I have counted numerous software titles that have upgraded or come out with new versions and to my fear Bryce 5 has not moved. I haven't use it in a while since I'm really into Rhino 2 now but have they announced any plans for bryce? An upgrade or update? Poser 5 looks like its going to be great.

No real details on Bryce 6 as of yet. Beta-testers will only just say it's "great!". I heard that they are going to call it "Bryce Pro", but no, no one knows a date for release. AgentSmith

I'm a big Bryce lover, but not a corel lover. Their word perfect office 2002 cost us about $50k in lost data, bad tech support, and workstation lockups. After generating about 500k files in .wpd format, we finally bought MS Word for all 18 workstations. The conversion process sux and that's costing us too, but when its done, we'll be better off. Heck, we got one machine that came with office 2002 and our tech reported that the virus scan picked up Backdoor G2 virus on the disk. I called Corel to notify them and they wanted $25 on a credit card just to report that there was a vendor out there with a problem. I declined to pay. If they didn't want to hear that, then so be it. And I made multiple calls with the same response. Corel released a service patch for Office that was touted to fix 75% of the problems. It fixed about 10% and we still crashed our spreadsheet billing program on a regular basis with no recovery capability other than the previous day's backup. Our bookkeeper is so happy now that we have Excel. The hours I spent writing the spreadsheets for 400+ clients and then converting to Excel took away my vacation. I haven't seen much improvement in Bryce, though the render engine is nice and the tree lab has its merits. I have KPT3 in Photoshop and use that a lot. The new KPT plugin that's out there, er, just from the box cover, doesn't get my money. Dunno what to say. They don't participate in the community like Poser does. Heck, the CEO of Curious Labs posts in the Poser forum quite often. I think the handwriting is on the wall. That's just my two cents.

I send Conan a few sugestions that the renderosity users made and he did get the e-mail in his mailbox, but he never gave any response. When I send him a second mail asking if he could say anything about bryce or the suggestions from the renderosity users he didn't answer also. He couldn't even say something like 'I have read the ideas of the renderosity community'. I get a really microsoft feeling from all this. Personally I think that demo animations showing new features are good for the business. Makes people want to buy the product. I mean: everyone has seen the poser5 preview anims and almost evey poser-user says 'Wow! I got to get me a copy of poser 5'. I think they just have to learn how to do marketing in the low-to-mid range 3D field.

It's a real shame Corel don't get involved in the community, the first time I heard that Poser5 was being released I decided I'd be buying it & the previews just made me more determined to get it asap. I've used bryce in a small way since Bryce2 but I think Bryce5 will be my last version. I hate to say it but Corel are starting to act just like Microsoft by ignoring users, but then Bryce is only a small part of their software base & they can afford to do what they like with it which includes killing it off if they decided they can't be bothered with it anymore. Rob

In a related developement, they have abandonned PhotoPaint as a stand-alone program for PC. It is only available for Mac. You have to buy the whole CorelDraw package to get it otherwise. I am not sure what is going through their minds but they do seem to be f*****g up on their user base.

Well, I guess that answers my question. I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge about an upgrade for Bryce allowing importing Poser animations into it. I know that Vue Esprit 4 does, but I kinda like Bryce and don't want to have to buy yet another program. I have purchased Susanna, but am having problems figuring it out; no doubt yet another fine example of my limitless ineptitude. (Don't worry joke, I'm not blaming you; I know full well that it works 'cause I've seen it, and it's awesome...) I was just hoping that someone has heard that something is coming down the pipe. Soon. Now back to that Susanna PDF...

Heard dat. I loved the ease and simplicity of getting right into Bryce, even though I was a latecomer (since Bryce 4) to the Bryce scene. If Corel isn't going to listen to the 3-D communities like 'osity Bryce users, they're setting themselves up for a huge fall. And that's too bad. I'll admit that for what I do, I'm fairly happy with almost everything Bryce 5 does with the exception of 'true' Poser import (import of pz3's or cr2's, as opposed to exported obj's... of course, Poser could be so nice as to set up export obj/mat files that showed relative file paths so that you didn't have to look up each and every texture file in your poser tectures directory). The only other option to someone like me (I'm an artist, not a modeler, and I doubt if I can devote the time to learning to model in a program like 3DS Max, Truespace, or the like) was Vue, which I'm still considering, but almost solely because of its Poser importing ability... After all, the Bryce online community is so much bigger and more prevalent than the Vue one, as is 3rd party (private user) support for mats and objects here at 'osity. The Bryce interface seems to be a lot easier to use, and the importability of PSD files into the texture editor makes it so much easier to use than some others. On top of that, I learned twice as much about using Bryce from Kitchens and Gavenda's 'Real World Bryce 4' as I did from the user's manual, same as I did using the Photoshop Bible series for Photoshop, as opposed to Adobe's user manual. I'm not even aware of any sort of book like that is available for Vue. Yet, at least. It would truly suck hard if Corel didn't pay any attention to their 3-d art community's suggestions, like here at 'osity. It might also force a lot of people who would ordinarily salivate at the possibilities for Bryce to take a look around and start supporting other products that do listen to their users' forums. AF

It's a pity Corel seem like a bunch of dicks because I like their s/w. For example, Corel Draw is 10X easier to use than Adobe Illustrator, which doesn't even have a font preview function!!! <<<:< Mind you, I think many of the bigger companies are going the same way. Last month I had an argument with some asswipe from Macromedia. I informed them of a very large bug in Flash & they said they'd get me a fix. Two months later I e-mailed to say where is my fix and they e-mailed back saying that I had to pay for my support now because I had purchased the package over 3 months previously! I attempted to explain to the retard that I had reported the problem two months before but they were unable to comprehend that high level of logic. Anyway, a little off topic. I don't think Corel will abandon Bryce, especially if rumours of Bryce 6 are true. I hope they don't, as what else is there? I've never used Vue, but my opinion of it was tainted ever since one of the top UK arts mags (can't recall which) stopped half way through their review process saying it was the worst piece of software in terms of reliability that they had ever tested. I still have the article somewhere, saying that unless a completely new version is released, nobody should even think of purchasing it. I assume a new version HAS come out (this was about 7 months ago) but still, I wouldn't trust it.

Yup - they slowed the interface down and made it less reliable! ;) I am glad that Bryce didn't become another historical piece of software, but I just wish someone with a little creativity had got hold of it instead of corel. Having said that, the advances in bryce 5 are so trivial in real terms (other than the tree lab) that even if it had gone for good after 4, It wouldn't make much difference, since I still use that 99.9% of the time over 5. ;) Fingers crosed for some benefit to version 6!

Interface slower? Less reliable? The Interface? Okay... I now have Bryce 5 and have noticed no difference in the interface at all(but, maybe that's just me). The program renders about 8% slower (again, for me) but, that's about it in the "this kinda blows" catagory. The advances in B4 to B5 actually are big ones, they're just not the ones the fans of Bryce TRULY wanted, lol. Especially for a "landscape" program, a Tree Lab is an awesome advance. With practice it can do similar things that say, Onyx Tree Pro ($500) can do. B5 also has : Increase-able Internal Reflections (TIR), & Ray Depth, True Ambience, Soft Shadows, Blurry Reflections & Transmissions, and D.O.F. Blurring!...all with variable Rays Per Pixel, not to mention Metaballs...I mean, these are all big things in the world of 3D software. I don't really think fans of Bryce will embrace/forgive Corel until they get...Poser file(pz3)import capability, True 3D file export, Plug-in support, and true radiosity. (at least, lol) But, I gotta admit, I too would love to have any of those capabilities in Bryce, who wouldn't? Kind of a shame, some are down on Corel, I don't think it's that bad of a company. `Course all I use from them is Bryce, so that opinion is a fairly limited one. But, without Corel we would all still be using B4, with no other choice. Yeah, so Corel doesn't talk to us like Curious Labs does, ah well, watcha gonna do? They've been a BIG company for quite a while and that's how they seem to handle things. Keep talking to them, someday they gotta talk back to us, lol. Here's hoping they make half as good of an impression with Bryce 6 as Curious Labs is doing with Poser 5...

By The Way...See that "Spotlight with Conan Hunter-Program Manager for Bryce 5" link way up above in the Bryce Forum Banner thing? I myself asked him; "Does Corel have any ideas or plans to open Bryce up for other developers to make plug-ins for Bryce as we see in other 3D programs". He said yes. So perhaps in Bryce 6... ...like you said "keep your fingers crossed". AgentSmith

Hey, I'd be all for it. I'm not really Corel a bunch of miserable b*stards or anything-- heck, I haven't even talked to them, just going mostly from what I've heard here. It does seem like the consensus I've read just here toward Corel seems to be overwhelmingly disappointing. But I'd be extremely hyped just to see something along the few advances from 5 to 6 like we saw in 4 to 5, especially if they do allow for 3rd party plugins. I'd be hyped even if that came at the cost of a slight raise in render times. (Slight, please! I just picked up a faster computer so I wouldn't have to render pictures over the course of a weekend! ^_^) AF

{Increase-able Internal Reflections (TIR), & Ray Depth, True Ambience, Soft Shadows, Blurry Reflections & Transmissions, and D.O.F. Blurring!} Yeah - that's all great - except that they are all totally unuseable for hires rendering, unless you have days and weeks to wait for final rendered output!! Bryce has a stunning renderer, capable of some incredible results, but it is pretty slow at best, with all the fx additions, it is almost unbareable! And yes, when leaving the materials and terrain editors, the redraw times on the interface are significantly slower in 5 over 4. I have heard this to be the same for other users in both mac and Pc formats. !?!

OOOHHhhh...redraw times from coming back from editors to the main interface, I understand now. I haven't really noticed, but that may be beacuse I changed to a fast PC along with B5. Bryce renderer = True Raytracer = long render. Yup, that's just the nature of the thing. Sucks, but the renders can be awesome. This is why other software titles don't do the TRUE Raytracing rendering. Don't blame them... Just don't have any render times gripes right now because I went from a Pentium-1 200mhz to an AMD Athlon XP 1.6ghz (and a GeForce 4 Video Card) So, I'm SO deliriously happy that I'm rendering many, many, many times faster than before, I can't complain at all. Well, not to much, anyway. (I HATE, in B5, how the material libraries will not remember my place with the scroll bar, I have to KEEP scrolling down to get back to where I was, over and over) AgentSmith

Cinema 4D render = Raytracer = fast and high quality. I have done a test on this: A simple ball in a basic scene, one light and hard shadow took 17 secs in bryce. with soft shadow it took 2:07 minutes (standard ray-setting used). When trying the same in C4D it took 1:02 minutes. That's 2 times as fast. And the Cinema shadow actually looked better! And to make the difference even bigger: The bryce scene was rendered on a AMD 1800+ with 512 MB RAM and the Cinema4D scene was rendered on a Celeron 600MHz with 192 MB RAM! Corel can't tell me that bryce's render engine can't be made faster. Cinema's raytracer is better than the one in bryce if you ask me. I think Corel is going to lose me as a bryce user if they don't improve the render engine, or at least make some options to set what you want to see 'TRUE'-raytraced and what 'not so TRUE' :)

I agree, ray tracing doesn't have to take that long, it's just that they haven't tried to update it.

...and what amused me, is that they made a fuss about how great the new effects were in Bryce 5, yet they make a comparitive render in Cinema look real time in duration!... can you imagine trying to render a full digital resolution animation at 30 frames per second using any or all of those fx!?? - it would take months! :)

Kromekat, you give room for some sarcasm (I hope I spelled it right); That is why they made bryce lightning. That way you can just get some extra computers to make your render lightning-fast. It's not their software that is slow, it's the render-farm that's not big enough. I mean what kind of loser can't get a renderfarm for his bryce-project :)=)

{I mean what kind of loser can't get a renderfarm for his bryce-project :)=) } Absolutely, I mean, I had nothing for my other 30 G4's to do until Bryce lightning came along. Now I can set off a 22" x 28" 300dpi render with soft shadows, ambience and dof blur on all of those, and still have time for a long weekend in Paris, a shopping trip to Milan, and still be back to see the last 2% render while I paint the exterior of the Mansion! ;) lol! dont get me wrong, Bryce is still my favourite illustration tool... but Corel didn't really make a lot of difference yet, hopefully 6 will not just be a re labeled 5!

Other Software packages that have raytracers rendering engines are not TRUE raytracers, that is why I keep putting that word in all caps. ;o) Other raytracers (Cinema 4D) are made faster beacuse they do approximations of raytracing, but don't go full out. This is because full out (True) raytracing takes a lot longer. (I may be wrong about that, but that is, so far, what I have dug up out about other raytracers) This is just FYI, I'm NOT saying that since Bryce is a True raytracer it looks better than C4D's. If you like C4D, and think it looks better, than go with that. Of course Cinema 4D costs $1,600.00, versus say, buying Bryce 4 online for $80.00...But, of course if you can afford Cinema 4D, building a renderfarm would be no big deal, lol. BUT...I do agree it would be cool if Corel could make options in the Bryce Raytracing engine to manually decrease its "trueness" to increase its speed. Other software raytracers can still look good and be fast, why not Bryce? Updating a True raytracing engine is difficult. As I imagine it, how can you find a faster way of computing "2+2=4" in your own brain? To stay "True" to the formula you can't really take shortcuts. Easiest way is to get a faster brain. `Course that's just off the top of my head. AgentSmith

I know it's hard to make "TRUE" raytracing fast, but the people at Corel could also make a few 'not true' features in the render settings. That way you can choose between true reflections and 'not true' reflections. The same goes for DOF, Area shadows etc. And they could also include motion blurr. Having no motion blurr in bryce sucks. As for C4D The radiosity render in C4D is faster than the not radiosity render in bryce. (unless you make your scene very hard on radiosity.) And there's a free version. Plus you can buy the ART version if you don't have to animate.

Yup, like I said before, perhaps Corel could implement an option to decrease its rendering "trueness", or something like that. For example - one of THE most realistic renderer's out there is called "Final Render". (although it IS technically a plugin for 3D Studio Max) Final Render is a raytracing renderer, but because the company has used special algorithms and clever caching, it renders way fast and it has extremely realistic results. This is the program that has made sub-surface scattering so popular. I agree, It would be VERY cool if Bryce could imulate any of that coolness. Yup, I tell Brycers if they want to go further in 3D than Bryce but, like almost all of us, don't have a lot of money, that Cinema 4D "Art" is THE way to go (that's just my opinion). Although it does cost $700.00 it is a very serious/professional 3D program. For now, I'll stick to the $250.00 I've sunk in into owning Bryce 4 & Bryce 5. ;o) AgentSmith

Footnotes... imulate = emulate Final Render http://www.finalrender.com/finalrender/default.htm Maxon's Cinema 4D Art v7.0 http://www.maxon.de/pages/products/c4d/art7/c4d_art7_e.html *Art 7.0 cannot/willnot do any animation. Let's keep our fingers crossed for a kick-ass Bryce Pro (Bryce 6)...while still being a fairly cheap upgrade for us broke earthlings. AgentSmith