I am addicted to Bryce since its conception. Other than its capabilities in generating realistic terrains it does excellent renderings on imported objects created by other software. And, it is unique For creating 3d animations or movement in 2d images and photos.
I don't think there is yet an alternative user friendly program in the market for rendering and animation.
Recently I updated my Mac Power PC and found out that Bryce is no more compatible with the latest OSx. And it seems that Daz3D is not interested in further upgrades.
Is another fantastic award winning program going to disappear?

Sadly, I'm afraid that as time rolls on, Bryce will probably fall further behind in compatability with current OS upgrades. There is, as far as I am aware, no plan to update Bryce to correct this problem. I do know that Bryce will work with Windows 7 - I use it on my PC at the moment. In short, Bryce will go the way of the Dodo unless something major happens.

"Is Bryce dying?"

Not really. It's just in a deep coma waiting to be awakened by the kiss of a powerful Goddess.

I think it's already dead, it just won't accept it.

It does work fine in Windows 10, I've used it without any problems.
Check out m post here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/58587/bryce-and-windows-10#latest

"Is Bryce dying?"

• Does it work? Yes, it absolutely does. So no, it is not dying. It is a working tool.

Are users opting to leave it behind because they feel they just HAVE to have the latest OS?

• Yes. That is their decision, so, it will be their consequences.

I didn't throw away my pencils, brushes and canvases just because Photoshop was invented.

• That would scream that I am not really an artist.

Nor, did I stop using nor throw away any WORKING tool just because no one made a shiny new version of it to appease me.

It's not the tool, it's the artist behind the tool that actually creates art.

AS

Yup like Mike Halverson from Imagine 3D (now abandonware but I still model in it) was fond of sayin..."It's not the hammer...."

Apart from the missing Mac support, Bryce is very much alive. Even though it's now four years without upgrade or advancement, I still discover undocumented pearls in this program. There are several capable 3D programs available, Bryce is the most versatile one. It's not just a great landscaper, there's almost no genre of art you can't do with it. Bryce will be dead the moment nobody uses it anymore.

It is only dying if you let it die I still use it although as of late due to mental health issues haven't had the drive to do it but I refuse to let it die I would rather die than live without it and that itself should speak volumes though I am not sure everyone will probably agree. Don't let Bryce die because others say it is dying as long as you can use it and stuff no Bryce is FAR FROM DEAD take blacksmiths that's a dying art but there are still people who do it, ballet, printmaking, clock making and some other things as long as someone still uses something then it is by no means dead. In fact I recently took up bone carving and my knowledge in Bryce proved instrumental in fact I couldn't have done it otherwise I know it sounds odd but it's true.

I will continue using it even if it means to have a separate computer for it..! I always test al my models in Bryce, the way it renders metals and glass just like that... Bryce is definetly not dead for me! And I will carry on making Bryce content for the store!

I remember back in 2008 when the last Hexagon update came out, DAZ said that Bryce 8 would be coming out soon. They went on to described the some of the features included, if I recall right, Bryce 8 was to have a scripting language; a way to save light and camera setups; the ability for D/S to send rigged figures to Bryce, so that poses could be adjusted in Bryce; the ability to edit vertices, among others. It hard say how far along Bryce 8 was, whether they had just started or near completion. It might have been only as far as the as the update they released years later, but it sad to think that somewhere on a server at DAZ sits a half finished, forgotten Bryce 8.

Bryce will remain in my tool kit as long as I'm doing spaceships and planet terrains. I think the program still does a remarkable job when it comes to space scenes and until I feel like learning another program or that I cannot create what I need for my work I will continue to use Bryce. As far as DAZ is concern I gave up of them quite a long time ago. They live, eat, and poop poser and all that goes with that program. I started to stop posting there at DAZ when they said that they would have galleries for just Bryce, yeah right. It was 20% Bryce and 80% Poser as that what they were posting on the so called Bryce Gallery. Why keep shoving Poser down out throats in every gallery especially when it was supposed to be a BRYCE gallery? I would like to see a real Bryce only gallery, that means that except for postwork everything created for the image is pure BRYCE! Now I would actually start posting to that gallery myself. But when my work is being regarded as not good enough for the Bryce gallery when my pictures is 95% BRYCE and the picture that beats me is 20% Bryce at most and 80% at least Poser then there is a problem with their standards!

It's 2019 and I'm still using Bryce and just can't find any other program, or application that has all of it's unique capabilities, with the most user friendly interface you can use. I can create my own custom materials, via the importer and integrated material editors. I can also import many various 3D files from other applications. The program has a Tree & Vegetation Lab, Terrain Editor tool and even sky & lighting lab with many settings. It even includes a deep texture editor. There are quite a few possibilities and capabilities! I've watched many David Brinnen tutorials in the beginning. But now I know this program so much more than I did back then. Although, I'm always still discovering a few new capabilities and hidden features. FYI: I'm a traditional award winning artist, painter-photographer and I believe Bryce is a very powerful and relevant tool, even now! It helps me tremendously in my studio!! I can even import my hand painted backgrounds and also 2D painted objects, usually as a 2D face. I add them and other 3D objects in a scene, including some terrains and meshes. If you look at my my art gallery online, located on my website, at: www.danseitzinger.com you will see how much this application truly helped me develop my artwork. I'm a Bryce user forever :-) Artist, Dan Seitzinger - My website: www.danseitzinger.com

IMO, what Bryce needs more than anything, and ASAP, is OpenGL rendering. Painful that with GPUs with dozens or even hundreds of sub processors, we're still rendering in slow motion. It would not require a complete rewrite just to do the rendering in OpenGL. Next on the list would be 64 bit. After that, ability to see more than 8 CPUs (particularly with Intel i9 and 18 core CPUs plus hyperthreasing now available). General updates all around would be next on my list. And Mac compatibility would be nice.

Daz needs to do the right thing here. Either restart development, sell it at a fire sale price to a company that will continue development, or make its code open source, so that developers who are also Bryce users can upgrade the code. Leaving it on a shelf as abandoneware is downright offensive to Daz' customers. It is, if I may coin a term, a "crime against software". It's completely indefensible.

I just got a new pc with windows 10, bryce is working fine, but does crash with some of the older Bryce 4 content.

Sadly this is what happens when people who don't care about the product take it over.

Greetings to all!! My name is Gabriel, and I apologize if I combine first message I write here.

I found this thread through a Google search, and I just want to comment that I started with Bryce 2 for PC, then I moved to 5 and finally I bought Bryce 7.1 PRO, which I use on two PCs. one with Windows 7 and the other, an Asus laptop with Windows 10.

For me, Bryce has hit the ceiling as it is. It is unstable on Windows 7 and 10. I use it with L.A.A. but their limit on RAM is absurd. Its rendering slowness is excessive, and that I only limit myself to making static images. It doesn't even cross my mind to make short animations.

I worked for an artist in New York, as a 3D designer, to create 3D images that reflected his style and his art, and in that time period I got to know a lot of things about Bryce, but also his limitations. Even he himself told me that, talking to other artists, when he commented that I was working for him with Bryce, they told him "what is wrong with you?"

The result: a few months ago I stopped working for him, because I no longer provide him with what he wants, because of the program. Now I still use Bryce for my ideas as an artist, but already without much illusion, knowing that I use a program that is out of the labor market in 2023. I have installed Blender 3.4, and I will start learning other software again, since DAZ is not interested in keeping Bryce alive in the least.

It's very sad for me to say it, but Bryce is dead. At least that's the feeling I have.
Greetings to all.

I do not argue with your insights, gabrierikdesign and I fully agree that Daz 3D is completely ignorant of Bryce, it does not even accept new assets (my second last was declined within 35 seconds (!) and the last one I tried took less than 2 minutes to be declined). Interestingly enough, I have 59 sets for Bryce in the Daz store and they still sell enough for Daz 3D to keep me as a PA.

Nevertheless, I still run Bryce 4, 5, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, 7.0 and 7.1 on a Windows 2000, an XP, 2 Win 7 and 2 Win 10 and even use Network Rendering (though not very often).

Bryce has its limitations, no doubt, but it is versatile. You can do abstracts, landscapes, space scenes or under water scenes, objects, vegetation, ... I find it difficult to use it successfully for characters, particularly close-up faces. Renders can take long, even on my i9 16 core CPU Win 10. Raytracing always takes more time than pathtracing because it makes less shortcuts.

The memory limitation of 2 GB (or about 3.5 GB with LAA) is a severe limitation. Compressing a final scene to save on disk is probably the worst "advantage" that was introduced with Bryce 6 because it is done in memory and thus limits it even more.

I can not comment on animation. I had tried it a long time ago and realised that I am a complete nut doing movies.

The last update to Bryce was made in 2011, and this is - as far as computer programs are concerned - an eternity. Looking on the bright side: no new bugs were introduced and meanwhile I know a lot of them and found ways around them.

So for me, Bryce is not dead.

Ok people, I've never heard of this LAA, does windows 10 64-bit come with it, and how do you engage it? Bryce 7.1 pro.

system win 10 64 bit 32 gigs memory 8 t CPU 

Bryce is not dead, I use it at least once a week 4hrs minimum just to make stuff to send to Daz or Bender or the other way around.

32-bit applications, like Bryce, can officially only manage 2 GB of memory. However, it can actually manage 4 GB, 2 of them are reserved for the operating system (Windows). There is a means to get some of those reserved 2 GB back for the running application. Most 32-bit programs have a flag that can be set to take some of those reserved 2 GB for them, and Bryce can be made Large Address Aware (LAA). There is a free program that can be downloaded and just unpacked into any folder on your disk (around 40 KB - kilo, not mega or giga). When Bryce is set to LAA, it can use around 3.2 to 3.5 GB of memory, provided your machine has at least 4 GB of memory. I use LAA not only for all my installed Bryce (4 to 7.1) but other programs, too on my Win 7 and Win 10 computers.
You may watch this video (link below), in which I explain how to get the tool and use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZmETVO15c

BryceHoro posted at 5:01 AM Sun, 19 March 2023 - #4459029

I do not argue with your insights, gabrierikdesign and I fully agree that Daz 3D is completely ignorant of Bryce, it does not even accept new assets (my second last was declined within 35 seconds (!) and the last one I tried took less than 2 minutes to be declined). Interestingly enough, I have 59 sets for Bryce in the Daz store and they still sell enough for Daz 3D to keep me as a PA.

Nevertheless, I still run Bryce 4, 5, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, 7.0 and 7.1 on a Windows 2000, an XP, 2 Win 7 and 2 Win 10 and even use Network Rendering (though not very often).

Bryce has its limitations, no doubt, but it is versatile. You can do abstracts, landscapes, space scenes or under water scenes, objects, vegetation, ... I find it difficult to use it successfully for characters, particularly close-up faces. Renders can take long, even on my i9 16 core CPU Win 10. Raytracing always takes more time than pathtracing because it makes less shortcuts.

The memory limitation of 2 GB (or about 3.5 GB with LAA) is a severe limitation. Compressing a final scene to save on disk is probably the worst "advantage" that was introduced with Bryce 6 because it is done in memory and thus limits it even more.

I can not comment on animation. I had tried it a long time ago and realised that I am a complete nut doing movies.

The last update to Bryce was made in 2011, and this is - as far as computer programs are concerned - an eternity. Looking on the bright side: no new bugs were introduced and meanwhile I know a lot of them and found ways around them.

So for me, Bryce is not dead.

Maybe I use Bryce in the wrong way. I love this program, very intuitive, friendly interface, and without limits for imagination... but, for example, I finished an image in three months, dedicating an average of 8-10 hours of rendering daily in that period. I used an ASUS GL753VD laptop, with an Intel i7 7700HQ CPU and 8gb of RAM (now 16Ggb). Yes, I made the image at a resolution of 4000x2250 pixels with antialiasing options, but reducing the rays per pixel to 9. And yes, it turned out very nice, but the time invested seemed excessive to me.

Here I leave this image at low resolution, but you can appreciate the amount of work it took me:

Bryce allows me to do things like this image, what kills me is the excessive render time and the 3.5gb ceiling of the program. If only DAZ would devote some attention to this program...

Thanks for your reply. It encourages me a little bit to not leave Bryce aside.

Excellent work indeed. My max render size is 1600 px. Quite a while ago I rendered the same image in different sizes and sent them to a photo lab to make A4 (roughly Legal) sized images. I also printed them to this size and found that there is no difference if I increased the size. Only when I do spherical panoramas, I render the 6 cube faces as 2560 px to assemble to a 8192 x 4096 px panorama.

BryceHoro posted at 5:01 AM Sun, 19 March 2023 - #4459029

I do not argue with your insights, gabrierikdesign and I fully agree that Daz 3D is completely ignorant of Bryce, it does not even accept new assets (my second last was declined within 35 seconds (!) and the last one I tried took less than 2 minutes to be declined). Interestingly enough, I have 59 sets for Bryce in the Daz store and they still sell enough for Daz 3D to keep me as a PA.

WOW. I've been thinking about creating things for Bryce, and the thing that stopped me was believing that people are not interested in Bryce anymore, because there are no new products for Bryce coming out. Kind of like self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thinking that Bryce is dead is like (to me) believeing that pencil and paint is dead. No matter the age of the tool, the only thing that will ever matters is the user.

Any media will have its own natural boundries as will any software that isn't updated and that's fine and to be expected. Yet for me, Bryce was always a sandbox of imagination and it always sparked mine. Without my Bryce muse, I wouldn't have had a self-taught education in (all things) 3D and I wouldn't have gotten those original jobs I had in the film industry so, all in all, Bryce will always be my first 3D love.

And yeah, I still start it up and play with it, I have since Bryce 4 and probably always will.

To be SURE, Horo's DAZ assets make playing with Bryce even better.

Recently went to win 11. I haven't really created anything new, but updated several old Bryce renders and everything seems to work OK. The one thing I wish they would fix is the Spray render tool, I used to use that a lot to blend terrains. 

Nice to see some familiar names in this thread :-))

This being the only active thread in the Bryce forum is already an answer to the original question, me thinks

I started with Bryce 1.0 in 1994 and upgraded until 5.5 and it always has been a fun programme to work with as well as my introduction into the 3D world.  It's limited modelling capabilities urged me to move to Cinema 4D and later to Blender.  I do keep a few vintage computers in my attic though, to run vintage software and Bryce is indeed one of them.  So, not quite dead yet, but a respected senior citizen in a retirement home...

https://blenderartists.org/u/roobol/activity/portfolio

Hello everyone!  It's been a long time - a decade or more? - I don't even remember.  I recall when I was all ready and motivated to build a whole new set of amazing Bryce models, then suddenly everything fell apart as DAZ expressed no desire to further improve Bryce while wanting to buy-out all my existing models for dirt cheap.  Needless to say, I basically lost all inspiration and motivation and got out of making models to pursue other stuff.  If I was 30 years younger I'd probably take the time to master Blender and Unreal Game Engine 5 and go crazy with it.   

But all that Brycing and modeling sure was fun and exciting back in the old days.