Attached Link: Whats Bryce all about ??

You're right it is only a terrain generator but people have adapted it to their tastes and styles and have created things beyond mere landscapes. The same applies to Vue D'Esprit , but it differs slightly with added features.

The terrain editor and lattice editor can be used to extrude things other than just landscapes. Although I have other modelers (not Max) I do most of modeling in Bryce now. I love the sky lab and the materials editor/DTE.

The original intentions behind Bryce were just what you said, a photo-realistic landscape generator. But, as always, the users took it much farther than the authors first intended. I've some some great interior scenes, space scenes, not to mention bloops (er volumetric interpretations) and fractals mapped to terrains using the terrain editors. I've seen giant pipe organs modelled entirely out of terrains, symmetrical lattice, and Bryce primitives. I've seen a huge, highly detailed castle including merlens on the walls, flags on the turrets, and stainglass windows, modelled ENTIRELY out of Bryce primitives. Now, admittedly, some of this stuff would have been easier in another package, but it's a little more fun in Bryce, I think. Caligula mentioned the sky lab. It's a great place. Full (almost, no radiosity) atmospherics including haze, fog, skydome colors, etc builtin and easily customizable. It's so good that I've caught myself looking at sunsets and wondering "I wonder what settings they used in Bryce to create that ..." :). So, where is this long rambling idea going? Just far enough to say that Bryce is well past the "just a landscape generator" stage. It's a full fledged 3D rendering system that will do animations and everything that your (our) twisted, devious minds can come up with for it to do. Now, if they (Corel) would only keep their promise and speed up the renderer in B5 ... :) That would make it the ultimate rendering system (to me at least). Having used 3D Max, trueSpace 4, and taken a gander at Lightwave, I prefer the Bryce interface the best. Okay, okay, I admit that it's a minority opinion. I think it has a much smoother learning curve than Max. Anywho, enough for now. TTFN! John

it is a much smoother learning curve than max. There is no reason the two programs can't reside on the same computer, we know that but go to max forum and they don't believe it, but hey who cares.

I use Bryce and 3DS both. I don't admit that Bryce is a landscape generator. That may have been it's intention originally, but it's gone far beyond that. Half the pictures I do are interiors, still lifes or close ups. If you master texturing, Bryce does better interiors than landcapes in my opinion. I rather biased because I love the way Bryce's render engine looks. I use MAX and Poser for modeling, and Bryce for both modeling and rendering. 99% of anything I do is rendered in Bryce.

Thing with Bryce is you can be a complete noveice and still get incredible results.

That's the truth. Check out some of the stuff at http://io.spaceports.com/~jstawarz/Gallery (copy & paste or type EXACTLY what you see. Spaceports is UNIX and VERY unforgiving about capitalizations ... :) Some of the ones on the Gallery #1 page are the first EVER 3D scenes that I did. In fact, Where the Sea Begins (1st row, last thumb) is the VERY first one that I did. And amazingly enough, it's got NO post work done on it... :) Now, admittedly, I haven't put anything new up there in a while (got Diablo II, who has time for Bryce? Or web page updates for that matter? :) And all of those are what came out of just fiddling with it for the most part.

However Diablo II and Bryce can also reside on the same machine, you just wont get any work done.lol Welcome Holli, Bryce is( for me) the most relaxing Program I've ever used, The interface is relatively simple and I like the way the Editors launch in full screen. although I'm not one of them , there are many right here at Renderosity who are truely masters at Modelling in Bryce. much of the greyscaling is done in Image editing programs,then applied to a Symetrical lattice in Bryce's Terrain editor. Bryce also has great boolean capabilities. and storing your models and materials as pesets for quick access is nice. The materials library is a wonderful journey.and you also have acsess to your favorite KPT and PhotoShop filters. You can also import you Poser figures easily.(sometimes lol) Materials,textures,Models,Skys,terrains,ect. can all be animated independantly. I love Bryce Hawkfyr

Tell me about it ... :) As for residing on the same machine, they almost didn't get to on my small (HD size, at anyrate) computer. One (1) 2.0 Gb drive and one (1) 1.2 Gb drive don't leave much room... Finally had to use my CD-R for the purpose that I got it for. Archiving! TTFN! BTW, just to keep this on topic, I'm constantly amazing myself w/ what Bryce can do. Now all I have to do is convince Plant Studio that it wants to export the plant sections on different layers ... :) But that's another fight!

I also use Plant Studio to import some of the plant objects that I have made. The only problem is that the plant object imports into Bryce upside down or sideways - which is an easy fix by just rotating the object. MartyLogo http://members.xoom.com/marty188/index.htm