What is KPT Bryce 1.0.1?

All you have to do is choose your favorite combination of sky, ground, and mountains to create exquisite natural and supernatural landscapes in KPT Bryce, an easy-to-use terrain-generation tool. With an interface long on high-quality pictures and short on traditional text-and-button layouts, KPT Bryce is a lot like Kai’s Power Tools, another HSC Software product (see review, August ’94, page 54). Both programs take some getting used to, but once you're up to speed, they’re a joy to work with.

A New Horizon. Starting from either a preset landscape or a blank screen, you add typical landscape elements to create islands, mountains, and chasms. You can create terrains or import any PICT file and use its brightness as elevation data. You can also add less natural geometric elements such as spheres, pyramids, squares, and infinite planes. Once you’ve created your terrain, you can smooth, sharpen, or randomize it; merge it with another PICT file; apply filters to it; or even erode it according to realistic water-flow algorithms.

Once you start digging into KPT Bryce’s fertile soil, you’ll be impressed with the program’s finesse. For instance, the textures you apply to scene elements are more sophisticated than those of traditional 3-D texture maps, responding to changes in the elements’ orientation, slope, and elevation.

Slow but Superb. KPT Bryce’s ray tracing trades speed for quality; a complicated scene can take several hours to render. A native Power Mac version, which will cut down rendering time, should be available by the time you read this.

We were disappointed that KPT Bryce is strictly still-life (a version with animation capabilities is being planned). The program also has no trees, which might not be important to you, except that it can’t import or export DXF files.

If you yearn to create your own 3-D landscapes, you can create impressive computer-generated still-life landscapes with KPT Bryce, whether or not you’re artistically gifted.

Sullivan, Jeffrey. (January 1995). KPT Bryce. MacUser. (pg. 61).

Download KPT Bryce 1.0.1 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II