1. Extended libraries:

An expanded library system across the board.
Including multiple sky libraries, more than 13 preset material categories - including more user categories

1. Improved Material Catagory Handling:

Deleting an entire category deletes that file completely. Deleting individual presets from a category still leaves the residual information in the file.

1. Improved texture editor:

A 16 bit Texture Editor:
Higher resolution textures = Better looking renders.

1. New multireplicator:

Hate typing in numeric values? A new random Multi Rep function that is supposedly "way cool!". It llows for multiple random replication of objects on any or all axis. Looks like it will be useful for trees or instant cities or greeble type renders.

1. Animation import:

Seamless animation import from Daz Studio

1. HDRI support: (see the image)

Enhanced background image loading via the Skylab.
Including HDR images with global impact.
The shot here is a photo of a monitor, but it's been said it looked "very impressive" on the monitor..

1. Object Exporting:

The long awaited ability to export native Bryce objects to other applications....Including .3ds .obj and any format that Bryce can now import. It's not yet known if this includes texture export.

1. Interface tweaks:

The (according to 3dc "dreaded") blue and silver Corel colors (I've never dreaded them) have gone the way of the dodo, replaced by a soft green control set (bleh, i like blue better then green) that has better contrast. GUI tweaks throughout.

Vue 6 Infinite's new features in contrast (for those who like to make comments on things vue has that bryce still lacks):

• EcoSystems Generation II with interactive real-time EcoSystem painting and layered EcoSystem materials
• Spectral atmosphere engine with Spectral clouds and MetaCloud technologies
• Flicker-free SolidGrowth 4 plant technology
• Ventilators for local wind effects
• An entirely re-written radiosity engine for fast indoor and outdoor realistic lighting
• New animation graph editor for precise control over keyframes and time curves
• Absorption and multiple internal scattering (Sub-Surface Scattering)
• Large Amplitude displacement mapping
• Volumetric shaders and HyperTextures
• Motion Tracking import from Boujou or MatchMover
• Multi-shape area Lights (convert any object into a light emitter)
• Re-posing of Poser characters directly inside Vue

when??????????????/

So, it's like a tie then. :)

Seriously though, although I haven't even loaded up Bryce onto a system for about the last three years I too have been watching this forum for the announcement for a Version 6 release of Bryce. Like; it is the Granddaddy of 3D for the masses and an update has been promised by both Corel and now Daz for ages. Daz should be ashamed for not publicly saying WTF is going on with Bryce's development, outside of "special announcement in two weeks" or whatever that was. C'mon, it's Siggraph and they deliver a .jpeg image of a lighting option? Sorry guys, but in my view someone needs their arse kicked. Or at least they need to make the announcement that they announced they were going to make; surely this isn't it?!!......

We've read it via other threads, Rayraz. ;-)

Still, it's nice to have a clean thread for talking about the feature set. Just so's everybody's clear, the 3D Commune report implied that there are a lot more features besides these.

I'm interested in that screenshot, combined with what has been said. It can be read that Bryce supports full HDRI (yay, if so), and it can be read that Bryce has image based lighting that has some as yet undefined "HDRI effect". Poser6 has image based lighting that just creates a big light dome with the many lights taking their settings from pixel information in an image.

The Sky Lab seems a strange place to put a lighting feature.

Hm, a single screenshot...not to bad. Why care about 10.000 Brycers who want to know more about B6...I agree with krimpr about some rear-kicking!

"C'mon, it's Siggraph and they deliver a .jpeg image of a lighting option?"

Nope, DAZ didn't even 'deliver' that. That screenshot is from the 3D Commune guys...

I am now literally dying from not being able to go to Siggraph this year....we NEED a FULL/OFFICIAL report!!!!! LOl....

But, it seems some of the cats are outta the bag now.  ;o)

"I am now literally dying from not being able to go to Siggraph this year..."

Oh no, how long have you literally got? ;-)

You could have sent me Agent Smith....

Thanks Ray - it's prolly a better idea to keep the developments to this thread rather then buried in the Bryce 6 thread and a few other out croppings.  LOL.  Guess peops are anxious or something? ;-D

The skylab is not at all a strange place to put an HDRI lighting feature....

3dsmax for instance works HDRI lighting with final gathering and a special light known as a "skylight" which basically simulates light comming from the sky as if it were a dome around your scene.

Supplying a heavily blurred HDRI image to these skylights and you'll have your HDRI lighting (the blurring gives a clean smooth lighting situation). HDRI reflections are generated by using unblurred HDRI images put in the "environment" slot of the scene, which again encompasses the entire scene as if it was a dome around it.

That is rather similar to a sky isnt it? Bryce sky's are sort of wrapped around ur scene like domes also.

Just tell DAZ : "HEY BOZO'S - WE'RE ALL STANDIN HERE WITH DROOL ON OUR CHINS AND FISTS FULL OF CASH - YOU WANT SOME, THEN DE-LI-VER BIOTCHESSSSS!!!!!!!!"

and how much does this bag of miracles go for?..;)

Cinema4D uses two sky objects for a full GI solution. One with a blurred HDRI for the lighting and one with a crisp LDRI (or non-blurred HDRI) for the visible/reflections. Makes sense to me.

IBL?...  Must be "Image Based Lighting"?  Cool.

Now either it's going to be a pea-shooter or it's going to blow anything in its price range out of the water. Hopefully the later.

The HDRI support would be cool. EXPORT OMFG!

I wonder about the modeling process, still only Boolean, hmm.

I thought there would some Rosity personel at Siggraph who could check out among others DAZ/B6 and give us a report...it's easier to get info about Area 51 than about B6; I'm shocked by the silence!

puke green? like.. yay :)

seriously though, looking forward to more screenshots and an official wrap-up

m

I still hoping they've included GI, but am very happy with HDRI suopport :) It won't be long now (I hope) Thanks for the heads up Rayraz...;)

I'm off to raid the gas meter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hahahahahhahahhahhaaaa...

Wish I was at Siggraph this year also...

FUNGPHHH FLITH FLARN FRASSSANABLE!!!!!

ROTF at all of you nuts.
You can always tell when it's the weekend around here.....

"That is rather similar to a sky isnt it?"

You are quite correct, Rayraz. I've long argued the "there is no spoon" angle with 3D apps; it's just virtual objects and virtual light in virtual combinations. That's the way I use Bryce; just a generator for any type of scene. My default opening scene is very different  to the one that comes with Bryce (i.e it's empty, with atmosphere off).

But most Bryce users, I think, rather enjoy its "real world" analogies. It's popularly regarded as a landscape program, with a terrain editor; a tree lab and a sky lab. This makes sense to non techies. And when they do lighting they head for the light lab.

For Bryce6, when users want to use the interior of a church for image based lighting they don't head for the light controls (as they would in, say, Poser6), they have to enter the sky lab - the place where they normally adjust fog, haze, stars, rainbows, clouds and other aspects of the sky. That was the basis upon which I made my observation that the sky lab is a strange place to have a lighting feature. For me, I'm perfectly happy with the IBL controls being the Sky Lab (I'd have been just as happy with them in the Light Lab, as I suspect you would have been).

And it's certainly great that Brycers finally have an option of putting something custom on the edge of the Bryce universe (the "sky dome"). That should have been there since day one.

So does this mean they added in radiosity and GI?

Dunno about photon rendering stuff like GI. But i think if it's any decent kind of IBL support it's at least got the basics of final gathering and/or radiosity or something like that...

"But i think if it's any decent kind of IBL support it's at least got the basics of final gathering and/or radiosity or something like that..."

Maybe it's a development of True Ambience (and the background process involved in that, which I suspect is some variation of final gather). The Sky Dome is one of the "light" sources that will illuminate surfaces in True Ambience mode. An image on the Sky Dome would have a similar effect.

If this is the case, then it seems possible that True Ambience will have been developed / fixed compared to the implementation seen in Bryce5. At the very least a proper fall-off level would be needed, and hopefully proper interaction with mesh smoothing and booleans.

Fully working True Ambience would probably be enough to make me buy Bryce6 at some stage.

That's all they added...that's it?

1. Improved Material Catagory Handling:

Deleting an entire category deletes that file completely. Deleting individual presets from a category still leaves the residual information in the file.

How is that improved?  How is that work it at all?

Hdri seems to be the only major upgrade....sigh.

Just wait the final specs will be coming out...

And No Tirjasdyn thats not all they added.

FP - Are you allowed to spill anything?

Nope...

Wish I could...

Damn NDAs...  can you at least tell us if you're happy with it? :)

I have ALWAYS been happy with Bryce versions to the most Part...

I am as Excited as the Development team and DAZ themselves...

The new features help a diverse group of users...We all get to have fun...Wheeeeeeeee.

Quote - Maybe it's a development of True Ambience (and the background process involved in that, which I suspect is some variation of final gather).

Well thats why i said a "decent" IBL implementation ;-) TA is old, unefficient, doesnt work as it should, and it produces too much noise.

TA seems to work with the rays that are already calculated in the scene during render, which is kinda unefficient.. It's kinda like rays trying to act like fotons. It's about as similar to FG as it is to GI or Radiosity, which means it's basically just another variation on the same topic, but as significantly different from either FG or GI or Radiosity as those three are different from each other.

FG works in a seperate render pass with a seperate set of FG-rays/samples which behave in a manner that is optimized for the desired FG effect. TA just uses the rays that are already there from the direct illumination (which is why it's hella noisy).

Lets let a real life example sketch the contrast:

In Mental Ray you rarely need to render with more then 500 FG samples for your entire scene.

In Bryce you can render your TA scene at 512 samples per pixel (!!) and STILL end up with a noisy image.

When using GI in you dont calculate Rays but Photons, which is apparently quite a different thing in renderland. Photon counts needed for GI can run into millions when scenes are more complex, so in that aspect the amount of samples is in less of a contrast compared to bryce's TA, but unlike TA rendering you can play around with photon radii and the way photon samples blend etc. etc. which allows u to reduce noise significantly. 

Most significantly better part about GI though is that it is (just like FG) calculated seperately from your raytracing passes and stores it's information in photon maps. Now once you've set up the right amount of fotons to represent the scene's complexity and calculated your photon map you can still tweak the radii and accuracy of the photons WITHOUT any need to rebuilt your photonmap! Which basically saves you lots of rendertime.

What makes these discussions of rendering techniques fascinating and frustrating in equal measure are the multiple definitions, often proprietry, floating around for the terms used.

"Global Illumination" is a good example.
e-on, for their Vue program,** **appears to regard it as the use of the sky dome as a big area light providing an all round illumination for "outdoor" scenes. Mental Images, for their MentalRay renderer, seem to regard it as a combination of Photon Mapping and Final Gather. End users enjoy an even wider variety of interpretations.

My understanding of "Global Illumination" is that it is a combination of render processes that together simulate all the light interactions seen in the real world. As such, radiosity, ray-tracing and photon mapping (for example) are not separate from Global Illumination; rather they are subsets of Global Illumination. This is the description I have seen on the web in articles that are not linked to commercial 3D programs. It is usefully summarised in this WikiPedia piece.

I point this out because I think I disagree with a lot of what Rayraz is saying, but can't be totally sure because I don't think we share a common point of reference. I certainly disagree with this: "TA just uses the rays that are already there from the direct illumination..."

Anyways, the discussion may be totally irrelevant. For all most of us know TA might have been completely removed from Bryce6. Only the beta testers here know that. They're probably giggling as we type. Bastards. ;-)

hi Ruben (and all others),

just throwing in my 2 cents, below you'll find the message I got from DAZ a few days ago. Essentially, within just a year after my request, they started to redo the manual. Sounds like progress of some sort.

Ruben, are you around this Saturday? Cor (aka RocSerum) is celebrating his 3000th image posted (today!) on Rosity and will present the How to... on his Got Her image, which took me 254 hours of rendering at 6000 pixels resolution.

regards,
aRtBee

The following issue has been ASSIGNED.

<

http://www.daz3d.com/bugs/view.php?id=7506>

Reported By: ronald
Assigned To: riggsd
======================================================================
Project: Bryce 5.5
Issue ID: 7506
Category: Docs, Help, Version and Info
Reproducibility: always
Severity: minor
Priority: normal
Status: assigned
Platform: PC
======================================================================
Date Submitted: 08-10-2005 00:58 EDT
Last Modified: 08-04-2006 12:18 EDT
======================================================================
Summary: please fix inconsistencies in Docs and User
Interface
Description:
Since say versie 3 Bryce has various inconsistencies between manual and user int, and
within the user int itself. Please have a sweeper team to clean this up.
======================================================================
Issue History
Date Modified Username Field Change
======================================================================
08-10-05 00:58 ronald New Issue
08-10-05 00:58 ronald Platform => PC
10-05-05 14:35 Nathan Blunt Assigned To => Nathan Blunt
08-04-06 12:18 Nathan Blunt Assigned To Nathan Blunt => riggsd
08-04-06 12:18 Nathan Blunt Status new => assigned
======================================================================
 

We all are speaking about render process, yes that's an importan thing to improve Bryce, but waht about animation?, waht about water animation, tree animation, wind ... These thing make better vue now, not the render. ( And I don't want to speak about ecosystem...) .

The render engine is very important to make real your worlds, but I think is more important the tools you have to make that world real.

3,000th? dang..not sure when 'rosity started, but that's more than 1 a day if it's '99...and I thought I was obstreperous with (quck check) 657..but I prune a lot..;)
of course a 10 and 1/2 day render's nothing to sneeze at either..;)
You'll find me on the porch with all of the small dogs..;)

hi All,

I guess Cornelis (RocSerum) is better on drawing that on counting (and I didn't verify), but after about 4 years at 1 image a day the Rosity counter shows 1300 issues in his galley. Not too bad, that is. Show him your regards, folks.

aRtBee

Bottom line...

DAZ has said FULL DS animation support into Bryce,Which means Poser support which means animated everything...

In some cases you have to work at it on other things its so easy a NOOB will be doing Action scenes in NO time...

(( DAZ has said FULL DS animation support into Bryce,Which means Poser support which means animated everything...))

If you have to go through DS ( Poser to DS to Bryce ) then the poser animation support will have problems.

I don't use DS because EVER YTIME, I tried bringing something out of poser ( 4,5,or 6 ) into DS some part of the Figure is messed up ( cloths or props missing etc...)

The IBL looks interesting.

But when stating {exporting Bryce native objects to other file formats}. Does that include Bryce Trees? Trees and Terrains are what Bryce does best. Exporting Bryce Primitives is not that big of a deal. Why spend days doing metaball, Boolean models. When the same, more efficient, realistic model, can be made in a modeling program in 1/10th of the time. So the ability to export Bryce Trees would be a big plus, for pros as well as amateur. Trees and Terrains only take minutes to make in Bryce, compared to hours in modeling programs.

I sure hope more vegetation support is included in B6, along with the ably to export it.

IMO that feature alone would be a strong selling point to the 3D community.

Yup, exporting Bryce trees out would be a cool advantage. I could take one into ZB, "knarly" it up with detail and export it out as low res mesh with a displacement.

Maybe if we are lucky....export it right back into Bryce. (when the day comes we have displacement support)

Quote - Ruben, are you around this Saturday? Cor (aka RocSerum) is celebrating his 3000th image posted (today!) on Rosity and will present the How to... on his Got Her image, which took me 254 hours of rendering at 6000 pixels resolution.

I dunno yet, it depends on if I'm on a plane to austria for a week or not.. haha

U mean "gnarly" AS? ;-) I'd like to see some of ur ZB stuff btw! i dont think u've shown us much (if any) of it yet right?

Lol...you're right, "gnarly".

I've been....reserved with my ZB stuff, yes, lol. But, I have posted some here and over at ZBC.

I love my ZB2 and am eagerly waiting on my ZB2.5....

It seems you can't export metaballs - but you can export boolean meshes in B6.

does this mean we can now have moving reflective spheres over rippling lakes?..;)

what about the ssssssllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww render times? i SURE hope they make some sort of improvement to this glacial-like movement of the render engine

I think you are exagerating there. Bryce doesn't move that fast. I think continental drift is a better approximation.