There are some valid points being made here and there in this thread that are not being fully connected by many of us readers.

Why no Bryce SDK?
Firstly, as simplistic as everyone says Bryce is, it has some special talents that no other application has. Someone already mentioned about Artmatic and Eric Wenger. What is not being connected by readers of the thread so far is that the procedural generators in Bryce's Material Lab and Terrain Lab are protected by copyright laws and are being used in Artmatic as well as some other applications. Even though Daz owns the Bryce software, they do not have the legal right to mess with certain areas such as procedurals, mapping modes, and some of the other Bryce specific abilities we are all so accustomed to using. Ever wondered why there is no World Cubic mappimg in some high end applications, no Object cubic or sinusoidal, its because these guys still own the rights. Most other applications use UV mapping so all these seemingly essential modes in Bryce are useless in most other applications.

So yeah, Daz owns Bryce....just not every line of code within it. Or a better way to state it, Daz is allowed to distribute Bryce, but not to give away its individual parts because some of those parts are still intellectual property protected by the original creators.

Artmatic and Mojoworld are at least two popular applications I can think of that were developed in some way by either Kai Krausse, Ken Muskgrave, or Eric Wenger after the days of Bryce and are part of the reason why a Bryce sdk still cannot be released. This is also the reason Bryce cannot be made Open Source like Blender.

Two of the most popular ideas offered by the userbase both shot to hell...

It isn't that Daz is stupid, it is literally that their hands are tied legally. 

Sad situation, no?

What about a Bryce 8 developed by Daz 3d then?  Here's why it so far it hasn't happened:

No one has managed to convince Daz3d that Bryce can do useful things that other applications cannot. Show me a look you can achieve in Bryce that cannot be achieved in Vue, Terragen, Carrara or Blender and then maybe we'll be onto something. While Bryce competes just fine in hobbyist markets it has no footing at all with professionals, and professionals are the ones who are dedicated purchasers of software to fund development. Poor people like myself who got into Bryce for it's low cost are not the people who keep the world spinning, you need the big spenders for that, at least for a lot of it. You can see the same thing happening with Carrara development. it too has officially stalled, but I still think we will see a Carrara 9 or 10 before we will see a Bryce 8 or 9.

Bryce has not grown with its user base, it became a tool for introductions to cg only as a stepping stone to other applications. I think lots of 3d software owe their large userbases to Bryce because it was Bryce that got them into cg in the first place. But once they "outgrew" (you can never outgrow Bryce) the obvious tools in Bryce they moved on to other applications which can do things more easily by being 64 bit, faster rendering, better instancing tools, better lighting tools etc.

What next to develop with Bryce?
For example, the rendering engine. While there are lots of improvements that could be made to the engine why would anyone bother? In this modern day of unbiased lightening fast rendering who cares about a new engine if it remains biased and slow as heck? The only other render engine I'd like to see added to Bryce is an unbiased one for Bryce, anything else is still going to leave Bryce behind its competitors. Not that the only engine should be the unbiased one, I actually think we should have two, the current and a new unbiased one. Either that, or they need to develop a plug-in or bridge that gets models into unbiased Octane or Lux, though I strongly prefer Octane. But spending time on this current biased and glacially slow engine is a huge waste of time considering the rendering climate today.

Bryce needs to be made 64 bit first and foremost, but that requires a ground up rewrite, and for that amount of diligence one could develop an entirely new application for which they did indeed own every single line of code...a lot like they did with Daz Studio.

Here is a link to a video made by DAvid Brinnen explaining the Large Address Aware.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DyWtdR6cys

If the horizon line is coming in as a paper thin white line across the background that can be really annoying. There are not many things we can do but there are a couple.

1. In the Skylab, go the the Clouds Cover. You will see a Cloud Height slider, make sure this is set to 100% maximum for Cumulus. There is a special relationship between the cloud height settings and the altitude and smoothness of the background Haze gradient. The Cloud Height setting affects the haze even if the Clouds themsleves are not activated, so this is a really important trick to keep in mind.

I find that the taller and smoother the horizon gradient the better the results because the transition from blue to white isnt nearly so sharp.

I have some other tricks you could try as well but try this one out first, if it doest get the job done then please report back and I'll give you more directives. Best of luck!

Mboncher,

Thanks for checking out my stuff Mboncher!!!!

Hopefully you have had the opportunity to read and follow the IL tutorial I mentioned. If not then some of what I'm about to post might not make sense.

Even though they are instances, they still carry a certain degree of information. At the very least an instance still has a location in 3d space requiring no less than 3 parameters, a rotation of three parameters, and a size requiring three parameters and then there is the source geometry which must be kept track of. This is why instances cost so much on memory.

A few things to keep in mind

Lots of people mistake Bryce slowness as a crash. Actually, the Instance Lab (IL) rarely crashes. It does however get so slow that users assume there must be a crash. If no crash report flies up, then it is not an actual crash. In some scenes such as Alpine Valley it can take a full 2 minutes of thinking before it applies even the slightest changes to a scene. This is super frustrating. This is the reason that preparation is so key. You must always have a plan, never play it by ear on something like this. Make lots of test renders before trying to settle in on any specific choices. Try to get the scene set up as best you can before you sgtart painting instances because as you know things slow down a lot once you start painting. Saving scenes with instances can take up to twenty minutes!! Re-opening scenes with instances can also take an eternity. Until we get 64 bit and multi-processor support for all functions, we will be dealing with this slowness.

Bryce has some odd limits within itself. The more polygons in the source geometry, the faster its resulting instances will consume memory by means of virtual polygons. Virtual polygons are just like real polygons and there are limits to the number of total polygons a Bryce scene can handle. But there is also a limit on the total number of instances a scene will tolerate, this is due to the 9 or so parameters required by each instance for it to exist. This is why a single blade of grass even though it is extremely low in polgons cannot be instanced a billion times to cover a landscape with grass. You are better off creating a clump of grass blades as a single object and paint that clump all around as this is more efficient. You are looking for a balance between total polygons and total number of instances painted.

As above mentioned, the virtual instances still have geometry. The wirefram view tries to represent this geometry. Bryce only uses multiple processors for rendering, it only uses 1 core for scene navigation. That's why complex scenes are so slow to navigate. When Bryce was first released there was no risk of the wireframe becoming so complex it would slow down the user. But with instances this is easy to do sadly. The best solutiuon is to use the "Show as Box" in the Attributes of the tree before you start painting it onto the terrain. This way all of the resulting instances will also be Show as Box and you will find navigation speeds remain tolerable even in really complex scenes.

Note: If you are not careful you can cause a crash when painting instances onto a terrain. As you may well know, when you first exit the instance lab after a painting session the resulting instances will be called "Unnamed." Unnamed is linked to the target object, in this case a terrain. It is best I find to always ungroup UNNamed and re-group it with a new name. (This process could be slow and it could require you to re-set the show as box option to speed things back up).

If by some chance you need to use terrain clipping, you dont want the instances linked to the terrain during that time or a crash will surely occur. Say for example that before I start painting I clip a terrain so that the bottom part is not visible in the wireframe or render. I am assuming that there is a water level and clipping the bottom of the terrain will prevent me from painting plants into areas that will eventually be submerged in water. I conduct my painting session like normal, I exit the IL, and I then decide I want to unclip the terrain. Well, if your instance group is still linked to the terrain Bryce will crash. You need to unlink the Unnamed group from the terrain before you do any more clipping. The reason this causes a crash is that instances are assigned to vertex and face numbers. Altering the clipping will break the associations because it alters the number and sequence of the vertices the instances are attached to. Resulting in a crash. It sort of pulls the carpet out from underneath the instances.

Last note on instances. Keep a close eye on memory usage at all times. Always keep the task manager open and always watch page file usage. For some reason after a scene with instances has been saved and re-opened the memory will be much larger than it was during the original session. I am not sure why this is, but as a general rule if you paint 100mb of instances in the origianl session it will cost around 400mb after being re-opened. I'm not sure if this is due to some corruption or legacy bug yet to be squashed. This is one area where crashes can pop up and surpise you because last time you checked memory usage seemed fine. Nope, sometimes you get surprises.

On the subject of a road cutting through a terrain, you will find this information as well over at Daz3d.com. A power user and buddy of mine for many years David Brinnen has a host of Youtube videos related to Bryce and i think I recall a few that deal with cutting roads and trails into terrains. Look him up and you will be very pleased.

Large Address Aware is extremely awesome. It is a stand alone program that you can use to extend the memory of not only Bryce but almost any 32 bit application. it does require at least 3gb of system ram though. I am not at my home computer to find all the links for you just yet. But I will look into it when i get back into NYC.

Talk to you soon.

You will get there in time, I have no doubt. Bryce does have limitations, but with imagination one can oftne overcome them. I should note that though Bryce is still 32 bit and cannot access more than 2gb on its own, with Large Address Aware flagging Bryce cna be made to acces up to 3.6gb. Very useful.

I love the heck out of Bryce 7!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm very glad to see that you have discovered the magic of indirect lighting. Indeed, you will never turn back!!!! The idea that the only lighting a scene needs is the default sun and some glow from material ambience is so very flawed in most cases. So few of us come to understand just how many "lights" we really need to make a scene look its best.  Also, desire to keep renders fast leads to terrible lighting choices made for the wrong reasons. If you want better looking scenes, get used to longer render times!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The IBL example you show above is exactly the point. Yes, rendering takes longer with more advanced lighting, but the results are much more professional.

IBL is nothing magical. IBL is nothing but a dome built of virtual radial lights. So in theory, even in Bryce 5, one could construct a Dome of radial lights and its behavior would be almost identical to IBL in B6 and B7. Yes, the dome you build may have 50 radials in it, but that's okay. Most of us are trained and fearful of using more than 1 or 2 lights so we overlook the real job completely. Amazing, no?

The only difference between IBL and a standard light dome is that the colors of the virtual radials in an IBL will each be different colors and intensities and these colors tend to match real life colors much more than typical. The colors are derived from an image map. Colors are much richer. This is due to the high dynamic range of IBL compared to the low dynamic range of most lights. IBL is excellent at capturing a real world situation and recreating it in CG. However, rarely do we really need a fully high dynamic range HDR image. In fact, for faking indirect skylight, light domes do a better job 99% of the time because they keep it simple and dont require an image to derive colors. Skylight tends to be blue tinted only, a waste of the true potential of an IBL. More on that later.

What always gets under my skin is the realization that most Bryce users produce flatter looking renders for years because they abuse and overuse the ambience slider in the material lab. Trying to keep renders fast, the originators of Bryce used to apply a 19.6% ambience to all default textures. This had the bad side effect of "training" users to always use ambience as the base for indirect lighting, which is very unfortunate. Ambience, is a powerful tool, essential even, but on it's own it will not produce truly realistic images because it cannot produce shading. This is true in any software. This is why Ambience Occlusion was invented, to allow uniform ambient to be subtracted when models are close to one another creating a less uniform and realistic result. I digress. We dont have Ambient Occlusion in Bryce a such, just flat ambience. Because ambience is so easy to use and rely upon, most Bryce users dont ever explore more advanced and accurate lighting methods such as IBL and True Ambience until several years into their Bryce careers. For this reason I started referring to ambience as "evil." Evil, in that it stunts artistic growth if we dont force ourselves to look beyond it.

Why does the IBL render look so much better? Here's why:

1. Light from the sky comes in from above in sort of a semi-spherical manner. Representing this requires multiple point lights arranged around an area all working together. Each radial will be very dim in brightness, but when all the virtual lights are added together they produce a nice indirect light effect with naturally softened shadows. All these extra radials firing at different angles expose geometry that would otherwise be hidden if the only light you were using was the default sun. These virtual radials of the IBL dome spray light rays and shadow rays toward your target model making it look much more 3 dimensional and realistic.

2.  As mentioned above briefly, one does not need to use IBL to create the look of indrect light coming in from many directions, the same can be rigged manually with real radials drawn onto a sphere and enlarged to the mazimum size allowed. Bryce 7 isnt doing anything new.

1. There are 7 new light types in Bryce 7, many of them designed for the specific task of indirect lighting in different situations. The Dome Lights and 3D Fill lights are comprised of networks of virtual radial lights firing in all directions and are equivalent to IBL in overall function but with the benefit that they can be made to any size and can be "fit" inside interiors as needed. Also, virtual radials just like real radials will cast shadows. Why do I keep referring to shadows?

2. Shadows are more imprtant than the lighting itself. Yep, sounds crazy but true. Most of us spend our time pre-occupied with highlights, we tend to think shadows are meaningless. WRONG!!! Shadows, are the most important thing because the shadows are what carve out the geometric shape of a mesh making it appear 3d and not flat and 2d like a billboard. How we "correct" for the darkness of shadows is how we really make an image look realistic. There are better and worse methods as discussed above.

Best of luck!

Mboncher,

You are not searching in the right places for information. First, there is no patch, everything works fine so there is no need. If you were to spend some time at Daz3d Bryce forum you would see there is a lot of information available to you, much much much more than you can find here on Renderosity, but hopefully that too will change. Here is a link to a basic tutorial I wrote to get anyone going properly with the Instance Lab.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/3381/

Always, best bet is to get involved in the community over at Daz3d to keep relevant. Renderosity forum is not as active and up to date as it used to be. Hoping that will change soon.

Here is a link to my Renderosity Gallery as well so you can see how much work I do with the Instance Lab and why I believei it is worth the learning curve. I dont use any postwork so what you see is real. I also dont use 2d billboards because they require Blend Transparency mode to render and for some reason Blend Transparency is extremely slow to render when using good lighting. Good lighting requires more than just the default sun and some ambience glow from materials, good lighting often requires Light Domes or IBL (which is also just a light dome in theory). Bryce gets deadly slow when calculating all those rays traveling through blend transparent surfaces espcially when they are stacked. Stacked means that there are lots of blend transprent models along the trjectory a ray is traveling meaning it must traverse multiple generations before it is absorbed. In complex scenes wtih lots of instances, rays wil indeed end up traveling through multiple models which leads to deadly render times. Turns out 3d geometry is much faster rendering even though it requires much more resources in memory.

The IL does have problems, just nothing that we cant overcome once we know what to do.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=496780

Best of luck!!!

There is more than one way to turn a terrain by 45 degrees. If the keyboard shortcut doesnt work anymore then just do it manually. Modifying your warkflow for a new version of Bryce isnt a bad thing necessarily. Something like this doesnt mean instability. Bryce 7 is a different program, and not everything works in the way it did before. The only way to appreciate Bryce 7 is to realize that it isnt Bryce 5. There are differences between the two.

We have to remember, Bryce 5 had lots of quirks too, it wasnt rock solid at all. We just had 6 years to get used to the quirks before the next version was released. Feedback on B5 when Corel first released it was that it was the buggiest version of Bryce yet so far....a big part of the reason Corel stopped development at the time. I too crashed Bryce 5 a million times at first, after about a year of learning what to do and what not to do I got no more crashes. Same with B7, I dont get crashes anymore and I do some insane stuff with it. A lot of people have only now begun to use B7 which means they've been using B5 for 10 years straight doing things the same way. It is not surprising that people wouuld assume B7 unstable, they think it's still B5.

The ideal of high quality textures being a problem is something I've never heard of. I use only high quality textures. There is an issue with image imports for Mac users coming through as blue, but that is an entirely different issue.

I think I need to start hanging out in these forums a bit more. I too often see mis-informations shared here that while well intended, just dont get the juices flowing in the right direction.

Bryce 7 is the single biggest jump Bryce has ever made under the reign of Daz3d. Bryce 7 saw more new features added than any other release. Bryce 7 had a partial base code re-write which was required for compatibility with new operating systems, that broke a lot of convenient functionalities. For some reason, the old base code of Bryce based on Axiom.dll is flaky. Adding in new features always has side effects and breaks old features. This made development difficult since new features introduced so many bugs that each had to be ironed out individually. We have paid a price for our new features. But if making more professional looking artwork is the point, then the tools such as instancing and advanced lighting are worth the loss of a keyboard shortcut for rotating terrains.

I suggest trying out the new tools in B7. ALl those new lights....you should be using them. You should be using instancing and you should be using exporting and the new TA and all that good new stuff. You should be exploring the things these tools allow you to do that you couldnt do before. You will soon find that all of the stuff that's really important to Bryce is still there. B7 is a fantastic program when taken on its own.

Glad to see you back in action!!  Most likely the model will look as it should in B7, though as you observed there are a few issues here and there. Fun fun!!!!!!!

I agree. Your work is very good so you should not delete images once you upload them. Lots of people add the images themselves as favorites. When you delete images from your gallery it makes a mess of peoples Favorites category. Once the image is posted let it live on forever.

Nice work as always Waleed!

Ah, I think I am beginning to see what might be going on for some people.

Instead of carrying things over from Bryce 5 into Bryce 7, why not try new things in Bryce 7? Kind of like a new relationship, its hard to get to know the new girl if all you ever do is carry over your feelings for the last girlfriend...who was awesome by the way, just like the new one will eventually turn out to be.

I do not think it fair to judge Bryce 7 by how it handles scenes made in Bryce 5. There are several reasons for this. The first being that there are a lot of changes to the way lots of things work. Booleans are updated, skies are updated, lights are updated...a lack of backward compatibility doesnt mean the application is bugged when used on its own.

Bryce 7 has bugs, huge bugs, for lots of people. Errors with image imports leading to blue madness for Mac users, displacement only works when in low priority, along with a billion other problems. It has unique problems, issues that do not exist in other releases. But they are all beatable, there is a workaround for most of them. Getting to know 7 for 7 is still the best route.

I have found that with most new versions of software I love, I do not jump into the new versions with two feet at first. I dabble, almost always decide I hate it, and depart from it for a while. A month or two down the line I come back to it, and I find I hate it a little less and that I'm findinig my way around and beginning to feel comfortable again. Next day I love the new version. So far this is how it always works in my crazy head. I suspect on some level others might be the same. Take it at our individual paces is the notion.

Bryce 7 enables an entirely different scale of work to be conceived. No more thinking small. We can think BIG now. We can produce vegetation complexity on par with Vue.

Bryce 7 was surely released too early. They spent a good bit of time developing features, too bad they also try to cram in bug fixes at the same time leading to a bottleneck and a premature release. I am basically begging people to look past the obvious problems, and dive into this thing anyway. To go forward we will be building on what we already have in B7.

Save often is a good idea. Always name the file uniquely, so that you dont overwrite a good save with a bad one and lose everything.

Here is a quick link to my personal gallery, most all done with Bryce 7 and all of it with no postwork, raw renders. I love the instancing, the new atmospherics, and the powerful new lighting options. For me, B7 knocks B5 out of the water, in a good way.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=496780

Best of luck!!

I was not aware of that! Thanks for the heads up!

I've only recently pruchased it, I had some models to UV map that were too high in polygons for UV Mapper classic to tolerate. So far I LOVE UV Mapper PRO!!! Yummy. If only it handled 3d painting a well, I'd be so pleased.

Fantastic!!! I am a Hexagon, Uv Mapper and Bryce uers. So I am looking forward to the content of this thread. Fun fun!

If you love Brye 5 then PLEASE support Bryce 7. We've worked hard on it. There is no good reason not to upgrade. Forget any negative statements people might have made at the beginning of the release, they are all wrong. Bryce 7 is fantastic and all Bryce uers should at least try it out. Fun fun.