Not a word about a new Bryce version so far?

If Corel doesnt put a high priority in developing some important upgrades to Bryce, Im afraid it will be outdated in the near future and will go down to oblivion like Vista Pro.

The recent announcement that Terragen will resume development towards importing 3D objects and including vegetation will make things hard for Bryce. Just looking at what it is able to now do for free tells me lot about future Version 1. Mojoworld will be another very tough contender.

I am working now with a large animation project, and to be fair, after 4 years working with Bryce Im becoming quite tired with the current version limitations, specially those concerning atmosphere, material editor, lack of LOD, animation flexibility and rendering times, to name a few...

I believe we should start screaming very loud to protect our investment in time and money on Bryce.

Fernando

I would have to agre with the above. I espcecially would like to shape the objects. i.e. bending a cube in the center. I love the ease of use in Bryce. Now if only they can make it more flexible.

Acuos,

One of the problems with Bryce is that exotic interface. The original developers were more concerned with aesthetic than with functionality. That's one of the reasons why there are so many shortcuts, mostly undocumented.
Another one is that Bryce is a closed package. Can you imagine how many new plug-ins would exist now if it was open like Terragen?

What concernes me more is the absence of the usual rumors that always precede a new release, or of new wish lists around the forums.

Fernando

The wish lists become boring novel long fantasies, every time. And, it's been done so often, we all know what we want, or at least hope to get in Bryce Pro. I don't find Bryce'e/Posers interfaces a problem at all, it's the one reason I was drawn to the program(s), and was able to learn them so easily/quickly. Back in 1993(or so), the original developer of the interface, Kai Krause was more concerned with making an interface that could be used by anyone, quickly and easily. An easy interface atop a powerful mathmatical program. If it wasn't for the interface, Terragen would be considered user-friendly comapred to Bryce. Limitations in atmosphere and the material editor? Like what? The shortcuts are documented, you just can't rely on the actual manual to show you what they are, lol. (rely on Real World Bryce) Oh, I would LOVE Bryce to accept plug-ins. It seems it was originally designed with that in mind, but that part of it just fell to the wayside. Yes, if Bryce stays a closed program, its user base will eventually shrink away. I don't know...I remember the pre-release of Bryce 5 and it was pretty much like it is now...just the sound of the wind. A few websites got to review it a couple weeks before it came out, a few beta-testers released some basic renders, that was about it. At this point, I would bribe someone good money to find out the Bryce Pro's new attributes... AgentSmith

I wonder if they would accept Pay-Pal? AgentSmith

Oh man to be able to develope plugins for Bryce to compete with the other high end Programs would make my day complete I am and always will be a Bryce user but I quite agree that if something isnt done quick Bryce will fall way behind...I am purchaseing Lightwave or at least I have almost enough to get but was looking and most Jobs do reguire users to use Maya too and I am stumped as to which one but both have Excellent qualities...But If they develope better modeling abilities (Point editing and maybe spline?)and exporting in OBJ format With the ability to develope plugins like SDK and be able to sell under NO RESTRICTIONS I would buy Bryce...

I don't think Bryce would ever have the EULA problems that Poser and its users have had, lol.

I bought Lightwave but returned it a week later. I found it annoying and "unnecessarily complicated" just to do the simplest things. So I went back to Bryce, which has its limitations, but at least I can get my work done fast and easy. Since I use Bryce for final scene renderings, the main and vital feature I'd like to see in Bryce is fast, professional looking radiosity lighting, and fast, quality soft shadows. The current soft shadows are poor and too slow for hi-rez renders. And if we could get other plug-ins, that would be super. By the way, to get around modeling limitations I import all my complex objects from another 3D program. If Corel doesn't take Bryce seriously they should sell it to someone who does.

And by the way, they BETTER NOT CHANGE THE BASIC BRYCE INTERFACE!!!!!!! It may be simple, but it's elegant, productive and very powerful. That's the main reason I haven't yet switched to any of those 'hi-end' programs.

IF the interface is unchanged, the least they could do would be to raise its resolution. I find it extremely annoying to have to squint an inch from the monitor to click on a three-pixel wide triangle to access submenus!

I think that's why I'm moving towards a higher end package. So far I'm happy with Electric Image, however, I do have an eye on LW and if I scratch the right lotto ticket, SoftImage XSI. But I'll always be a brycer at heart and regardless of what Corel puts out, I'll surely upgrade. Oh to see Poser integration! Too bad MetaC didn't last long enough to integrate those programs.

So what if they don't give us what we want. Apart from the usual gripe of slow rendering, Bryce has got it all as far as I can see. It's nice to get upgrades ect, but I'm happy with B5. The Bryster (Chris)

If they change the interface I will kick and scream. The best part about it is that it is as simple or as in depth as you want it to be. If you wish, you can only see the basic interface, but if you want to do more, you can access more powerful features through submenues without having to be confronted by them in a simple scene. Bryce's material and texture editor is the best i've ever seen. Once you learn what the components do (noise, phase, filter, belnding modes, etc) it is a snap to create any material you desire directly from bryce. It's ability to blend whole textures together is also very cool, and is way beyond anything in 3dsmax or other programs that rely mainly on image maps for the texture. Sure, bryce sucks as a modeler. You only have booleans, and you can't export them. BFD. Bryce was pioneered as a landscape program - just look at how far it has come since then. Be patient and if enough people desire them, you will see the tools you need. No matter how many new features bryce 6 has, I hope that the main interface and the labs stay pretty much the same. I am all in favor of new labs, and this is how I think bryce should progress. We have the main work window, and then the labs should plug in seemlessly much as they do now. An interesting direction to go would be if corel sold the base program with a few upgrades as it is now, and then had labs to be purchased separately and installed within the program. Then plugins could me made for the labs. The new labs might be: a modeling lab, an advanced 3d terrain lab (upgrade of symmetric lattice editor), and an easier to use animation lab with the ability to have paths interact with eachother. (Believe it or not, the current advanced motion lab does have some cool controls if you can get used to it.)

Just out of curiosity - does anyone know why Bryce is called Bryce? I've always wondered...

Well Bryce is a landscape program and Bryce is a canyon so it's named after a cayon that it can create as a landscape. :)

FYI: Bryce Canyon is in Utah.

Here's my opinion: Bryce's sky limitations: No volume clouds, static cloud-movement, support for only one sun and moon. Bryce's Material limitations: No (volume)caustics. No self-illumination. No illuminating textures. No dismpacementmapping. Only four material channels. No Fresnel fall-off. No adjustable diffuse/specular etc. gradients. Instable when importing high-res textures. Bryce's modelling limitations: Only boolean modelling. Where are the poly-modelling tools(at least the stuff they have in Amapi), extrusions, nurbs, sub-d's etc. Bryce's rendering limitations: Astronomically slow. No GI, Radiosity, HDRI etc. Only one shader. Where are the different or even adjustable shaders? (Electron microscope look for instance) Other: No Plug-ins. No full poser-support. If they change at least some significant limitations from this list they can expect to get profit from Bryce. If not: They'll be forced out of the market. The competition is strong. Corel must remember that. And the most important thing: Release information about the project while you're working on updates!! Tell people what they will get in the new version!! If people have something to look out for they'll buy the software.

*At this point, I would bribe someone good money... The wish lists become boring novel long fantasies, every time. If Corel doesn't take Bryce seriously they should sell it to someone who does. ...the original developer... I wonder if they would accept Pay-Pal? yes...lol

Seems Corel have bigger problems than bryce to worry about at the moment. This is from Digit-Mag. ( http://www.digitmag.co.uk/ ) " Corel cuts 22 percent of workforce | November 07, 2002 By Todd R Weiss Corel is laying off 22 per cent of its workers to try to shore up the companys weak financial picture. The graphics-software maker said it is cutting about 220 employees to save some $12 million (around 8 million) annually in expenses. The company will retain about 769 employees worldwide. Corel said it will take a one-time charge of up to $6.3 million this quarter to pay for costs related to the layoffs. The move comes 14 months after the company spun off its Linux operating system business to start-up Xandros, so Corel could focus on its desktop productivity and graphics applications. The layoffs and related cost-cutting moves are being undertaken to help get the company positioned for profitability, according to Corel. Like many other companies, Corel has been hit by the slow economy and cutbacks in IT spending during the past two years. The staff reductions will come from all departments within the company. Corel has made a commitment to run the business profitably, regardless of the prevailing economic conditions, and the measures we have implemented today position us to achieve that goal, Derek Burney, president and CEO of Corel. He said that while the company expects revenue growth in fiscal 2003, it is adopting a conservative approach in aligning our cost structure to reflect the companys current revenue patterns. "

If Corel doesn't take Bryce seriously they should sell it to someone who does. ...the original developer... The original developer MetaCreations, which was actually MetaTools when they released the first version, "KPT Bryce"clearly has no interest in further development of Bryce.

I like the Bryce interface, being able to go to one place to a proportional resize an object is great. I use Truespace and you have to put your cursor on a special place to resize. Sometimes you can't do it because you are not in the right place to see the lines. They boast about the 3d widgets but sometimes they get hidden by the other objects and you have to swing the camera around. Also like the ability to save the current viewpoint. What we have to do is send our requests to the Bryce developers if possible instead of complaining here. If the they don't visit this forum, then we are just preaching to the choir. As far as the health of Corel goes, that is unsettling. I would miss Bryce if it was discontinued. I do not look forward to learning Truespace as a renderer.

...the original developer... Actually, I was referring only to the developer of the interface, there were a number of "developers" of the different aspects of Bryce. But, yeah MetaCreations bowed out a while ago. Corel bought it in April 2000. Rayraz, One of your beefs with bryce is that it has no volumetric clouds...come again? Maybe I'm misunderstanding that one, lol. AgentSmith

MadMax has a great idea. A basic Bryce program with labs to purchase seperately. I don't use the animation feature so I would rather have other choices. The seperate labs should allow for plug-ins. This would be great. Paul Oksnee

I hope corel ditches Word Perfect. Their modifications to that fine program cost our office about 50k in expense and lost productivity as we change over to MS Word. you know it has to be pretty bad when an office that has used WP for 12 years decides its cheaper to convert. What a nightmare.

Actually, Corel's Word Perfect is doing great for them as some PC companies have decided to dump bundling MS Word with their PC's and go with Word Perfect.

I meant volume clouds through the cloud lab. Something like: skytracer. And about WordPerfect: It's much easier and better than Word. All the functions are called what you expect them to be called. And it always works. If you don't really use too much advanced features you can also try the freeware program 'textshield' it's really stable and compact. And I know the developer and he's still working on a new version with a completely new text-engine.

Argh, renderosity tried to eat my post!!! ha, I copied it in the nick of time... Rayraz...I'm with you on all of the things you mention, even the clouds...I've wished for better skies for a long time now. I can get lost for hours in some aspects of bryce but feel like I'm hitting brick walls in the skylab. Sure you can make a volume slab or the dreaded sky plane, but they both look like crap, and have not been improved upon since b3 fer chst's sake. AgentSmith, I have alot of respect for you, but the skylab is sadly lacking. If someone can show me volumetric clouds without leaving the skylab I'll happily eat those words. Can't even use bump channels on them, well u can but that also looks like crap. The best clouds I've seen were done with lattices and volumetrics, and 4 years mastering the program. Mojoworld has the most shockingly beautiful terrains I have seen from anywhere, except maybe parts of Utah and Alaska (screw hightmaps!). Terragen has the best atmosphere effects and Terrains every bit as good as bryce, and an intriqueing material system. For a renderer/texturer/scene builder combo bryce can't be beat, but in each aspect it is beaten hands down by other programs....they just can't do it all as bryce can. I keep eyeing other programs, if only they were more like bryce! I fear for my favorite program becoming obsolete, or worse given limited modeling ability without the features it has being brought up to date. I'll do most of my modeling elsewhere. I'll pose any figures elsewhere (now wouldn't that be nice). I'll map and paint textures elsewhere. I'll even modify and tweak terrains elsewhere. Just give me a better skylab, a nice foamy transition between beach and sea, and more material channels than you can shake a stick at (or a lumpy tree, for that matter). I don't care if it takes a week to render. Ok, I'll shutup now. Hey, he started it....8^)

Ah, skylab, I get what you (guys) mean now. I've only used the clouds in skylab as background filler for my volumetric clouds.

I've got some other things they can improve: How about: -A bone system. -Better animation lab. For instance with curves that decide the rotation or movement along an axis instead of curves that only display the speed at wich the animation between keyframes is interpolated. -Basic physics system with collission detection. -Particle system. -Clouds that morph because of turbulence in the sky.

And glow-effects/flares ofcoarse.

(laughs at Rayraz, again!) Methinks if you're gonna list off Lightwave's features word-for-word, perhaps you should just use Lightwave? (grins) Or, maybe just convert the top-bar of your Lightwave to say "Bryce Pro", and then you'd be happy? I suck at LW, I've been playing with it for months and still haven't made a single image worth posting, anywhere. I wouldn't even e-mail one of my pathetic attempts to my own dear mum. Even a million dollars worth of software won't make me into another Monet or Rembrandt. I love new tools as much as the next power-hungry, ego-based monkey! But it's all about the art, here, not the technical precision. It's like you have a $40 sable watercolor brush and you're comparing it to a $4,000 dragon-nose-hair oil brush! If you want the power of the dragon-nose, go use it, it already exists. And if Bryce "6" had all of the same features, exactly, as LW, that would be pure copyright infringement, and Corel would go down even faster... Save the DRAGON-NOSES! Make more art! Even some of the greatest artists in the world use crappy brushes some of the time, and the weird part is you can't even tell when they're done!

let see. where shall I start... -"A bone system" This is also available in truespace wich is also a mid-range program. It doesn't need to be complex, but a very basic system would much improve the animation. -"Better animation lab. For instance with curves that decide the rotation or movement along an axis instead of curves that only display the speed at wich the animation between keyframes is interpolated." This can't possible be hard to implement, it's almost the same as what they have now, but then more intuitive and easier to control. -"Basic physics system with collission detection." I agree this is a little bit more complex, but still it would be very handy. -"Particle system" Also availabel in FREEWARE Truespace 3SE and possibly many more cheap programs. -"Clouds that morph because of turbulence in the sky" Just needs some extra procedurals specialised for this effect. It doesn't need to be physically perfect. -"Flares/glows" If corel can't program a glow-effect it can better stop programming. A basic 2D effect with added z-buffer to composite it into a 3D scene would do the trick. It's alredy done real-time in games. If you look at what poser can do in one new version (clothing simulation, hair and a new renderengine added in one version while keeping the software affordable) it can't possibly be to hard for corel to at least implement some of the things I mentioned.

There are many things we all want out of a new Bryce. If we could just; bend stuff export anything have Bryce plugins ...everything else would eventually follow, and my girlfriend would never see me again.

Yeah, maybe then she'd leave us BOTH alone! Just joking, AgentSmith. (grins) A joke...

So, that's what happens when she "goes to work"...I see...

Bryce and Poser interfaces are very different. The Bryce one is done with understanding and is extremely efficient once you've learned it. The Poser one mimics the look and feel without any understanding of the ergonomic principles behind it. You can never get up to speed with Poser in the way you can with Bryce. As for me, I'm just beginning to think about possibly upgrading to Bryce 5 ...

I finally did it B4 to B5, I'm happy with it, learning to make strange shapes with the trees and metaballs, lol.

I know what would be nice... Make the interface run in a regular window. Have the interface automatically scale its resolution/size to be useful regardless of screen resolution settings. Also the interface size should be independent of the project size. I dunno about B5, but in B4 - it's annoying to have to change the document size back and forth for layout and rendering just so you can see and use the controls while making full screen images (XGA res.) It can't be that difficult can it? Other software does stuff like this all the time. If Corel doesn't want to back up Bryce anymore, perhaps they should offer it to JASC. That company is pretty dang good at what they do, and this would allow that company to get their foot in the door regarding 3D. Not to mention that their pricing has been fair to the consumer. Heh... Well, that's how I look at it.

I do have to say I do not like the drop down menu bar in Bryce 5, very annoying, IMO. That is partially because I use my MS Word shortcut bar up there 24/7, but it's also `cause, I just don't care for it, lol. Auto scale of the interface would be cool. I don't really have a problem with document size. I keep my monitor at 1024x768, and I render usually just at 800x600 anyways, so that's no prob. Anything bigger, I always render to disk. It hasn't been until recently I have rendered big (3,000 pixels). Corel's backing up Bryce, and as always I'm curious to see what they do with the upcoming release. Wait and see. AgentSmith

Grass Lab. More prefab trees. At the very least, ability to import objects made in Poser with textures matching more precisely in Bryce to the settings in Poser. At the very most ability to import entire Poser animations to be rendered in Bryce. These last 2 should have been done when Poser and Bryce were both at Metacreations. If Corel wants to keep Bryce selling, they better get with the owners of Poser and make the products mesh. Because you can do this with the latest version of Vue, it's making Vue look more and more attractive. Surely if it can be done in Vue, it can be done with Bryce,too.

Can you import all sorts of file types like *.dxf, *.3ds with VUE?

Yeah.