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Message edited on: 09/20/2005 12:28

In many case B5.5 is slower then in B5.0.1, so I don't think you'll be impressed. The animation system was unchanged in 5.5 except for a few minor fixes, so, yes, it's still linear. But I will say it's kinda unfair to compare a 99$ program to a $2000 program ;-) Best; Dan

actually maya and max both are more expensive then 2k at the time when i bought them. But still its the classics we keep comming back to. bryce hands down is the best for landscapes. and if the renders would be soemthing like max fast, i hate waiting 4 hours just to find out the geometry is messed up, now we wait another 4hours, a whole day wasted to rendering, its says on the daz web page that it is 30% faster were they fibbing?

Actually it says "Now you can render your favorites scenes over 30% faster on average. " Scenes with lots of image textures render much faster but scenes with Premium Render Effects (like soft shadows) are slower then 5.0.1. How fast Bryce goes is totally dependent on the scene, not 30% faster for all scenes. So that's not really a fib, just PR speak. Although that's only true for the PC ;-). The Mac version is slower in all cases I've tried (and I've tried alot!).

I'm a huge user of plop rendering. It saves loads of time. If you're only changing a small section of your image, just load your last full render and plop render only the area that's changed. As for the price of Maya, my first car didn't cost half that much.

But yeah, Bryce is slow. Not what I would call a production app. Its really only for hobbyists. I'd be very careful doing commercial work with it on a tight deadline. But I'm sure some people here are currently doing just that.

Message edited on: 09/20/2005 15:05

Also there's some rendering effects which Bryce has permanently fixed as a default on, where those other programs allow you to turn them on and off as needed. Some settings if enabled in those programs can make them just as slow as Bryce. Yet another thing to consider. Also the simplicity and rendering ability of Bryce is hard to beat considering it's usually priced under $100. What it does isn't bad considering it's close to costing 1/10 of the other programs you've mentioned. (That's after they cut their prices.) As for Bryce animation - yeah it's pretty much limited to linear stuff. No physics, morphing, bones, etc. Those are things Brycers are hoping for if 6 ever comes out. As far as commercial use goes - Bryce is good for still scenes and general illustration. It has a short learning curve which can aid production - well at least for small studios with limited training budgets. And some of the basic animation Bryce does can be implemented into web design with the use of other software (saved .bmp sequences work in Flash quite well). If you plan on doing full out animation with effects, etc. - then Bryce still isn't what you're looking for. If that's the case, it might be better to go with Cinema 4D, Maya, LW, XSI, etc.

I was gonna say, it's a hole in the screen you throw money in, but it's a lot smaller hole than Poser..;)

You lot are on crack! My render times have dropped significantly since B5.5c at least by 1/4, sometimes a 1/3. My only gripe is that you can't put unlimited poser characters in a BRyce scene.

My render times for a desktop sized render (1200x750 or so) it takes about 2 hours for me. I don't use a lot of lights or premium settings but I do use a lot of volume materials. Animations for me I tend to be very carful with what I use as far as lights settings to keep the render times down It takes me about an hour a second on average at 640x480 at 30fps. I avoid volume materials reflective surfaces and premium settings when I do them.

Since I do a lot of image textures, it's faster for me. Some procedural materials, like those by Johnatan Allen, which are very good, take a lot of time to render. OTOH, yeah, add some things to scenes in other programs and render time will rise accordingly. For instance, that antique watch in my gallery took about three hours in Cinema, IIRC, at 920x680. And Cinema is usually lightning fast, render times are measured in several minutes. Then, add Global Illumination and stuff to a Vue render and it will crawl... But I wish DAZ really brings down the Bryce render time with soft shadows or volumetric materials.

It was the same thing for me basically. I moved from Wings3D+Bryce to C4D. Some of my old Bryce images (like this one from 2003 - http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=559973) took 40 hours to render. Not because of soft shadows or any advanced setting but because of the ligth setup (using light a dome). I've taken a look in the gallery and the stuff you have there doesn't look to be 4+ hour rendering material. Just basic light that probably will take Bryce a couple of minutes to render. If you discover a geometry error after 4 hours of rendering then you technique needs to be polished. Even with high end apps you need to check for stuff like that before you enable all kinds of rendering options.

Bryce is still a raytracer renderer, and those will ALWAYS be slower than a scanline rendering engine. More accurate, but slower. So, not really a fair comparison. (but, I do understand your point, I've seen C4D render...way fast.) It would be nice to have Bryce (6.0) with a selectable rendering engine. And/or, quality vs. speed sliders. I have ran into the rare few scenes that render a little slower in Bryce 5.5 vs. 5.0, but all in all, B5.5 is faster for me. Loading and saving scenes is faster also, which is a godsend for complex scenes. But, I know DAZ has more room for rendering speed improvement... Soft Shadows are another complex problem that even high-end programs have struggled with, but have now pretty much wrangled in. I'm not sure with Bryce being a raytracer, if it would be possible to speed up the rendering of soft shadows much past the idea of optimizing/speeding up the program code. :o/ Maybe if it would calculate shadow maps? AgentSmith

shadow maps are good for uniformly soft shadows - the size of the map equates to the sharpness/softness of the shadow. Many lights with large maps will eat RAM fast. The only drawback is that uniformly soft shadows don't always look right. Shadows tend to be sharper at the point of contact between the caster and the receiver and more diffuse with distance (this assumes the light is not a pure diffuse source) so yes that would be faster but can eat all your ram PDQ.

BTW when bryce does soft shadows in premium, it does what Cinema calls area shadows. Even cinem4D takes time with these. I tend to use the pure soft shadows on fills mostly aor where there is no immediate receiver other than the casters self shadows.

I like Bryce's rendering options the way they are now. I've been tooling with Poser 6 lately, and I find minor tweaks with the Firefly renderer can make huge differences in the way your scene looks. I've been spending almost as much time tweaking Firefly as I did making a scene. But that's the learning curve I guess.

If Bryce 6 is a) taking a long time to become available and b)won't have an appreciably faster render engine anyway, and c) most people can't afford Maya or Max, is there a mid priced app that renders much faster than Bryce yet can handle soft shadows etc? Is that app Cinema 4D?

Vue maybe? Haven't used it myself.

Yeah, Fran, it's most probably Cinema. Soft shadows and volumetrics are a snap. Materials are easy and intuitive. But sometimes it can take several hours to render something and you'd need Advanced Render module to get caustics or GI. I've just tried Vue. In some ways it's much more advanced than Bryce but in others it's utter crap. For instance, Ecosystems are quite nice and easy to set up. They don't take much memory and can look extremely good. OTOH, it's terrain editor is awful. Maybe I'm an idiot but I couldn't get the terrain preview pic to be bigger than its default (approximately) 350x350 pixels. Yes, you can zoom, but it's not worth much when the picture is four by four centimetres on my 1600x1200. And I'm not going to switch to a lower resolution. Also, click on Procedural Terrain and it will take ages to redraw the Terrain Editor, while the CPU occupancy goes up to 99%. Painting the effects on the terrain is terribly slow. Maybe the problem is in my graphic card, but I don't see a need for a big fast OpenGL card when they only have height colour on the 3D terrain preview. Compare it with Bryce, where you don't have the height colour on the 3D preview but which, after calculating the initial fractal, is lightningly fast. Okay, so I can't do overhangs directly in Bryce, but I can fake them. BTW, Vue tells me my graphic card should perform "correctly". Rendering in Vue is not a bed of roses, either. Click on volumetrics, GI, shadows and so on, and the Vue render might crawl possibly even slower then Bryce's. Not to mention that its translation (moving) of objects is a pain. Plus I hate PC programs that emulate the Mac appearance.

Cinema is not what I would call cheap but it does seem to be lower than the others in its class. Also it can come modular so you can just get what you need (for me that's the core and the Advanced render module). Still runs about $10x bryce though for even that. I love C4D but I still have a spot for bryce in my apps.

Hhhmmmm, my current copy of C4D was free, (CD cover mount) but it is resolution disabled. For the base version of C4D 9, we're talking 425, I would look at XSI Foundations instead for 299, it's got to be one of the strongest entries into the pro level tools. Also think ebay, I bought Maya 4 (a genuine copy) for 45.

Message edited on: 09/22/2005 05:46

Vue on the Mac ain't all that great either. It kept unexpectedly quitting. I actually started on Vue, but switched to Bryce because it worked. I find Bryce to be unexpectedly slow to render certain simple scenes. I had a scene of a Trebuchet I'm working on with a couple of Poser figures and 1 terrain and it took 3.5 days to render on my 3.6ghz P4. I then merged the models into a new document, and the whole thing rendered in 2 hours with the same render settings. Go figure.

Bryce slow renders are not too much of a problem for me, if it takes too long, move it to another machine. Wait a bit and it gets done. Finished a 5 day render that way. It does suck that 5.5 does not accept stuff that 5.01 accepts on the mac.