I'm really starting to get frustrated with my copy of Bryce.  V.5 was rock solid for me.  7.1 seems to crash when I do spray render, instances or even just holding down the shift key to turn terrains at 45 degree turns.

Is there some sort of patch out there for this or is it a 'feature' of the software to be so unstable?  It's really frustrating to see such potential dashed by crashing constantly.

B7 IIRC has problems with high quality textures. These would cause a crash. Not sure if this will help you though.

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.

I don't know if it's the textures because so far I've been sticking to many preset ones with little modification.  It's been a long time since I've used V5, maybe I just wasn't doing things too often that caused it to act up back in the day.

Thanks for the info guys.

Now it's up to learn about instancing and how not to crash it, plus deal with power consuming lighting methods.  Even with a new computer with much bigger CPU and more memory than I've ever had before, I still bog this stuff down fast.  There are a few pieces I want to do, but have to build up my skill and understanding of this software before I attempt it.

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!!!!!!!!!!!

Large Address Aware Flagging???  never heard of it.  If it can increase performance out of my 2.6ghz machine and use more of my 6gb or RAM I'd be happy to learn about it.

I went through your gallery Rashad, and I have to say I'm very impressed.  I started experimenting with the instance lab, and see some things I want to do, but manage to crash the program if I do more than 300 instances or so with trees and it significantly slows response time to doing camera changes or moving objects in it.

I have a few scenes in mind I REALLY want to do, but discovered I have a severe lack of modelling and textural skills in which to pull it off.  And they should be simple, but honestly, to do them right, is taking a long time to figure out how. 

My latest challenge is how to create a realistic country highway that goes over hills and valleys so you see it in part.  An idea came to mind, but I'm not convinced yet how to do that.

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.

Thanks for the info on this Rashad.  This is very useful to know, and I will be keeping it in mind.  I'm going to try once again at a scene that I wanted to do but couldn't do to lack of skill, memory and computing power.  It seems simple, but I've never done anything quite like it.

As for the road, well, let's say I like to work on a grand scale and have no temperment or skill at painting terrain at this time.  Most of mine consist of creating simple terrains then creating many dupes that I modify to get what I'm looking for.  The idea I have is similar to this, but doing it in gravel and heavy woods, similar to what is below:

I've seen the other terrain road videos and tuts.  I've used it once or twice with mild success.  Of course my texturing skills aren't good as I've not figured out how to paint them worth a darn, even something like a road or door.

Well, time to figure out more workarounds and familiarization.  See if I can pull off that scene I wanted.

The one instability that's driving me absolutely buggy is the "Shift-Click-Drag" crash that's happening to me about once an hour if I forget about it.  It's a strange hiccup that also happens when using the eyedropper.  Sigh... I hate using the "A" menu to move objects.

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

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