude. But in saying that you have made this forum as bad as the 3DSM forum or even worse and it is a sad thing that you chased this person away. Consider yourself bitten again. 8) Catlin

That type of presumption must also lead you to brand folks like me a "pirate". I have bryce, poser5, Cinema4d 8, Vue, Deep Exploration, Painter8 ,PSP and Zbrush. I use but a few of these and do not even have them all loaded on my PC at present but will get around to them one day. Still, I seem to remember buying them and having neither hooked hand nor a parrot, I am no high seas bandit. You missed out a somewhat obvious possibility, drac, and that it some people have enough cash on their hands to buy what they like, as I do. If you need to be the greatest 3D master to own these then I have not heard of this rule but maybe you know better. I don't really care for the, guilty by presumption and cynicism attitude, and neither I suspect, will others.

You know, Drac, some of the things you say can be so incredibly insightful, so full of, I daresay, wisdom. One look at your gallery shows you to be a fantastic artist, one that I admire a great deal. But then.... then you open your mouth and come out with something so completely boorish that I have to say I am ashamed to be on the same forum with you. Tell me, (and I know I'm going to regret asking this) but what exactly is your beef here? That someone may have downloaded their software for free, as opposed to being an upright citizen and plunking down the cash for it? Yeah software piracy sucks, and the only people paying for it are folks that DO buy their software, (ie. higher purchase costs, etc.), but here's a newsflash for you: accusing someone of being a thief, and then implying that they have no business in trying to learn a software package is not only silly and accomplishes nothing except to scare off a person that may be truly passionate about the art they are trying to learn, it is downright mean. I'm sure you get a nice warm feeling when you hit the render button, knowing that your programs are legally paid for. But if I may ask, is the art you create any more valid, any more 'artistic' than something made with pirated software?

Draculaz, Oh, our sweet and humble Drac! I honestly enjoy the relief I get from reading your posts... Reminds me of my own, angry youth! Remember, though, anger is a gift. It is a motivator, not a cure, a means, not an end. Cause and Effect, can't ya smell the smoke in the breeze? A) Someone asked a question. B) You hate that person because you don't like their question. A + B = You are very immature and insecure. Knock it off, man, you are a great artist! Don't let them get so far inside of you, keep SOME walls up! Still, it's all good that you post your mind to me, it doesn't hurt me to read about someone else's "problems", however self-generated and mythological they are.

Yeah, by heightmap I meant displacement map. Ignore me. This is an issue, but I don't think fingers need to be pointed.