Entered CNET Catalog: 06/30/2001
SKU: 0735163085914
Manufacturer: Corel Corp.
Manufacturer description
Design, render and animate awe-inspiring 3D worlds and abstract 3D sculptures using Bryce. Designed for beginner and advanced users, Bryce includes libraries of presets as well as the tools you need to design your own materials. Start by using Bryce's scene files, models, materials, texture libraries, sky presets, importable objects, animation paths and movies. As you learn and grow, you can start creating more originals. Bryce gives you complete control over your environment and features enhanced realism.Product summary
The good: New Tree Lab makes your landscapes look more realistic; supports slightly faster network rendering; new metaballs modeling allows organic image creation.
The bad: Rendering is still incredibly slow; more expensive than previous version; few new features; small preview windows.
The bottom line: If you're already a Bryce user, we don't recommend this upgrade. The new features aren't compelling, and it takes forever to render animation.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 01/15/2002
Seriously slow
MetaCreations' Bryce 4.0 costs only $249 or $99 for the upgrade. Corel increased the price of admission to $309 and $159 for the upgrade. Unfortunately, the interface, the work flow, and the standard textures remain the same. Worse, Bryce 5.0 is now so bloated that its rendering engine is actually slower than version 4.0's. For example, using a Micron PIII-500 PC with a 40GB drive and 128MB of RAM, we created a 720x480-pixel canvas and enabled superfine antialiasing. Next, we dropped in two overlapping planes and textured both, hit the Render button, and timed the results. Bryce 4.0 rendered the scene in 11 minutes, 49 seconds--not an impressive time--while Bryce 5.0 took an abysmal 16 minutes, 51 seconds.
So, why even consider upgrading if the product runs more slowly and costs more than its predecessor? Well, if you're on a network, Bryce 5.0 now features network-rendering capabilities, and they're noticeably faster. In separate tests of networked machines, we rendered a 200x100, 24-bit, 15fps, 1,058Kbps, 16-frame, 1.10MB AVI animation on two identical 1.7GHz systems. Each PC featured 256MB of RAM under Windows 2000 SP2, and we networked them using 100Mbps Ethernet over an isolated VLAN with two clients and a file server. On a single computer, Bryce 5.0 rendered the file in 12 minutes, but using a second networked computer cut the render time to 7 minutes, 4 seconds. Of course, we consider Bryce a hobbyist's choice--for example, for illustrating a personal book or creating robot models--so we doubt most users have this type of networking power available.
Sketchy greenery; slick new lighting controls
Bryce 5.0's other major improvements include a new Tree Lab (yes, you can finally plant trees in your landscapes) and a Light Lab for controlling lighting direction, tinting, and intensity.
While the Tree Lab seems exciting at first (finally, landscapes that don't look like scenes from a foreign planet), the thrill doesn't last. Bryce 5.0 takes an insanely long time to render each tree. If you're thinking of creating animated forest flybys, be ready to render for days, if not weeks. You can tweak branch length, trunk, and foliage type, but with mediocre results. For one thing, the wireframe reference tree model, which should offer a look at your final tree, is so awkward and hard to see that it's hardly worth including. Furthermore, once you've finished tweaking a tree, you can view the final result only in a tiny preview pane at the top left of the screen or by rendering individual sections (which takes forever, of course).
The new Light Lab, on the other hand, is a compelling addition that lets you apply all sorts of effects to the lights in your scene. You can alter a light's intensity, soften its edges, adjust its color, and, coolest of all, create your own custom gels, which can lead to some pretty imaginative results. The lighting controls are logically organized and intuitive to use. Be warned, though: the lighting effects use lots of processor resources. Our 500MHz PC took 2 hours, 41 minutes to render a tree with light shining on one side.
Metaballs only a minor draw
While previous versions of Bryce let you model practically any shape imaginable, version 5.0 includes built-in support for metaballs, a feature that lets you create organic shapes that don't have incredibly high, processor-intensive polygon counts. Unfortunately, when you're working with the metaballs, you can see the effect only in the tiny preview window in the upper-left side of your screen, so it's almost impossible to see the final effect. The only way to view an image at a reasonable size is to render it--an incredibly time-consuming process.
Overall, Bryce 5.0 includes a few promising additions but not nearly enough to warrant the $159 upgrade price. Plus, it's so snail-paced, you'll spend more time rendering scenes than actually creating them. Save your money and wait for the next release. We're hoping for a better Tree Lab, a lower price, faster performance, plus a ton of new textures and free wireframe models.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15out of 15 user reviews
Worth it if you don't have the previous version
Pros: new rendering options; DAZ Studio integration; nurb modeling
Cons: lack of export features
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Smoking Quality!
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Greate 3D Tool
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Best animation prog i have ever used
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Incredible software
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I thought upgrade worth it
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Good but not all that good
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Still good
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Not what was expected...
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Reviewer is unaware of full gamut of Bryce 5 features
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Clumsy, top-heavy toy
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Outstanding 3D Animation Tool
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Bryce 5.0 is all that!
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Annoying camera operation, Otherwise great
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The work you create is almost as beutiful as the program its self
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