Bryce 6.1 — Updated, Yet Dated
Hey you remember Bryce 3D don’t you? Cmon, think back – think waaay back. If you’re a 3D artist like me, you have very fond memories of Bryce from the 1990s. It was a very easy program to get into and produced breathtaking results with almost no effort. But the history of Bryce since then has been a bit of a slow motion tragedy.
Nonetheless DAZ 3D’s Bruce 6.1 has been out n the wild for some time now, ad this time around it includes universal support for us Mac users.
A Little History
Bryce was one of the first products of MetaCreations (whose story perhaps deserves an article of its own). MetaCreations was formed by merging Ray Dream, Kai’s Power Tools, and Fractal Software. Some of the software produced by these three companies included Ray Dream Designer (a very cheap and remarkably powerful 3D modeling, rendering, and animation tool), Infini-D (another well-respected 3D app), Kai’s Power Tools (at the time, *the* must-have set of plugins for Photoshop), and Fractal Painter (perhaps the single most revolutionary 2d graphics program ever; it introduced editable layers before Photoshop). It seemed like a match made in heaven and they quickly released a slew of amazing programs (Poser, Detailer, Bryce, Kai’s Power Goo, Carrara, and Canoma among others). They then imploded, sold their products to a variety of different companies, and disappeared in some kind of bizarro dot com puff of logic.
Universal Binary? Excellent!
Most of these products have either completely disappeared or are circling the drain and Bryce appears to fall into the latter category. I recently bought the latest version of Bryce (I’ve bought at least two other versions) at 50% off from its current developer, DAZ. I had high hopes for Bryce 6.1, since it has addressed the greatest failing of earlier versions (vegetation, or the total lack thereof) and is now a Universal Binary. It ran quite nicely on early Power Macs, and I had visions of Bryce running insanely fast and easily producing gorgeous vistas of tree-filled mountain valleys. Alas, it was not to be.
For those of you unfamiliar with Bryce, it is a 3D terrain creation and rendering program. Because it’s easy to use, folks use it to render all kinds of things, but if you want a general purpose 3D package, you had best look elsewhere. Something that still has yet to be fixed is the user interface; it is totally counter intuitive and unattractive.
Here’s the quick version. You launch Bryce, and you get a ground plane and a sky. You can add a mountain by clicking on the mountain-shaped thing in the Create … er … toolbar. Yeah, let’s call it a toolbar. You can render by clicking on a render button (there are several, you’ll figure it out). It’s quick and easy to create some great looking photorealistic landscapes, howerver it just not may be the landscape you were hoping to create.
For those of you familiar with Bryce, this all sounds just like Bryce N, where N < 6, it is. One significant change: if you haven't seen Bryce in a while, it does do a good job with trees now, but the "vegetation" on ground surfaces still always looks like lichen, or mold, up close. What it isn’t is anywhere near as fast as you’d expect a program with no significant new functionality that ran just fine on a 180MHz Power Macintosh 7300 with 80MB of RAM. You’d expect, say, a speed demon on roller blades with a rocket pack in fast forward. Something like that. What you get is a program that is kind of tepid in wireframe (edit) mode and doesn’t render particularly fast.
Conclusion
Anyway, if you know Bryce and want a version that is pretty stable, runs native on Intel Macs, and is not too pricey (note: DAZ frequently has special deals; I got half off), by all means go for it. If you don’t know Bryce, I can’t really recommend it. The base version of Vue isn’t much more expensive and Vue has features Bryce can’t touch and a much better interface.
Bryce was my first 3d experience ever in graphic design class and I still have the animation I created almost a decade ago.
It sucks what happened to Metacreations because their leftover 3D products like Poser and Bryce have suffered stagnant (or excruciatingly slow) development. Poser was just updated to version 7.0 and yet it isn’t enough of an improvement IMHO to bother with.