yes yes yes! Bryce's image exporters are horrible. Convert to a web-friendly format using any other program, such as PhotoShop, PhotoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, Debabelizer, anything except bryce!!!

There is no information available about Bryce 5 yet. Supposedly, it will be released "early next year", although whether that means early 2001 or early 2002 is not yet clear. Looks more like it will be early 2002. I would guess that they're gonna build in support for Mac OS X in the new version (since there's a 4.1.1 beta demo which supports it) on the mac platform. If they've been listening to us at all, hopefully it will have full export capabilities, be more integrated with Poser, fix some minor details/bugs, have a hierarchic object browser, yada yada yada... ... but the deal is that no one knows exactly what's going on, except for the people at Corel (and they might not even know what will be in the release yet).

I had a look at the press release/readme for the 4.1.1 beta... lest anyone get too excited about this, there are some caveats: (a) it only runs on OS X public beta and does NOT run on OS 9 (which means that it's not Carbonized... it's 'cocoa-ized', since a Carbonized app will run in both settings) (b) it doesn't look very stable (but hey, neither is OSXPB) (c) a lot of the features are disabled, mostly related to import/export. This implies that it is now multi-processor savvy on the Mac, because anything that runs as a native OSX app will be able to take advantage of the built-in multiprocessing support. This assumes, however, that Bryce is multitasking to begin with (which may not be the case). No mention is made about acceleration for the G4. Hmmmm those multiprocessor G4's are looking more attractive every day... my G4/400 is a year and a half old... maybe I can convince the wife (read: hypnotism) to let me buy a new machine /;^D

they carbonized B4?????? you're kidding!!! Did they build in support for the Velocity Engine too? I remember that originally they couldn't because most of the calculations are done in doubles instead of floats.

nope, Bryce does not currently support dual processors. Corel would be foolish, though, if they didn't build that support into Bryce 5. --flick

OK, Prizm... that's not quite accurate. Clay's Volumetric fire, like all other material textures, does NOT emit light. Sorry. What you're seeing is reflection on the man's face... he must have a reflective material put on. The other drawback is that in order to have the fire material 'glow' without its own light source, the Ambient Color setting (in the Atmospheric settings) must be set to a reasonably bright color... the volumetric fire material has high Ambience values, but they can't produce any ambience that's not in the atmosphere. In Bryce, at least, the only objects which will emit light are the light primitives. The easy way to have an object (like a torch flame) emitting light is to place a radial light inside it... and then in the material for the torch flame (you can use Clay's fire, it's pretty darn good) select "disable Receive Shadows".

yup, you're screwed. There's no way to integrate Bryce/Poser animations, other than by creating a new scene for each frame. Wouldn't that be nice??? The alternatives: a-) export each object in Bryce individually as an OBJ file, and import into Poser. This only works for terrains, lattices, and imported mesh objects. b-) use the Bryce animation, and import your poser figure. The downside is that the poser figure can't really move inside Bryce... I think if you ungroup it, you can get some really cheesy motion, but nothing like what you can do in Poser. c-) use another modelling program (other than Bryce) that can export all of its objects to DXF. bummer.

you need to enable the "full shading mode" to get the effects you want... the default "flat shading mode" is a very basic shading, which doesn't interact with sunlight, haze, etc. Be warned that it's gonna wreak havoc with your render times. It's in the little triangle in the upper right corner of the materials grid, just to the left of the A,B,C,D texture components.

you need a starcat.dat file in the Data folder. You can create your own (good luck, that would take forever!) but I'm sure there are places to d/l them off the web. IMHO, I think they should have waited until version 5 to put this crap in. Bryce is all about user interface, and neither this nor the new light gradient feature has any user interface to speak of. Badly done, Corel.

BUT if you want the textures to show up properly, you have to tweak them. There's a tutorial on the sidebar tutorials link over there ------> I can't remember exactly which tutorial, but I do know that if you want to get all the textures to show up properly, it requires a little bit of work.

For the time lapse numbers, the top number is the amount of time which has elapsed, and the bottom is the estimated remaining time to finish the complete render (without antialiasing). The top one only updates every time a sweep is completed, so it's not much help.

the "new volumetric rendering" is exactly the same as in 4.01. In fact, they introduced a couple bugs in the volumetric rendering in the first release of 4.1... it has since been corrected in the second release of 4.1, which is what is available right now on Corel's site. Don't bother upgrading, if you ask me.

yeah, it works just fine, all the way back to Bryce 1.0 The resume render feature has always been a part of bryce. When I originally got Bryce 1.0, I was running on a Mac '030 at 33MHz... most of my renders took over 10 hours to complete, so I got very familiar with this feature :-) When you use the Render To Disk or Render to Animation features, resume render doesn't work... because Bryce isn't smart enough to figure out where the partially completed files are. It only works when you just use the regular Render command. As for rendering an animation.... you can easily render it in chunks by selecting a "working area"... that little green bar that fills up part of the animation area. So select just a partial working area, and in "Render Animation", select "render working area" instead of "entire animation". If you want to interrupt a current render, just interrupt it and click "stop"... delete the last BMP frame, and render from that frame forward later. Details of the "working area" are in your manual, under the Animation section... or maybe it's under the Rendering section, I don't remember. There isn't any way to resume a "Render to Disk..." command, to my knowledge. This poses a bit of a problem, since render to disk is the only way to render really really high resolution files, which are the ones that take forever anyway.

well, they didn't fix "all" the original problems. Some people are still having problems with crashes, import/export, and file size issues. IMHO, unless you need the specific features of version 4.1 (there aren't that many, and none of them have decent user interfaces), then stick with 4.01 -- it fixed most if not all of the same bugs and didn't introduce any new problems.

you can't actually do that.... Bryce doesn't let you animate the "hidden" property. Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the Bryce animation engine, and really needs to be fixed in version 5. Here's the only solution I've found: when you want to "hide" an object, move it way off screen. Next, in the Advanced Motion Lab, set it for an immediate transition time, which looks like a vertical line. That's about as good as it gets.