How to Make Units With Bryce 5

[Gary Childress]

Complex modeling.... well the best modelers are: Lightwave, 3d Studio Max and Cinema 4d. Also popular (and high end), but not quite as fancy are: XSI, Truespace and Cararra.
Good "pure" modelers (these lack most 3d fucntionality, but are just for making objects for use in another app (in order from coolest)) ZBrush, Hexagon, AC3D and Shade.
Popular free programs Wings 3d (a pure modeler), Truespace 3.2 (older free version), Blender, (hard to master), OpenFX, Milkshape 3d (a pure modeler),POV-Ray (text based), MORAY (GUI version of POV-RAY), you can even use Google Sketchup Freeversion (a pure modeler, it requires that you use either Blender (free) or VUE (not free) to get the stuff in to Bryce.

Thanks for the informative post Bjornlo. This weekend when I have more free time I'll look into downloading some freeware and try importing more complex annimations into Bryce. You have a good point, since the scale in civ is small Bryce should be sufficient for probably 95% of what I want to do. And you can't beat the price (Free)!

I actually did make a ship annimation using elongated cylinders and a cube for the mid section. It didn't turn out too bad I guess. It was one of my first projects after the cannon.

EDIT: The bow and stern are actually elongated cylinders that stretch far down below the ground plane to make the sides fairly vertical.

 

[Gary Childress]

That thing looks amazing, for an experimental fiddle with new software.

Poser will animate pretty much anything, but it's true that you can't really model in it (although it's surprising what you can do with primitives). It is designed primarily for animating figures, not necessarily human (there are many animal/monster figures available for Poser).

If I can do what Bjornlo was talking about and import more complex shapes into Bryce from other software then I'll be set for just about anything.