@Squidgy The Brick:
Quote: "Bryce 5 (which is no longer supported).
"
That was true until Daz3D purchased it from Corel last year. Bryce is alive and well. So far the only new features have been integration with their existing 3D character products, but it's early yet. I guess that's to be expected. I have noticed artists beginning to sell Bryce add-ons, like materials ("textures", to you and me).
@Philip: thanks much for the kind words. You might want to compare Bryce to 3DEM and Terragen. Both are free, I think. 3DEM does a better job making animated fly-throughs of terrains after you've loaded them. Terragen is good with skies I've heard, but I also heard there were some copyright restrictions if you wanted to use the output commercially. I haven't verified that.
Another program I've been looking very seriously at is Mojoworld by Pandromeda. For planet and terrain building, it smokes every product I've ever seen, including the heavy-hitters like Maya and 3DSMax. Their tech support pointed me to a sample planet export and I'm encouraged by what I saw. The 3DS terrain output converted to .X quite nicely in GameSpace and DBPro was able to read it. The demo was too high poly but it looks scalable. Anyway, for generating scenery... well... check out their galleries: [href]www.pandromeda.com[/href] I believe they also did some of the art for that hokey "Day after Tomorrow" disaster flick that came out last summer. Bad movie, great eye candy...
@Phaelax:
Quote: "After using 3dsmax, bryce sucks. The interface bugs me and is annoying to use."
I agree that the interface is annoying to learn. Not as bad as GameSpace, but close. I've worked with it long enough to know what all the ridiculously small icons mean now though. IMHO, the program is far, far deeper on features than you see at first glance. What's missing is a really good up-to-date book (same as DBPro
)
I'm not sure it's fair to compare Max and Bryce though. Isn't Max more of a 3D modeling tool? Bryce is really "just" a terrain/landscape/sky program, and it excels at that, esp. for the cost vs. the full-blown modeling programs out there.