Bryce 7 Pro review
One of the oldest landscaping programs around, Bryce 7 Pro’s new functionality works hard to show us the app’s still got what it takes
Price: $70 (Pro) $40 (upgrade) | Developer: Daz 3D | Platform: Windows/Mac
Main features:
- New Instancing Lab
- Updated render engine
- New lights
- Displacement
- IBL toolset updates
Bryce 7 Pro ships with some good 'rip apart and learn' scenes
Like Painter, Carrara and Poser, Bryce was one of the famous (or infamous) MetaCreations line of products, which broke new ground in the 1990s by offering affordable creative applications with distinctive user interfaces.
DAZ 3D acquired Bryce 5.0 from interim owner Corel in 2004, releasing Bryce 5.5 in 2005. It sported the first incarnation of the DAZ Studio Bridge, enabling users to bypass Bryce’s onerous object-importing and texture re-assigning process by allowing them a direct import and link to a rigged and textured figure.
Functionality has been added in bits and pieces over the years, including HDRI in the 2006 Bryce 6 release, and currently, in Bryce 7 Pro, an Instancing Lab, improved lights, lighting and sky functionality, plus import and export improvements.
This release has also been modified to fit the DAZ business model and ships in PLE (a personal learning edition for non-commercial use) and Standard flavours in addition to this Pro edition.
Bryce lovers will be happy with some of the new features, and it’s easy to see why: the Instancing Lab is a welcome addition for those tired of using the labour and memory-intensive Replicate functions to populate scenes with vegetation or other props.
Working as a basic particle emitter, it uses a native component – a plane, terrain or any other primitive – as an emitter, and built-in or imported components like plants, rocks, or other items as particles.
While it’s no Vue EcoSystem editor or Carrara particle emitter, it does bring Bryce’s abilities closer to the standard functionality now found in similar applications.
Divided into a Brush Editor and a Painting interface, the Instancing Lab lets you define both brush parameters and density details.
A pie chart in the Instancing Lab illustrates the distribution of plant forms
The brush controls particle size, density and spread, and the Painting controls let you define component density and scale, allowing for particle sets consisting of various components to be built and randomised.
While some of the Lab functionality is clever, like using a pie to define particle density and variety, some functionality is probably still in the works: it has no colour variable or variable density fractal settings like Terragen or Vue, and implementation of the tools could have benefited from a little more time in development.
Although the Brush Editor’s wheel setup is a good way of implementing instancing functionality, the ability to save the defined instancing brush would have been useful, either as a standalone file or as part of a saved project.
In addition, there may have been some benefit in checking or updating the texture-import function: Bryce still doesn’t seem to accept newer TIFF file versions, like the ones in the billboards included on the XFrog CDs, without an excursion into Photoshop first.
You need to split the alpha from the diffuse, as some TIFFs import as stripes or not at all.
Keeping tabs
Compared to Bryce 6, the functionality boosts in the Sky Lab generally allow for fewer workarounds and more realism in renders.
Improvements to the IBL toolset include Cast Shadows, Soft Shadows and Use Sky as HDRI
The IBL tab in the Sky Lab finally has a specular function, meaning no more workarounds in pure HDR scenes by using the reflection channel or an extra light for specularity.
The new ability to include or exclude scene objects from being lit (also implemented in the Light Editor) saves on render time, especially with big, volumetric and displaced materials like clouds, while the new Use Skydome function allows users to employ in-program skies as HDR skies.
Defining shadows and depth of field is also easier: the functionality can now be set directly from within the editor.
An updated True Ambience system in the renderer gets rid of tell-tale mini-slabs of uniform shadows better than in previous incarnations. Light now bounces better into and around shadowed areas – and finally renders colour bleed, something it didn’t do without cheating previously.
Stability issues
This could have been an excellent release: the Instancing Lab takes a lot of work out of populating scenes, the Sky Lab tweaks facilitate more realism in renders, and even something as small as a displacement function can help to ‘pop’ a scene.
Sadly, issues with stability, render times and documentation turn it into a buggy one instead.
Bryce 7 Pro can be crash-prone, both on 32- and 64-bit platforms, with most of the crashes traced back to memory handling and renderer utilisation, according to the crash log. No matter the cause, the instability is a fairly frustrating experience for hobbyists, not to mention in a pipeline or production situation.
When editing a scene, trying to lock an item imported through the importer and not the Bridge (which won’t always load the entire selected set) is also a problem: locking it will either rotate the item a few degrees or ungroup an imported group.
Despite updates, the render engine is still fairly time- and resource-consuming with IBL settings. Rendering itself is crash-prone, especially saving post-render.
Perhaps some crashes could be avoided if one knew the limits of the new functionality, but Bryce 7 Pro shipped with outdated documentation, with full documentation slotted for early autumn.
Hopefully, the worst crashes and issues will have been fixed via beta patches, followed by the 7.1 release. But they detract from what could have been a good, fun release.
Bryce has a long history of easing newcomers into 3D via a friendly interface, and a fix for the issues mentioned should continue to help it do so. However, experienced users will no doubt ignore most of the issues, and dive into the new tools, ready to concoct anything from volumetric jelly to instanced forests.
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3D World verdict
PROS
- Instancing Lab
- Excellent teaching scenes
- IBL updates
CONS
- Instability causes crashes
- Bryce 6 documentation
- UI is sometimes unresponsive
- Provided the patch fixes the issues Bryce 7 Pro has suffered, the new tools make this a release worth taking seriously -
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By Cirstyn Bech-Yagher
Posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 5:30 pm under Applications, Reviews. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Bryce, Illustration, review
