Hi All, I was just in a public  featured chat over at Daz artzone and got a quick question in to Dan Farr about bryce... here's where it went. Daz_Dan is Dan Farr and Daz_Chris is Chris Creek, the other co-exec guy over at daz.

Most of it we know, but there's a few other bits that we didn't.

(I've cleaned it up a bit to remove irrelevant comments to bryce or repeated comments from multiple users)

Dave L.

Flak says (14:11):
question: bryce?
DAZ_chris says to  (14:11):
now there's a loaded one.
Flak says (14:11):
:D
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:12):
Bryce is probably the toughest one to address right off of the bat.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:12):
The dev team that we had worked with is not working out as well as we would like. We are working on getting a newer group to help us.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:13):
Quite frankly speaking we are also consider the possibilty of going open source with it as well.
maclean says to  (14:13):
Bryce?
GhostWulf says to  (14:13):
interesting
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:13):
I am still talking about Bryce.
blondie9999 says to  (14:13):
Which would mean what, exactly?  "Open source"
DAZ_chris says to  (14:13):
Ofcourse we would be directing it all from here.
Radkres says to  (14:13):
Lynx ver?
mors_d says to  (14:13):
actual OSS, or something like BSD?
Nester751 says to  (14:14):
*Really open source I mean
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:14):
We will not make that decision lightly but are looking to different options.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:14):
We will engage the Bryce community to help us make this decision.
BlackSpartan says to  (14:14):
Open Source means that we could in theory compile Linux and etc versions of Bryce
DAZ_chris says to  (14:14):
Bryce needs to continue to grow. By no way would this be considered abandonment.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:14):
We may also have some legal aspects around it that will determine what level we can go with.
Flak says (14:15):
some of the dte code is one of the issues isn't it?
DAZ_chris says to  (14:15):
We would have an internal P.M to drive it forward.
Lyrra says to  (14:15):
displacement would be nice
DAZ_chris says to  (14:16):
They is alot that we'd like to still through into it.
Sarissi says to  (14:16):
64 bit for all of Daz's apps would be really nice.
DAZ_chris says to  (14:16):
We would like that also.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:16):
Bryce literally has one of the strongest reputations of all apps.
DAZ_chris says to  (14:17):
We would need demand to drive that one. (Flak note - this is addressing 64bit... I think)
Flak says (14:17):
what does the "internal PM" bit mean? (sorry 7am here - brain a bit asleep)
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:17):
It just needs to have some more development (as you know)
DAZ_chris says to  (14:17):
Product manager.
Digital I says to  (14:17):
..but it certainly would be nice to carry some of the nicer aspects of DS (displacement, for example) over into Bryce...
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:18):
I agree that Bryce definitely needs some serious love and we may need to reach out to the community to do that.
.
.
DAZ_Dan says to  (14:19):
We have hired on a lot of software developers over the past year. We have gone from a couple of engineers to about 15 between internal and external developers.

 

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD

Interesting.

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

Very interesting.. I'm surprised they couldnt find a good balance of programmers, with so many brilliant programmers out there, who do this kind of work for free.  Which might be what Open Source might attract.

In case anyone's wondering, after that the discusson went into daz studio and carrara development and things mainly after which it headed towards ArtZone stuff.

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD

Sounds like a lot of gobble-de-gook double talking maybes. Who says that those 'engineers' are working on Bryce? Bring aspects of Studio into Bryce? Why?

They talk about engaging the Bryce community and yet how much of what they did to Bryce actually come from the community? Sure, Brycers were involved in the beta testing, but they were short-changed time and again by concerns over cost-effectiveness and time to production of the next iteration. How many issues were actually shelved when they badly needed to be addressed and solved?

IMHO Daz never once gave a definative answer to any direct questions when asked about Bryce and issues raised about its future developement in this or any other statements or conversations.

Big thanks to Flak for posting though.

Available on Amazon for the Kindle E-Reader

All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

And in my final hours - I would cling rather to the tattooed hand of kindness - than the unblemished hand of hate...

Could be promising.

Thanks Flak

___
Ockham's razor- It's that simple

The 15 internal and external engineers I just presumed cover DS/bryce as well as other things.

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD

time will tell

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is why I've started learning Vue 6 Infinite and Carara Pro 6 as well as getting more comfortable with Cinema 4D,..............not abandoning Bryce, but,............it is still like a comfortable old running shoe, however,  I'm looking at those bright red pumps with 4 inch heels in the store window. They're very shiny !!!  I just think in the long run they'll get me further than the old shoes will,......expand my horizons so to speak. Ecosystems are very shiny indeed !

"Any club that would have me as a member is probably not worth joining" -Groucho Marx

I don't believe more in DAZ, that history is sent... 
He/she always appears a new dialogue with them, and the statements are always the same ones. 
DAZ should have more consideration for Bryce, improvements already have been implement. 
I agree with Sackrat; new horizons should be seen and considered. 
I am a lover of Bryce, but I should admit that am imposing limits to that love. 
 
Hugs.

I said before, I think DAZ saw Bryce as a cash cow and a way to compete with poser. Now they realise that development of the software is taking too long and costing too much. Patience is running out with the older user base, I see many people jumping ship to Vue, because it's going places and is considered industry standard in some respects.
Hopefully by going open source things can get moving again. DAZ promised so much and delivered very little. I don't blame them directly, I just think they got carried away with the euphoria that was in the community once we found out Bryce was saved. They certainly went in the right direction to start with, talking with the original programmers, but the longer we waited for a new version the more the feeling was they had bitten off more than they could chew. From some of those comments above looks like they are finally admitting it.

http://joevinton.blogspot.com/

Well,

The problem that brycers (us!) got is that Daz makes money out of content for DazStudio. Having taken over Carrara doesnt help us either. Im sure its a great application but it still competes with Bryce.

If i were Daz i would streamline Bryce a bit more. Get rid of animation and/or modelling and concentrate more on rendering option and optimizations.  I would happily pay $200 for Bryce if it had some render upgrades and more format import options added.

Promotions is also an issue. They do an excellent job with studio but when V6 came out it was all about the "fantasy enviroments" and a lot of landscapes examples.  As i was saying on a thread at 3dc, Every year theres a competition or two out there for Bryce which included 20+ categories.

Just reading the description on 3d world magazine issue 102 quick reference keyboard guide says it all....

Bryce: ...affordable software for creating realistic landscape imagery
Carrara: ... Daz 3d figure posing, modelling, landscape design, physics , animation and rendering apllication.

Thats just a joke. How many oustanding abstracts are done in bryce actually use a terrain? or have you seen a nice looking big chested girl render on a mountain? no.

Why does Daz not promote such other excellent uses of the program as opposed to say to people "look how you can render a pretty mountain" ? 

I guess there is a reason why you can go to Daz from within Bryce but you cant go to Bryce from within Daz!

Thank Flak for the passing it on. I thin we should form the "Council of Bryce Elders" and tell Daz excactly how to promote Bryce.

A lot of members do a hell of a lot to promote Bryce as everything other than a landscape program but Daz never says thank you cause you havent rendered an Aiko or Victoria....

Alex,

I agree with orbital and TheBryster, and I would also like to add, since Daz3D are really avoiding summing up anything solid about the future of Bryce, I think Bryce will always be second to other like apps........

......but just one second...... we all enjoy using Bryce right? And a lot of us have not yet learnt everything about Bryce, and just because it doesn't have ECO systems, one can still find other ways to acheive a psuedo environment by cheating a little.....what the eye doesn't see the artist gets away with! So I shall quite happily continue with Bryce, even if it's knocked off the shelf and binned, it's still got a few years in it yet....after all, it's the finished result that is important.

Thanks for taking the time Flak.

as for developers,

They should talk with Intel or Amd about some promotions and get some dev help back from them.

I pay good money to see Bryce promoted as "It work best on an AMD system or Intel" without these two companies we wouldnt have any rendering!

They always promoting Daz "works best with Nvidia" so why not the big boys?.

Al,

Omac2 said: I thin we should form the "Council of Bryce Elders" and tell Daz excactly how to promote Bryce.

We already have one. We're called Cardinals! :lol:

Seriously, I'm sick of this, 'Bryce is a Landscaper' crap.

Available on Amazon for the Kindle E-Reader

All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

And in my final hours - I would cling rather to the tattooed hand of kindness - than the unblemished hand of hate...

Quote -

Seriously, I'm sick of this, 'Bryce is a Landscaper' crap.

Yes indeed, even though I only use it for landscapes I still build my own bridges and buildings.

I model 95% of my stuff in Bryce. I enjoy doing it, and feel it gives my work an originality. Any one who has ever asked me for advice, I have always said "build your own models" you learn so much more from Bryce. Yes it's a challenge and it takes a lot of time, but the effort is worth it. DAZ provides content, it relies on people who want quick results. Some of the stuff is stunning I'll admit, but really can you sit back and feel 100% happy with what you've created.
To prove my point, DAZ  has a gallery which is called the hall of fame, have a look through it and see how many Bryce images you can see which doesn't use actual DAZ content. Surely there are enough talented people on here to have images shown in this gallery. But we are never going to make them sales.
I find it difficult that they don't come to us here and on 3dcommune and give us some answers. This is after all where the original Brycers with years of experience are.
So shall we go over to DAZ and try to get solid info?

http://joevinton.blogspot.com/

OK,.........being modeling challenged, I don't know about that end of things,.........I still like Bryce because it's easy to use, the lighting environment is a breeze,  especially with the implementation of HDRI (limited as it might be) and 3rd party systems like madmax's Zenith light rigs. I have used Byrce since V. 3,  it was virtually crash proof until V. 6, then Daz got a hold of it.  As far as the genre,........that's up to the individual, the artist is limited only by their imagination. As is the case with any 3D app. It's not a toy or just a landscape generator (I just happen to like landscapes and naked Vickies). Daz has done some good things,....HDRI's, multi-threading, slight improvement of the rendering engine, etc. I find that this news is distressing, however, I had already made the choice to use Vue and Carara Pro6, I am finding the learning curve a bit daunting with both. I will continue to use B6.1 just not as my main app. That's my story and I'm sticking to it !

"Any club that would have me as a member is probably not worth joining" -Groucho Marx

Totally agree with Orbital. For me, building the scene with models you make yourself in Bryce is the most enjoyable part, in fact I often feel disappointed if I have need to import a model by someone else!
And as for Bryce is a landscaper, it's been sometime time since I last did an out and out landscape!

With all this..can we conclude if there is eer gonna be abryce 7?? or we hoping against hope? forget the when..i give up after reading their conversation....

All of us know about the means of Bryce, of your supremacy (in the past) to do what does... but today it is different... behaviors exist to work with 3D that don't exist in Bryce (they could already be there), VUE does. 
The continuity in the use of Bryce (for me) he/she feels only and exclusively for not having a long time to perfect the learning for instance with VUE. 
Many of the artists of here and of other communities they did already make your list of possible improvements, will it be that DAZ gave importance?. 
The Gallery of DAZ for me is one more shop window of what it can be lucrative, and not a shop window than Bryce is capable to do.  
They exist very more artists than DAZ should give attention of what he/she appears in the gallery. 
 
Sackrat, agree with what he/she said. 
Orbital; me and many other we also do like you, we created everything with Bryce, at least the one that she can do with him, and still a little more using our imagination. 
But all this is little front to the delay of the possible innovations in a so dreamed new version. 
 
The wait and anxious for innovations... meanwhile, in a distant galaxy, continue to play with my imagination. 
 
Hugs

Thats my point, Daz doesn't seem to appreciate the effort many of us are putting into our work.
They are the ones underselling Bryce.
To quote Gene Hackman in Willy Wonka
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams"

http://joevinton.blogspot.com/

Hmmm.... me thinks we need to get doc mojo in on this thing again ;-) I remember him being quite enthausiastic a few years ago about ideas to improve bryce.
Why doesnt DAZ attempt a cooperated effort with Pandromeda? Surely the people there should have the knowledge neccesary..

Oh btw, obviously programming bryce requires far more specialized skills then just your average programmer. There are very specific skillsets required for the mathematics involved as well as performance optimalization.

There are ofcourse people willing to work for free if its open source, but when a project isnt open source, no skilled programmer is (or should be) stupid enough to work for free.

(_/)
(='.'=)
(")(")This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your signature to help him gain world domination.

First of all, my credentials in order to assure you that I know something about what I am going to write: programmer since 1984, professional software developer since 1987, freelance consultant since 1997. Have developed (among other things) real time image processing applications in C/C++.

Several times I have had the misfortune of having to take ownership of old code. It is a nightmare, especially if the code was not been developed in an object oriented way. Just understanding what a routine does can be a multi-day task... and I am talking about understanding, not about fixing or extending!

In addition, every time a new developer / team assumes the ownership of a codebase, their quirks/habits are added to the existing stuff like geological strata, slowly but implacabily eroding whatever structure was there before. Programmers can slow this architectural decay but cannot stop it unless they perform extensive (and costly) code refactorings.

Sooner or later you reach the point where it is faster, better and cheaper to rewrite the thing from scratch.

Bryce 1.0 appeared in 1994 on the Mac so we can safely assume that it is early 1990's procedural code, patched by several different teams over 14 years... the translation into English of what DAZ people said is: we tried REALLY hard to make something more than some limited modifications (Bryce 6.0/6.1)  but eventually had to admit that the codebase has by now degenerated so much that it is uneconomical to keep on trying to mantain it, so we are planning a grand gesture (OSS) in order to get out elegantly of this quagmire...

The writing was on the wall since Carrara3D Express release: C3DX does roughly what Bryce does and I think it is based upon Carrara code so it is a newer and maintanable codebase (if you are a programmer, just have a look at Carrara SDK: it is clearly written, documented and exhibits a clean structure).

You part ways with people, you can do the same with programs... so either stay with DAZ along the Carrara path or come to Vue land.

Bye!!!

GIMP 2.7.4, Inkscape 0.48, Genetica 3.6 Basic, FilterForge 3 Professional, Blender 2.61, SketchUp 8, PoserPro 2012, Vue 10 Infinite, World Machine 2.3, GeoControl 2

*You part ways with people, you can do the same with programs... so either stay with DAZ along the Carrara path or come to Vue land.

*HERESY!!

Available on Amazon for the Kindle E-Reader

All the Woes of a World by Jonathan Icknield aka The Bryster

And in my final hours - I would cling rather to the tattooed hand of kindness - than the unblemished hand of hate...

According to the Mayan Calender Earth will disappear from this dimension into the 4th in year 2012  among huge catasprophes ...hope DAZ will fix Bryce before we're all gone!!! :-) 

Quote - According to the Mayan Calender Earth will disappear from this dimension into the 4th in year 2012  among huge catasprophes ...hope DAZ will fix Bryce before we're all gone!!! :-) 

Now that's an idea for a render! :b_funny:

===========================================================

OS: Windows 11 64-bit
Poser: Poser 11.3 ...... Units: inches or meters depends on mood
Bryce: Bryce Pro 7.1.074
Image Editing: Corel Paintshop Pro
Renderer: Superfly, Firefly

9/11/2001: Never forget...

Smiles are contagious... Pass it on!

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday

 

Well, If Bryce goes open source, it means that Daz are not going to work in Bryce in the future, and make the Bryce code public. I think it will be great if they choose a good license and if there is people out there that wants to make thing starting from taht code...

---

adh3d website

I'm suprised that they didn't consider consolitating it with Carrara. (Maybe they did? Too many damn parallels between the programs to really warrant developing them separately with a limited budget.). I know TheBryster probably hates the idea, but it's true. It's suprising how similar I found that program to be after getting it via 3D-World Magazine #100 promotion. There's some differences of course, but experience with Bryce makes diving into Carrara happen pretty fast.

And I'll also agree that Bryce isn't a toy. (Even after moving to Carrara, simply because it does some things that Bryce can't speed-wise.) It's not that it lacks power or a sufficient tool-set. (We all know it's perfectly fine for staging and rendering.) The main problem with Bryce acceptance on the professional level is that the rendering engine is slow in comparison to a lot of other software. (You could render over two dozen proofs for visualization in another program before Bryce would finish its render. And you could probably get the final high setting render in the other program done too.) Bryce's rendering slowness probably has something to do with lack of optimization to take advantage of newer hardware (not to say DAZ hasn't worked hard on it) and less flexibility in some areas that other programs let you downgrade for speed. It probably also lacks the modularity of newer programs, so working on one chunk to improve an aspect might seriously break things elsewhere. Then DAZ has their hands full with source that may have some really neat things hidden in it, but is too vague and complex (spaghetti code?) to figure out what it's good for.

Opening up the source would be pretty neat, and not just for compiling to 'nux or higher bit levels. It would allow more breathing room for tiering. Bryce would fit in well on the free entry-level tier. (Kinda does already.) Besides DAZ makes their money on content selling and brokering, so "giving away" some software can't be too bad. (Might even be pretty big on P.R. brownie points.) By being open-source licenced, innovations (or discoveries regarding what that undocumented old code does) related to Bryce could be taken back in by DAZ for no cost. Also bugs tend to be more widely accepted in OSS, simply because the software evolves and there typically always exists a perpetual beta somewhere in the development stream. I think the neatest thing would be if the GUI layer could be found to be separable from the underlying render engine. (Imagine some cross port that had the familiar and easy to use GUI on a more powerful and flexible renderer with much better animation features.)

Who knows, maybe DAZ will figure out how to keep the GUI part somehow but only open up the rendering bits. Thus they could get away with not having to develop much and simply be more of a maintainer, and iplement the good stuff out in the field back into their particular build.

---

Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.

It sounds to me DAZ has a mixed crew when it comes to the vision of Bryce with the rest of DAZ. Sounds like within DAZ there's ppl who like it, but the higher-ups seem to be focused on other things--so there isn't a lot of commitment, just promises of "we have to do something." When I hear someone say "we have to get the community involved" it tells me there's a bigger problem in the background.

15 developers for one product is quite a lot. It makes me wonder if the Bryce code is seriously poorly written that they might be considering re-writing chunks of it.

For them to say they need the demand to develop 64 bit Bryce speaks trouble to me. Everywhere the world is moving to 64 bit. 32 bit is still good for now and the next 4 years, but 64 bit is foreward looking.

I do wish they would have elaborated more about Open Source Software (OSS)... as there are some good benefits for going that way. They do need a dedicated, determined group to keep Bryce OSS development active. Afterall, Sourceforge.org is filled with many abandoned OSS projects. But still, I wonder how many forks that will generate, or side projects. Probably the best thing for Bryce would be to go OSS, but do what Sun has done with OpenOffice and keep a dedicated developer group to keep pushing out the most complex parts of the program. Keep the momentum going is one of the keys to success with any OSS project.

Thanks, Flak, for posting this and keeping us all informed. I don't have the time any more to go all over the net to take part in things like this now. So, truly, a big thanks!

Anyway, to any DAZ employee who reads these threads, I would still support Bryce with $$$, so get a move on!!

It'd be a damn shame to merge Bryce w/ Carrara.
I used Carrara for a while, hated it increasingly w/ use, finally gave up.
It has to be the most bug ridden 3d software on the market.
But don't believe me, go take a gander at the bug tracker. :laugh:

Friends don't let friends use booleans.

Well, combining alexcoppo's excellent description of the reasons why bryce's code is probably a nightmare with the fears of some people about mergers between carrara. And the statement about 64bit version needing demand..

I'd get the following conclusion:

• Bryce's code is ancient, headache to work with, half-rebuilt for 6.0/6.1
• 15 developers dont get much feature progress, thus, they spent ages trying to understand the code, then rebuilding seemed to take rather long.
• 64bit probably requires some significant rebuilding = headache as illustrated by the conditions of both previous points.
• Bryce isnt that much of a memory hog, thus there is less prominent need for 64-bits.
• Cararra does most of what bryce does, with (apparenlty) much cleaner code. Merging its code base with that of bryce would only degrade cararra's code quality. Either that, or it would take a lot of effort to clean bryce's code.

Thus; depending on how much rebuilding was done for version 6 and how high the quality of this new code is, bryce is either best of as OSS, or set to die within 2 mediocre minor updates at best.

(_/)
(='.'=)
(")(")This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your signature to help him gain world domination.