by Fred Thorlin
This is a beautiful program. It has the prettiest user interface of any product I have worked with. It is capable of easily producing beautiful, dramatic scenes. It is also one of the strangest.
3D modeling is an active software market segment. The activity is driven by the commercial success of entertainment projects showing off the capabilities of the technology and the dramatic improvement in the economics of producing these images. Toy Story, Jurassic Park and Quake are some of the more dramatic examples of commercial success. The rapidly appreciating price/performance of 3-D accelerators and their common inclusion in user systems are making the technology available. The price of competent 3-D modeling software ranges from $70 to $15,000. At the high end, these products do magic. Moderately priced products, like Bryce 3D, merely do amazing things.
When you start Bryce 3D, it comes up in full screen mode, yet the apparent working area only occupies a fraction of the screen. A great black area fills the remainder. You quickly learn that the program only operates in full-screen mode. Click some buttons and this condition is rectified; the fact that the buttons are invisible is one of the early disgruntling experiences. Buttons of a similar type do not have a similar appearance. The Windows menus that are included,, do not conform to Windows standard usage conventions. Once you accept that the interface is intended to be pretty, rather than functional or consistent, your gruntle will start returning. Creating a scene is very easy. Just click a button and a landscape is generated for you. A few more clicks and you have a sky, a sea and an object in your scene. A thumbnail of the scene is constantly displayed in the upper left corner of the screen. One more click of the button and the scene is rendered by ray-tracing, the most photo-realistic method. The program makes generating 3-D landscapes so easy, that it is hard to believe that no other major program, costing less than $1,000, does. This capability justifies its inclusion in many a professional 3-D artists’ toolbox. You don’t have to accept the randomly generated landscape; a clever editor allows you to shape your own world. Bryce 3D also includes texture and material editors. The product includes a moderate collection of objects for inclusion in scenes. Some simple DXF object files can be imported from other 3-D programs. Bryce 3D program only exports images though. Because of this, the dramatic outdoor scenes can only be used as 2-D backdrops with other 3-D modeling programs. Another feature of Bryce which I really appreciate is the View Control. With it you can set your scene spinning as though it were on a “lazy Susan”. This makes it much easier to comprehend the scene you have created and how it differs from the scene you are trying to create.
Learning how to use Bryce 3D is not as straight forward as it looks. The tutorials should be called do-it-yourself demonstrations. They advise you of the existence of some capabilities, but the tutorials never get far enough into a feature that you can use it on your own projects at the end of the tutorial. Alas, that does not make Bryce 3D any worse than the rest of the 3-D products I have explored. 3-D isn’t easy at bottom, but it is seductive. You just have to jump in and learn it the hard way. Bryce 3D does have more to the documentation than the tutorials. This information is included in the very attractively printed and illustrated manual. Third party books on Bryce 3D are available.
The major new feature in this release of Bryce is the animation editor. Earlier versions only did stills. The support for key-framing and camera control are excellent. If you want to learn the basics of creating 3-D animations, this is likely the best package. If you want to make useful, commercial animations, however, there are two major omissions and a problem. There is no mechanism supporting the creation of objects out of text. Very few commercial tasks don’t include some text. There is no support for inverse kinematics so articulated models are difficult to include in animations. Rendering is slow. Rendering is slow because it is all ray-traced, because the ray-tracer is slow and because Bryce 3D encourages you to make very complex scenes, e.g. landscapes. You can see your animations in wire-frame mode very rapidly. You should start your final animation renderings just before going to bed though. There are some options you can select to speed up rendering, but they don’t solve the problem. These realities, and its sub $200 price, make it a good learning tool.
Bryce 3D is a product of MetaCreations. MetaCreations publishes several 3-D modeling programs including RayDream 3D ($99), Ray Dream Studio 5($299), Infini-D($599) and Bryce 3D($199). This oeuvre of competing products is the result of corporate acquisitions and makes for a confusing choice for consumers. MetaCreations has many additional illustration products including the Fractal Painter and Kai PowerTools families. Surely the company will merge these leadership products and technologies into a more coherent product line. When that happens, we expect to see a real powerhouse in this increasingly important segment of the software market.
Summarily, Bryce 3D is a tool experts will want for generating landscapes, seascapes, sub-sea and outer-space environments.
Beginners will want it for its price and range of features and 3-D techniques to explore and learn. I know I will be spending more time with it.
Defective demos
Techsupport - characters, work in final size only, render minimized or
in background?
No character models
No normal windows
No API
No gravity
Fred Thorlin is president of Personal Instruments, Inc. The Houston, Texas based company does Visual Basic development and consulting. You may contact him at fredt@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.