Downloaded and installed it.

Liked it my image "View on Haarlem" was the installer image. :-)

On first view, after launching no big changes.

The extra content package looks promising.

I dragged my Bryce 5 object-, texture- and skylibraries to Bryce 5.5 and all loaded well, no errors in Bryce 5.5.

I like it the taskbar is not locked anymore in Bryce 5.5.

I loaded an old Bryce 5 file (see image), which took 5.01 minutes to render and anti-alias in Bryce 5, but it took 7 minutes in Bryce 5.5. So I don't know about that.

My pc 1.7 Ghz, 512 Ram, 120 gega disk, windows XP, but a louzy 32 Mb graphics card. Plan to upgrade soon (Poser 6 doesn't run on my machine).

Just curious.. Is the rendered image of better quality than a the similar render in bryce 5? A nice image by the way.

It'd be great if yu could post the B5 render too for comparison :)

Yes... It is stated that on some scenes the render times went up do to the Better Quality issue in 5.5....

Erm, foleypro, isn't that better quality thing at odds with the "pixel for pixel its the same output render" thing that we'd heard for quite a while?

If they've improved the render, thats fine by me :), but just a bit different to what we'd been told is all.

edit - off to go read the most recent blurbs to see what they have ended up doing to the rendering side of things. If they have managed to improve quality and reduce times by 30% on average (and some scenes I remember them saying go a lot faster than 30% quicker), I'm impressed - thats some serious algorithm tinkering.

Message edited on: 04/29/2005 09:53

I rendered them a few times over again, simultaneously, rendertimes were almost the same (5-7 minutes).

I don't see the diff. Is there a difference?

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there is a diff...the bars of the windows look clearer with 5.5, and the back in the spaces there too..look blacker.. 5 seems to have a haze overall.. 5.5 is so much clearer...

Hmmm. Note the numbers. Bryce 5.5 has more than double the number of rays and almost double the number of ray hits. So, if I'm not getting something wrong, the render is effectively twice as fast. Ain't it? And yeah, the shadows are a tiny bit darker.

twice as fast?? I count a few secs slower...

Yeah, but its doing twice the work in about the same time...hence twice as fast. Looks like a fair bit has changed under the hood.

Is this an upgrade or a new full product? I know that this has been probably answered in other strings but i could not find through most of the infighting never get a "yes", "no" answer. Thx ! =^)

Officially its an upgrade - they've killed off some of the bugs, done some tweaking, and added a bit more functionality in a couple of areas.

I can't speak to anyone's subjective experience of the two renders, but I can run a difference check in an image editor.

As you can see, there is very little difference, especially around the window area. I'd bet if you compared two 5.01 renders of the scene you'd see a similar difference check result, especially if the check is run on a JPEG compressed version, as with these (compression will emphasize any slight render differences).

The render report for the 5.01 render doesn't make any sense. It looks like there's some kind of error, so I wouldn't read too much into the figures that do show.

Message edited on: 04/29/2005 12:11

I didn't see much difference in my images at all. Both were saved under exactly the same bryce default saving and compressed together in the image above. PJF, I only see a black image with some words scrabbled on top left?

Creations, when you run a difference check in an image editor any pixels that are the same will be rendered black. Only different pixels show up. The reason you see a primarily black image is that the two scenes are nearly identical. Obviously there are differences where you wrote the version numbers in, and what you see (scramble) is the result of those differences. Obviously I only compared the left hand side of your renders, since most of the other side is covered by the render report.

Well, I tried with histogram, including the render reports. There is a tiny difference, as you see, bigger than the difference check.

There seems to be grumbling about the render times in the DAZ forums. There is a post that "image" based textures give the biggest render boost. They also state that DAZ found out why Corel was not supporting the MAC version since the improved code only works with Intel processors and Nvidia cards. (at least thats the way I read the posts.) So single processor users of Bryce 5 using procedural textures may see very little improvement and in fact may see an increase in the render times. I will be very curious to see the outcome of this.

Thanks PJF, that makes it clear. I rendered them again and noticed Bryce 5 option "save image as" saves the render as jpg in low, medium, high and max quality (I saved max), while Bryce 5.5 "save image as" has only the possiblity of jpg (or other format, but not compression). The jpg's therefore could have a difference in compression. So I rendered them again and exported the image as bitmaps, same resolution (901 K) and didn't find any major difference. I checked the rendertime reports, and the Bryce 5.01 gives me many times same errors. I rendered above image around ten times in both versions. Bryce 5.5 won the race at my pc 9 of the ten times (with more or less background processes running and both versions rendering alone or simultaneously). Mark, the above image indeed uses an image texture.

Message edited on: 04/29/2005 14:20

Message edited on: 04/29/2005 14:22

Bryce is acting like a politician. You can never get a clear-cut answer. I read and reread this post and I'm confused. Shouldn't 5.5 be the clear winner? Or at the very least, its renders should be much better. PJF's difference check pretty much confirms NO difference between the two. So, what is 5.5 really offering. Not render speed or quality that's for sure. And if its not offering that (the most sought after features) DAZ should rename Bryce 5.5 to Bryce 5.05. Don't try and dazzle me with new revamped features and promises of faster renders when they don't exist and then try to sell me some 3D pack at $8 cheaper and package it as a special offer. I'm in advertising, I spin this kinda BS everyday for all kinds of products. The truth is in the pudding people. Don't believe the hype. I encourage more testing but so far I'm not impressed.

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I agree, but I guess much depends on other factors, like background processes. That is why I rendered my image in both versions many times. During one of these testrenders I had Poser Pro running also and it slowed down Bryce 5.01 considerably (10 minutes), while Bryce 5.5 did it in 7 minutes. In another testrender there was no other program running and Bryce rendered it in 5 minutes only. Overall, depending on memory allocation in most of the cases Bryce 5.5 rendered defenitely faster, allthough I can't see the difference in the quality of the renders.

i'm not impressed either, i'm rendering something right now and it's rendering slow as hell. b5 did it faster. my bet is on reflections causing problems.

hmmm if it's reflections I'm guessing AS would know more :) he's a master when it comes to reflective materials :)

For an accurate comparison of render speeds you must keep the conditions as similar as possible. Running 5.01 and 5.5 simultaneously, or with other apps running, may tell you something but it won't tell you anything valuable about their relative speeds. Creations's comparison of Bryce5 running alone vs Bryce5.5 running alone seems to result in times that are in the ball park of what DAZ is saying should be expected. Five minutes, seventeen seconds is a substantial speed improvement over eight minutes, forty four seconds. You'd have to have a fairly big jump in processor power to get that improvement in Bryce5.

Yeah, but its doing twice the work in about the same time...hence twice as fast. Unfortunately no-one cares how many rays the render calculates if the total rendertime isn't going down and/or the render result isn't better.

You need to start in Bryce 5.01 Render and then save and Open in 5.5...Then render and save then run the same Test backwards open the scene in Bryce5.5 first render and save then 5.01 and save...Now if you use Lights in 5.01 then you need to turn off the Gel light in 5.5 when doing this test Because of the Gel light Bug that was fixed in 5.5...

I must say that I'm really not impressed with what I see about Bryce 5,5. 80,00 US (105,00$ Canadian) for upgrading a software that I allready have and I don't need the content and the Daz Studio. Daz may had to rebuild all the application but it is none of my bussiness and I don't have to pay for that. I'll stay with Bryce 5,01 or simply switch to Vue if Bryce 6 is not better than E-On Software v5. I love Bryce and its GUI but it's a shame to render a Poser image in 3 hours with Bryce vs 15 minutes with an old version of Cinema4D (v6) or a free version of Carrara Studio (v1,1). It is my point of vue for the moment.