Hello fellow Brycers, Does anyone know if Bryce 6 will be able to compete with Vue? I just finished looking at Vue5 specs and they totally amazed me: Global Radiosity.... Automatic placement of EcoSystem populations... Sea wave generator... Rock generator and scatterer... Real looking trees... and much much more... I'd stay with Bryce if it could do at least half of those things, because it's so great to use. I hope Bryce doesn't fall too far behind or I may be tempted to jump ship.

I doubt Bryce 6 is going to cost $600 like Vue 5 you are talking about. (hope not, anyway, lol) DAZ would like to pack as much new stuff as possible into Bryce 6. I assume right now its just figuring out how much they can do without driving the price up too much, and without taking too long to produce it. AS

Well, if Bryce 6 is going to be around $600, I'll just hope that Daz will continue to supply updates and patches for Bryce 5.5c (xyz), cos, no way am I going to pay that price for software!!..........thats the cost of a computer and a half for me.... Just hope that it does come out this year....so much hype and wishes is starting to get unbearable. MFX

bryce falling behind? ns, s thanks, drac

I would bet on something for a Bryce 6 in this year. That's only a guess, though. It had better be a darned good guess....hint, hint DAZ! AS

well the last time i called daz and asked... they were completely NDA about it, so i figure something IS brewing. drac

Yup, NDA's are abounding about...;o) AS

I think Bryce6 is Carrar5:) For me anyways lol

Whilst I'm aware Bryce is missing many features, my biggest issue remains the crippling render times... I have a full-on job that leaves me very little time for this hobby, and increasingly I seem to be starting a render before I leave for work so that it will be ready when I return. My experience with Vue 4 and the Carrara demo suggests that this issue doesn't exist (to the same extent) in other products. (BTW Carrara recently introduced a cross-grade price for other 2/3d packages) In terms of Bryce 6 - can't see them getting anything major out ahead of Vista. Why would they? They must have an eye on the significant changes that will introduced with Vista, and in keeping feature parity between the OS's they get the opportunity to finally do some real Mac OS X work. We also shouldn't forget that Daz are a tiny company, with (very) limited resources (27 employees in May of last year). Those resources first and foremost are always going to be used in support of the companies business model - and that is the sale of models/accessories. This is what keeps the price of Bryce (artificially) low - to pull through the content. I don't see that changing after the effort to develop and integrate Daz|Studio. (As an aside, a product which also a proves to me Daz don't understand UI's) As much as I love Bryce and would prefer to see it developed to equal Vue, Carrara, etc - years of neglect at Corel, Daz' resources and business model seem against it. :-( Garry

Vue 4 is exactly as slow of a renderer as Bryce. I have Vue 4, and when I took render settings up to match Bryce, its not much of a difference at all. I've not ever tried Carrara before. Has always looked promising. Any big updates with Operating Systems would be through optimizing Bryce 6 to be compatible with cpu's and Windows OS that are 64-bit. Also with dual core cpu's, and quad core cpu's, Hyperthreading, etc. I've got a feeling that 5 years down the road almost all MAC's will be driven by Intel cpu's anyway. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, lol. If needed, DAZ has used outside companies in the development of Bryce, so its not always just the 27 employees DAZ has in Utah. AgentSmith

I have Vue 4 too - for Mac - bought it whilst waiting for Bryce 5.5. On the Mac at least its way faster than Bryce 5.5 for similar settings (render quality). I suspect that this is because Vue 4 on the Mac is simply better optimised for Mac OS X. On the operating system side - both Vista and Tiger introduce many new API's for video, graphics (eg, in Tiger you get Core Graphics, in Vista Presentation Foundation) etc, etc. Bryce doesn't take advantage of any of Tiger's new API's (actually, its still clinging on to mostly the basic 'carbon' API's) - not least because you would begin to get feature differences between Mac and Windows. If you follow the recent Apple & Intel announcements, Apple's stated intent was to be fully Intel by the middle of 2007, with first products in June of this year. Apple is ahead of that, and Intel have modified their roadmap such that the dual core's that Apple need for the Pro line appear about the middle of this year - I would be amazed if Apple isn't all Intel by end of the year. Sure - I would bet that Daz outsources code work, given the low cost of Indian coders they would be dum not to. But that still has to be project managed, the code integrated and verified and so on - there will remain a bottle neck in such a small company. Garry

Flicking through my copy of Expose3 couldnt help but noticing a couple of "master" series images done with Bryce. I'll stick with it myself. :) Alex

Alex.. Every time I see an Orbital or Roche image I'm aware that I'm not close to mastering everything that the current Bryce has to offer... But the render times! I thought that Bryce Lighning might be the answer - I have a spare machine... But no, read the details - two machines takes longer than a single machine because of the networking protocal overhead... From comments at the Bryce forum at Daz, 3 machines is little better. :-( Hey ho - and sorry everyone for the general grumpiness of my posts. Its cold and wet here in Paris, and I'm stuck in Excel preparing my business review for last quarter. :-( Garry

I'll be sticking with Bryce for some years to come. I just love the environment and I enjoy working with it. I gave vue a serious try two years ago, and it irritated the hell out of me. Kept crashing every 10 min. My greatest worry is DAZ's commitment to Bryce. I have the feeling they picked up the app because they saw the potential of being able to sell scenes, props and models for use in Bryce like they do in Poser. However, Bryce simply doesn't lend itself well for that sort of thing because of the broad range of subjects Bryce artists encompass. Poser has essentially five main themes, Fantasy, Portrait, Pinup, Glamour and Sci Fi. Its easier to make elements for this, which makes Poser ideal for after market items.

well garry ive tried worldbuilder, 3dmax and vue and none of them has given me the satisfaction that bryce gives. Off lately all my images have taken 1 hour to do, and thats after 500+ images and a LOT of postwork that i had to learn. I do think some people expect a lot from Bryce and they forget that it still a $99 3d program. Im just learning cienam4d and the render engine is "instant" (no kiding!), specially with a dual core baby. But bryce is just more fun and 100 easier to use and thats the atraction for me still. alex,

It's really too bad that Bryce is considered a 'low end' or a 'cheap entry level' 3D program. I've got Softimage XSI 5 sitting on my shelf right now, doing nothing, because it's too cumbersome and weird to use; so It's back to Bryce for me. Perhaps they should just add a PRO version of Bryce for about $500, and keep the basic version.

DAZ did indeed farm out much of the programming. Look at the 5.5 About screen - Opportunity International, which I think is in China.

I'm sorry to say that my faith is starting to falter. Bringing Bryce up to par with the competition which no doubt will require buckets of new code just seems too big a task when you think how long Studio took to come out and become a v1.0 product. The instability of the 5.5 release and DAZ Studio also bothers me too. Selling it at $99, I'm not sure they can afford to put the resources and time into such a big project. Like the software maxim states, on time, good quality and features, but you can only have two of them. My early experiences of 5.5 suggests I only got one of them.

Well, Dan, with the names like Wenguag Chen or Jianian Yan, I expect they are Chinese, even if they are not in China. :-) But they appear to have an office in Salt Lake City. Not that far from Draper, no? :-) And they also appear to be China Chinese. Interesting.

OK,........like I said a day or so ago,........Bryce 6 will be available just shortly after the Buffalo Bills win a Super Bowl ! I doubt that Bryce 6 will bring machines to their knees like Vue5 I does. The longest render times I've ever seen,.....when you use all those "fantastic" features like GI and HDRI and Ecosystems,.........I've loaded V5I on a dual 3 Ghz Xeon box with 4 Gb's of RAM and it still runs like blackstrap molasses in January ! I guess it's ok if you have 3 or 4 days to wait for a render at premium settings. We'll see,........film at 11 o'clock.

"DAZ did indeed farm out much of the programming. Look at the 5.5 About screen - Opportunity International, which I think is in China" Yes, you are correct. The huge load of fixing and optimizing Bryce's code (from Corel) was done by a large group of Asian programmers, I'm not sure in what country though it was actually done in, though. DAZ has been kicking around with Newtek and Nvidia. We COULD see improvements in Bryce 6 and/or Bryce 7* with help from these companies. Not a guarantee, but maybe. Then there is the possible insane realism achievable with the Maxwell renderer plugin coming up in this year (although expensive!) Yet, I am hoping we get a switchable renderer in Bryce 6, perhaps the fast renderer Studio uses, 3Delight. *Yes, I said Bryce 7, DAZ corporate has mentioned B7.0 to me. From my talks with them, they are committed to Bryce for the long haul, just imho. AgentSmith

OTOH, I think I've already mentioned it here: Carrara Studio. DAZ should set the features of Carrara Studio as their goal. CS has many things that really high-end programs have. All for $249. That looks like a really nice price for a really nice set of features. OTTH, I obtained Carrara Studio Pro for a review and... interface should be changed. It's ugly to high heavens. Turn on the advanced render features and it's slow, slow, slow. (On AMD 3000+.) The default tree is worse than Bryce's, although it does have some good options like bending and really interactive way of editing it. BTW, Maxwell is nice, but their four release candidates are apparently worse than their betas. Maybe Vray? :-) And Bryce's renderer isn't bad at all. It lacks the high-end features like subsurface scattering, ambi. occlusion, HDRI support and such. But what comes out looks really good. Except it's slow.

"The default tree is worse than Bryce's" I officially don't believe that, lol... Yeah, I have always loved the look of Bryce's renderer, except for the speed of it. That's why we need to have Bryce capable of using 3rd party renderers, absolutely like Vray! Bryce's rendering engine, a raytracer, although very precise/true, is like all raytracers, slow. The precision is what you would want when rendering reflecions, refractions, glass transparencies or shadows. Yet, if it is just a landscape with trees or volumetric clouds that didn't call for precision, we need a fast scanline renderer option. (or something similar). AS

Vue Infinate is a decent speed renderer. It is multitreaded which is nice. One thing I do notice about it, is it is a memory hog compared to both Bryce and Lightwave 3D. I got a copy of it when I picked up Lightwave. They had some deal going on for both being packaged together. It sucks RAM bad though with just one fairly complex figure in the scene. Bryce seems to handle loads of models with no problems, it's just that your render times really shoot up.

I've had this thought for a while but haven't expressed it. But this thread seems to be the proper place to do so. I wonder if DAZ would (or did) consider putting Bryce 6 in a DAZ Studio type beta mode? Here's what I mean. Start rewriting the code to a more modern computer language, in incremental states, and making it avaiable to Bryce 5.5 owners, like DAZ Studio was (is). Let us keep our 5.5, but, also let us run the new code and help debug it. Let us compare render times and quality and provide feedback. I think there is a lot of talent here and being able to use that talent would be invaluable to a small company that has a product with a great following. Of course, those who depend on Bryce for commercial purposes could continue to use 5.5.

AS's #23 is the only post that I think really reveals the issue. To ray trace at a certain amount of accuracy or detail is a finite task. To me, it seems, no matter the name of the software to perform the same task at a given accuracy will require the same amount of time. Hence cpu power and clock speeds are the only real variables when comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Other issues like tree creation and abilities to do simulate various lighting situations is code files. You either have it or not. If you favor the "haves" it'll cost you. Nothing is free. I'll have Bryce a long, long time. It's the best for the money in my opinion. Willie, (the hobbyist and knows that is all he'll ever be)

"the hobbyist and knows that is all he'll ever be" That's excatly what I thought about myself also, up to a couple of years ago...until people started offering me some money for my Brycing. You never know. AS

BTW, C4D is only lightning when you start. Once you get hooked on area lights, GI, ambient occlusion and sub-poly displacement it slows down as well. Longest so far was 43 hrs - all of the above plus DOF at 1600x820. As I have said in the past, rendertimes are constant, you always expand your "needs" to fit your resources!

Message edited on: 01/17/2006 21:28

For me it all depends on how quickly DAZ moves with development and whether or not they develop support for Bryce to work natively on Mac OSX. Y'all might be wondering why I don't switch to a PC, but for my line of work (film industry), the Mac is the tool of the trade. I also happen to enjoy working on one. If I could afford both a PC and a Mac, I might consider doing so. I freely admit Macs are priced ridiculously high - but that's fodder for another topic. ;)

I have Vue 4 and C4D 9 sitting around here somewhere. I really should think of firing them up and giving them a go and this from a die hard Brycer. Bryce was my first 3D appy of choice and I'll probably always have a soft spot for it. But I'd be lying if I didn't say the images produced in C4D don't intrigue me; they most assuredly do. The lighting and atmosphere alone are edging me closer to pulling my hair out while learning a new program.

Almost all of us use other programs in addition to Bryce, nothing to be ashamed of, lol. I've always thought that C4D would be a natural step for Brycers, its extremely capable and not priced to horribly high. I'm still thinking of getting C4D, especially now since I have ZBrush 2, and want something that will render displacements. AS

Well, with the new Intel MAC relation, MACs might be more attractive to many PC Users! (Might not need to buy both!) I know I am paying attention to this to see what comes of it.)

Believe me rc, the Intel thing has me intrigued as well. I'll be monitoring this very closely as I'm due for a new powerbook for work but want to wait and see what develops. I learned a long time ago not to go with the first generation of most things. ;) I just hope this doesn't mean Mac users will now be more susceptible to email virii and whatnot. I'm like an old dog and don't want to learn new tricks in that dept., lol.

AS - after seeing what all ZBrush can do while at Siggraph this year I can officially say I am green with envy. So you did manage to wrangle yourself a copy. Smooth move, dude!

As to Macs being film industry standard,.........maybe be at some shops but a fair number of places use PC's,......like HP Xeon workstations or servers for rendering farms. For content creation and developement some people feel Mac's are superior,.......at one time this may have been true, now however it's more a matter of what you grew up with(so to speak) and personal preference, and dare I say it, digital snobbery(not meant in a truly bad way), rather than any actual performance edge. In the past 5 years on PC's(using Win 2000 and XP Pro) I've never had a serious system crash or BSOD,......yet I have managed to freeze up a Mac on 2 different occasions. Just pure luck I guess.

sackrat - what you say is usually true for rendering. Most places I've worked at (Rhythm & Hues, Digital Domain, etc.) do use PC's. As do the accounting depts. But on my end of film production spectrum (the production itself: organizing crew, equipment, logistics, rawstock, locations, you name it), Macs are the main OS of choice. At least they have been in commericals and music videos since I began in 1988. The times I've forayed into working in production for visual effects live action shots (Titanic, Anna & the King, XMen 2, etc.), all the freelancers I worked with (again with R&H and DD) used Macs.

I'm sorry to hear you had problems with your Macs. But I think that can happen on any system, lol. I've owned 6 Macs altogether and only had one have a fluke HD crash. The techs said it was a freak blow out. Thankfully it was still under warranty or I would've committed hari-kari since it was my work powerbook and mainstay for income. I sold my Classic II years a go. But my PPC, 540c powerbook, Lombard, Titanium and dual G5 all still work. Most are mothballed until I figure out what to do with them. Word on the street is that some Japanese collectors are paying good money for the older models. I dunno, lol. I just like that I rarely have had problems with any of them. Whatever platform or PC you use - if it works & floats your boat, that's not such a bad thing. ;)

Message edited on: 01/18/2006 01:25

I'm curious if users are staying with Bryce because of the higher price of other apps, or because they haven't yet seen how fast the other apps render? Carrara Basics 2 is around the same price and looks more powerful than Bryce.

The speed of my workflow is king for me. A client will be wanting all the speed in the design part of the process, as it can be lengthy anyway. They don't seem to have problems with waiting a day or two for a render to finish and for me to post-work it. AS

I've always found bryce the easiest app to get to grips with and hope it goes on from strength to strength. I've tried other packages but always go back to it. For seting sceans up I just love the interface.

I'm also suprised how many people have found instability with 5.5. Maybe I've just been lucky but apart from once when a daz studio release messed it up for a while I've never any problems with it myself. unless this is a Mac thing I'm on PC.

I have to say Carrara looks interesting but I'd want to go for the pro version and thats out of my price range at the mo.

Message edited on: 01/18/2006 18:08

I'm going to be sticking with Bryce as my big texturer, renderer, arranger, lighter app. Modelling I'll do in SILO from now on.

Since I have had the Carrara demo, Bryce has been sitting on the back burner. I think I'm going to make the jump over; the only thing is, the primitive modelling in Carrara seems to be less evolved than Bryce; oh you can apply modifiers and everything (Bend, stretch and punch and so forth) but when it comes to neg and pos modelling you can only select two objects at a time. This is hard to get around for me because in Bryce I would select multiple objects at a time to subtract from another object. So learning how to use the Spline and Vertex modellers is essential. I just need to stop thinking in primitives. Anyway, I think for the price and similar interface, Carrara is a logical jump from Bryce.