Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Corel
EAN: 0735163086454
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Corel
Manufacturer: Corel
Model: BRY50PCMUGENG0
Platform: Macintosh
Platform: Windows 2000
Platform: Windows NT 4
Publisher: Corel
Release Date: 2001-07-18
Studio: Corel
Product Description:
There's nothing quite like building your own world, and no application makes it easier than Bryce. Now on its fifth major revision and currently owned by Corel, Bryce has grown from a fun application for building alien planets to a capable rendering tool with advanced features. Version 5 offers numerous new features and improvements. To address the complaints of the slow rendering engine, Bryce 5 has introduced network rendering. No longer will one computer have to slave away all its own on a 10-second scene. Rendering can be distributed across as many systems as are available on your network. The number of computer slaves available for use is only limited by your own hardware, as Bryce's network rendering license is unlimited. However, Bryce still doesn't take advantage of computers with multiple CPUs--rendering on a system with two 400 MHz processors takes the same time as rendering on a system with one. If you've got a green thumb, Bryce 5 has the Tree Lab, one of the easiest ways to grow a forest. Nearly everything about a tree is variable: number of branches, number of leaves, kind of trunk, kind of leaf, branch angle, amount of branching, etc. There are presets for dozens of common and uncommon trees, and the thumbnail preview screen lets you preview in wire-frame or rendered views. Once the forest is grown, you might want to light it up using the tools from the Light Lab. Based on the earlier version, the new Light Lab has been redesigned to make it easier to build, adjust, and customize lights and their attributes. You can use color gradients as gels for lights, and control other attributes like shadow ambiance, soft shadows, blurry reflections, and true ambiance. The new Light and Tree Labs, as well as metaballs and network rendering, make Bryce 5 a must-have application for old and new users alike. --Mike Caputo
Customer Reviews:
8 of 10 customers found the following review helpful:
 Slow Rendering Time, CPU's Floating-Point Unit (FPU), 2002-10-17
As an artist who has used Bryce 3D and upgraded to Bryce 4, I was satisfied with the product's ability to render realistic worlds and 3D special effects, even before I upgraded to Bryce 5. But for all the beauty I have been able to create with this affordable yet powerful software, there has been one increasingly prominent sour-note that may pretty much kill-joy everything else I liked.I am currently rendering a sixteen-second animation using Bryce 5 on a WindowsME PC. The animation is 320-by-240 pixels resolution per frame, and has a frame rate of thirty frames per second. The PC has a Pentium III, 256 megabytes of RAM, a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and on-board 24-bit graphics acceleration. Nevertheless, because the animation includes six to eight transparent metaballs with a marble texture and the refractive properties of water, Bryce tells me that the animation will take at least fifteen DAYS to finish. To make a long story short, Bryce 5 will punish you in slow rendering time for the same intricacy of creativity the software claims to reward. At first, I wondered whether or not Bryce's rendering engine was software-intensive (i.e. all of the complex floating-point calculations involving exponents, roots, logarithms, trigonometry, and so on are all carried out by the software) or hardware-intensive (i.e. the same complex calculations are passed to and from the CPU's Floating-Point Unit, which is MILLIONS of times faster than the software-intensive method). All Pentium CPU's have an FPU, and since Bryce 5 requires that the PC in question have a Pentium, one would think that Bryce's rendering engine would be hardware-intensive, taking advantage of the FPU's speed and power. Nevertheless, other users have told me that the Bryce 5 rendering engine is only software-intensive, hence the incredibly long rendering times on simple animations that were cursed with having too many complex props and actors in the scene. Other users have advised me to make use of Network Rendering, where several computers sharing a network link carry out the same rendering project together. But it totally defeats the purpose of purchasing an inexpensive yet powerful 3D world-rendering tool when you have to spend tons of extra money on other computers simply to render a scene or animation at a decent rate. Ultimately, because my work is deadline-driven, I have found that Bryce's dismal rendering times have become absolutely unacceptable. I am already doing research on another 3D-rendering software package that has a considerably faster rendering engine, one that makes use of the FPU. Bryce 5 is excellent for rendering phenomenal 3D worlds and animations, but only if you have a day's, a week's, or even a month's patience, because that's exactly how long it may take.
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