What is Bryce 5?

Once a mere landscape generator, Bryce has evolved into a wonderfully flexible 3D art and animation tool. Bryce 5 is Corel’s first major update since the company purchased the program from MetaCreations in 2000. Not only does Bryce 5 run natively in Mac OS X, it also boasts expanded modeling and rendering powers — including metaballs, network rendering, new labs, and new rendering options.

Bryce 5 makes it easier than ever to create foliage-filled, landscaped environments, thanks to its two new labs — the Tree Lab and the Light Lab. The Tree Lab lets you generate unique and realisticlooking trees via an easy-to-use interlace where you can set the tree’s complexity, establish its number of leaves, and institute the base shape for both the trunk and the foliage. You can also choose the type of materials and the color for the trunk and leaves. For greater detail, you can import custom leaves...

The Light Lab provides all the tools you need to shed light on your objects and/or landscapes — from sunlight to artificial light. The interface features controls for brightness, direction, materials, color, softness, and more. You can now create gradients — introduced in the Bryce 4.1 patch — in the Light Lab.

To give environments more authenticity, the Sky Lab incorporates a star chart, accessible via a sky-dome control, to create real-world heavens. You can move the dom o view various parts of the sky and constellations. You can also randomly generate stars by pressing the Option button, as well as place the sun and moon with a click of the corresponding button. For even more realism, Bryce 5’s new rendering options include depth of field, true ambience, blurry transmissions, and soft shadows.

Bryce’s metaballs, greatly versatile despite their simplicity, widen the program’s modeling repertoire. Metaballs are round globules that you can group together to serve as the building blocks fora model, giving it a more organic feel than polygonal (sharp-edged) modeling. In Bryce, metaballs work like Boolean operations — their relationships don’t manifest visibly until render time. Unlike Boolean primitives, however, metaballs don’t require grouping to work together. In fact, with metaballs, grouping works just the opposite way, keeping sets of metaballs from interacting with other sets.

In most cases, the textures we applied to metaballs blended perfectly at the seams. Unfortunately, some complex materials — namely, those created in the Deep Texture Editor with a combination of noises — can cause Bryce to quit unexpectedly when you apply them to a metaball group that you subsequently duplicate. The duplication caused our Mac to crash. Our ultimate workaround was to duplicate the metaball group first, and then add materials to each copy — not exactly efficient, but we avoided any unexpected crashes.

The updated Terrain Editor now supports larger terrains, up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels. It also features more grays for smoother transitions and greater detail. The paintbrush has the same size range as in previous versions — but strangely enough, it can’t access the top row of pixels, which caused our inverted terrains to display a 1-pixel row of white along the top, creating the illusion of a sharp ridge. Our work-arounds included removing the ridge with the clipping tool; creating elevation maps in a separate graphics program and importing them; and exporting inverted terrains, then removing the ridge by deleting the unwanted polygons.

The newly integrated network rendering saves time when you’re rendering animations. but it’s buggy. Complex materials don’t render identically between host and client machines, causing unexpected color shifts. Animators who prefer to render animations as a series of individual frames rather than as a QuickTime Movie can’t use network rendering — the process will stop after the first frame.

Bryce’s new file-saving methods caused us some alarm. Prior versions of Bryce automatically saved numbered files with the next sequential number whenever you used the Save As option. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Now the name of the rendered image you export defaults to the name of the previously saved image. This makes it dangerously easy to overwrite files by accident if you’re not paying close attention.

Bryce 5 lets you create gorgeous terrains easily and has some wonderful new features — but it’s a diamond in the rough. The problems with metaballs and network rendering make adding complex textures difficult. If Corel fixes these problems, the program will truly shine. Nonetheless, Bryce 5 is a worthwhile upgrade.

Sammis, Sarah. (October 2001). Bryce 5. MacAddict. (pgs. 42-43).

Download Bryce 5 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver