Bryce Users (and those considering Bryce)

[Bjornlo]

Bryce 6.0 was just released. And, as part of their aniversary special to their Platinum Club members, it is avialable for 6.00 for PC members.
If you are not a member, you can get it for 36.00 (6.00 plus 30.00 for the minum 1 month membership).

This version has a number of very compelling features,

• It fixes the long frustrating bug with overlapping volumetrics, nested transparencies and a bunch of other stuff.
• It has faster renders,
• The ability to collapse boolean objects into a mesh
• the ability to export this Bryce made mesh for use in other programs (such as Poser, if you want)...
• There are other fancy features which most won't care about (HDRI, etc)

and so on... just letting those interested in it know. I have not used it yet except to see if the volumetric/transparency issue was gone.
It supposedly has better support for Poser imports, but I haven't tried it.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Ay Caramba!

 

[Bjornlo]

It is pretty good. It supports dual core during renders. So your fancy battleships could be rendering in far less time. Plus even on a single core, like my old laptop, it seems faster... 10-15% faster.

Best part is the price... 6 bucks! haha. It is going back to 100 bucks in a like 2 weeks.

 

[MarineCorps]

It is pretty good. It supports dual core during renders. So your fancy battleships could be rendering in far less time. Plus even on a single core, like my old laptop, it seems faster... 10-15% faster.

Best part is the price... 6 bucks! haha. It is going back to 100 bucks in a like 2 weeks.

If I had a use for it I would buy it just for dual core support.... Maybe I will. Just in case.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

Sounds like a great bargain. How long do we have before the deal ends?

 

[Bjornlo]

Sounds like a great bargain. How long do we have before the deal ends?

From the daz web site:

This introductory event ends on November 20, 2006. At that time, Bryce 6 will be priced at $99.95.

For some reason I thoughted it ended on Nov 1st, so what I said earlier about it being a 2week special was wrong.

 

[Bjornlo]

Just did a test render:
Bryce 5.5c (which is faster than Bryce 5.0 by around 10-15% on this scene)
Render time: 7:23
Bryce 6.0 (same scene, same settings)
Render time: 4:22
And, it gets better. Because I was OC'ing a bit more on the B5.5c scene, so the CPU and BUS speed is 7% lower (2.57ghz vs. 2.4) with 6.0 and it still is nearly twice as fast.
Then I saved the scene as a Br6 scene... the file dropped from 858kb to 343kb. So I loaded one of my larger scenes, and resaved that. It dropped from 1.29gb to 1.01gb.
Saving disk space and time, gotta love that.

 

[MarineCorps]

Just did a test render:
Bryce 5.5c (which is faster than Bryce 5.0 by around 10-15% on this scene)
Render time: 7:23
Bryce 6.0 (same scene, same settings)
Render time: 4:22
And, it gets better. Because I was OC'ing a bit more on the B5.5c scene, so the CPU and BUS speed is 7% lower (2.57ghz vs. 2.4) with 6.0 and it still is nearly twice as fast.
Then I saved the scene as a Br6 scene... the file dropped from 858kb to 343kb. So I loaded one of my larger scenes, and resaved that. It dropped from 1.29gb to 1.01gb.
Saving disk space and time, gotta love that.

Better compresion. Didn't expect that, I had a dream that I bought Bryce 6 last night. But it was only a dream. I need to buy a labtop so I need all the money I can get.

 

[Bjornlo]

I can understand that. However, if you have any interest in Bryce at all, you might regret passing on the 6.00 price later.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Downloading.....now I just have to reinstall every other program that I have because I had to reinstall XP over the weekend...5 times.

 

[Bjornlo]

Thankfully, I can only take the blame for some of the drivers and utilities.
I had to reinstall myself. I thought all was well, when my antivirus program (which is actually a filter driver, but it runs as a service) caused a glitch within explorer. Was faster to reinstall again than mess with it.
All seems well for now. Wait until you see some of the "special" features of Vista's copy-protection... for example, only allows two transfers... this includes two hardware upgrades on the same system. fortunately XP is pretty stable since I intend to run it for quite a while.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Did they forget to include the g-damn serial number????????

 

[Bjornlo]

Did they forget to include the g-damn serial number????????

Nah, that was just some 'tard at a packing plant (contracted company).
Vista (the next version of Windows) has some strange copy protection that was put in there by design. Amongst the most annoying is that you can only upgrade your PC a couple of times. After that, according to press releases, you will be required to buy another copy of Vista. Also, most versions of Vista include severe limitations on copying music, etc... The premium version (600.00 or so) has very few restrictions. But most people who "upgrade" to Vista will end up with an OS which uses more ram, more processor power, requires a expensive new video card for all the features to work and will provide less over all functionality (to the typical user, when compared with XP Home). But in my mind the worst decision is the limits on hardware upgrades. If you buy a laptop, it is not as big a deal. But, if you use a desktop and want to upgrade a few items you can do this only twice. As this is called a transfer and it is not as simple as XP (which was annoying enough with all the calls to reactivate).

 

[Wyrmshadow]

actually I was writting about Bryce6. I installed it and it asked me for the serial number... Took a little searching but I found it in my account on Daz.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Initial thoughts: It's like learning to drive a new car. Everything is basically the same, but so much feels different. It will take a while to break in the new toy and feel confortable.

Oh, and I managed to crash it within the 1st minute of using it. I tried to export my stealthy bismark...booom. It didn't like that so much.