I didnt have time to respond to the original posting a while back regarding the Unreal Engine and how its an amazing renderer vs Bryce, which was followed by an amazing screen shot. Well here are some things I'd like to point out. The two are two different beasts, and really shouldnt be compared to each other. The Unreal Engine is a Real Time Renderer it has to look beautiful but at the same time it has to be very fast 60FPS or more. Bryce Rendering involves things like reflections and refraction and are calculated accurately so that light bouncing off a mirror or passing through a glass of water gets bounced or bent the same way it does in real life, the disadvantage is the large amounts of numbers to calculate which is more suited to non real time computing. But than how come Unreal Screen Shots look as good or better than some of the Bryce Renders Ive seen? Well Game Engines like Unreal are built for speed not accuracy, tricks are used to generate realistic effects rather than calculating exactly how light would behave in a scene. Im not going to get into full detail you can google them to find out, but weve got Shaders / Multiple Passes / BSP Trees / Color by Vertex (Triangle Shading). Textures such as those used for Walls / Floors are Prerendered and 3D Effects built onto the 3D Video Card are used to augment them. I use Bryce on my Pentium II / III / AMD Barton Systems with 32MB Ram Low End Video Cards to 128MB High End Video Card. Try and Run Doom 3 or Half Life 2 on a Pentium II with a 32MB 3D Card. You cant. All that real time calculation, requires a lot of hardware. Game Engines generate Fire / Smoke / Water Reflections using the capabilities of the 3D Card. Games Designed for an NVIDIA Video Card may not necessarily look or behave the same as an ATI Video Card. Bryce relies more on math and calculations to render rather than the capabilities of the Video Card. So which is why I say the two shouldnt really be compared. (runs and hides for cover)

they shouldnt be compared but they can incorperate technicks from the games into the 3d apps to get faster pictures, like texture baking for example.

Sometimes it all comes down to how the end result looks regardless what engine was used or how it was created technicaly. Maybe we need a Marriage of both Gaming & Non-Real Time Rendering.

We are almost there now... Watch for a AVI in the future involving... Bryce5.5,Truespace6.6.,MayaPLE and Unreal Engine 2.5 then V3.0... It will be so FUN doing this Tutorial that I am wanting to start now but I am haveing to wait... Bryce will be a Major APP in the creation of a Level for Unreal Tournament 2004....

@Foleypro-can I ask how you will be using bryce(terrains maybe)?

I will be useing Bryce for... Terrains Trees Bushes Effects Material/Textures Creations and Exportation Level Designing and Setup Enviormental Background Rendering Sky Boxes Animated SkyBoxes Scene Swapping Between Truespace6.6 And Bryce and MayaPLE Exportation as a Full Untextured Levels... Fly/WalkThru Thru/Camera Shot Animations... And it will also be used for the whole Tutorial for the screen shots and setup for the templates... This is just a start.. And since I have already had My Wizard character in The Game that I made in Truespace6.6 and Bryce5.01 and going thru MayaPLE I am just wanting to show How Bryce5.5 will even help better... All will be Revealed in the up and coming weeks just wait on the Release of Bryce5.5 and then We will see...

Message edited on: 03/16/2005 21:54

First scroll back up to the top of the page....read below the Renderosity header. Then re-read foleypro's two posts carefully. Then click here ->Rochr with Bryce5<-goggle at the picture then scroll down to post #4.

Bryce was dead, kept afloat only by the love of its users. Now that Bryce is being resurrected, where have you all gone? The 5.5 upgrade is a cleaning up of the code to improve speed, and a bell and a whistle. DAZ knows what they have to do for 6 to be a viable package, and is actively pursuing those routes. i.e. "DAZ has contacted Kai Krause...the makers of Wings3D....Maxwell coffee....and the best Brycers bar none."

I'm seeing Bryce compared to specific purpose software. I am not willing to give up it's flexibility. I'm seeing Bryce compared to software that has shelves of how-to books at the bookstore. I am not willing to give up it's simplicity. I'm seeing Bryce compared to software that cost $400 or more. I am not willing to give up it's affordability

How much did you pay for Bryce? Was it the free Bryce4 from the magazine? $80 Bryce5? Or are you an old timer? Get Bryce3 for 6 furs and some shiny beads? I got Bryce4 for $160 shortly after it was released. I got Bryce5 from DAZ for $40, and I'll get 5.5 for about $25 after vouchers. How can you demand the same features of a $400+ program?

I understand that some people are posting comparisons out of concern for the future of Bryce. But that is not the tone Im reading. Over and over and over.

My Dodge Neon is not a Porsche 911! Whaaa!

xenic101
(sick and fucking tired of seeing his pastime thrashed about in the single largest BRYCE community on earth.)

I got Bryce 4 for free when I was Beta Testing it ;)

Aye, it was my original Unreal 3 thread I believe in question here... I don't take any personal offense, Analog, but you are a bit misinformed about some of the technicalities. Also, I'm not certain you viewed the Unreal 3 tech videos, or read all of the data on this program and it's iterations... "Bryce Rendering involves things like reflections and refraction and are calculated accurately so that light bouncing off a mirror or passing through a glass of water gets bounced or bent the same way it does in real life, the disadvantage is the large amounts of numbers to calculate which is more suited to non real time computing." - Incorrect. Bryce doesn't process light, at all. It's a raytracer, not a photon mapper. Bryce doesn't calculate light bouncing off of mirrors or through water, because it has no light system. Rays are a mathematical analysis approximating color levels, and are nothing like photons. "Well Game Engines like Unreal are built for speed not accuracy, tricks are used to generate realistic effects rather than calculating exactly how light would behave in a scene..." - Correct, in general. In the case of Unreal 3, though, you are witnessing a breakthrough in rendering. Unreal 3 is able to calculate realtime techniques such as light-through transparency and (more importantly) displacement shading... "Bryce relies more on math and calculations to render rather than the capabilities of the Video Card." - Correct, again, with one major flaw : With Unreal, those same "more" calculations are being performed on an amazing piece of harware, the Geforce 6800. If Bryce 6 were brought up to the industry standard (Direct X 9), we wouldn't have to sit around test-rendering constantly to achieve certain effects, and it would speed up our work. Granted, most people don't have a $500 Geforce 6 card, but even if DAZ brought Bryce up to DX-7 specs, it would help! My point is, and was this : There's no reason that ANY 3D programs of ANY caliber shouldn't be able to at least reach Unreal 2.0's level of preview generation by now. Hell, 90% of the Bryce renders alone on Renderosity look like shit compared to Unreal 1! I'm not trying to say that we should all switch and render in Unreal or anything ridiculous like that, but what I am saying is : Man up. Learn more. Do better work, everyone (ME especially!), or the CGI industry will get run over by the realtime industry. They certainly have the funding, as you all know by now video games make more money than movies do, and they will continue to outdistance pre-rendered animation as time goes on. Nvidia and the people at Unreal are making certain of this... So don't lok at my statements (past or present) as an insult to our current software, I mean them more as a motivator. I should be able to produce better imagery than a stinkin video game by now, damnit!

Hardcore thread...;o] AgentSmith