Digital Art Zone

Anyone tried it yet?

Aeolius - 25 July 2012 08:22 AM

Anyone tried it yet?

I have not, but I think the chances of the current version of Bryce 7 working in Mountain Lion are between zero and none.

I realize that it’s somewhat unhelpful to respond to a “Have you tried it?” question with “No, but I already know it won’t work.”, and I stand a chance of looking like an idiot if I’m wrong. However, I would be seriously surprised if Apple had decided to spontaneously revert whatever change it was that broke Bryce in the first place. For Bryce to work again, DAZ will have to do the work.

I’m more curious to know how other DAZ products - particularly Studio 4 and Carrara 8.5, plus non-DAZ products such as Reality and Lux - hold up under Mountain Lion.

At present the System rrequirements for Bryce 7, as detailed on the product page, do state that Bryce 7 will not work in OS X Lion, so will not work in Mountain Lion either, that does rather stand to reason.

It has been stated by one of the Daz3D management team that when Bryce is brought back into the Dev Cycle they will be working on getting it operattional on a Mac using the latest OSXs.

The next question would be whether there is a Windows emulator running Mountain Lion. If yes, Bryce would be worth to run under an emulator. I don’t think the next Bryce development cycle will beginn in the next two weeks.

Horo - 25 July 2012 11:07 AM

The next question would be whether there is a Windows emulator running Mountain Lion. If yes, Bryce would be worth to run under an emulator. I don’t think the next Bryce development cycle will beginn in the next two weeks.

I’ve run Bryce 7 successfully on Windows 7 under Parallels 7 on OS X 10.7 (so many sevens ...). And the latest version of Parallels 7 is supposedly Mountain Lion-friendly.

So if you want to run Bryce on a Mountain Lion-equipped Mac right now, the best method might indeed be to do so on Windows under Parallels (or VMWare). You can pick up Parallels for anything from $30 to $50 if you shop around (search http://dealnews.com/ or a similar site); you can probably get a copy of Windows 7 for about $80, so you’re looking at an outlay of $130 or less (plus tax and shipping) to be able to run Bryce.

That’s far from ideal, but it’s possible.

Note that I haven’t tested Bryce extensively, or tested the DAZ Studio bridge, or figured out if whether you can share one DAZ content directory across both OS’s. And there will be a performance hit for rendering under emulation. Still, the basic functionality is there.

According to this compatibility site:
http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_p/index_tags/_p

Parallels virtualization does not work under 10.8.
But VMware Fusion 4 does.

dan whiteside - 25 July 2012 11:34 AM

According to this compatibility site:
http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_p/index_tags/_p

Parallels virtualization does not work under 10.8.
But VMware Fusion 4 does.

The very latest build of Parallels 7 claimed to add Mountain Lion support, and I’ve seen posts from users who claim that it does indeed work under Mountain Lion. It’s possible that RoaringApps tested with an older build.

However, I haven’t tested it myself - I’m holding off on Mountain Lion until I find out exactly what it breaks - so I can’t confirm that.

have tried it natively on mountain lion. doesn’t work. hope this helps :\

Doesn’t work for me either :-(

This problem/fault/bug has lasted for a full generation of Mac OS and I haven’t heard much from Daz that makes me feel confident that they are actively pursuing a solution :-(

What alternatives (free if possible) are there to Bryce?

In the meantime I’ll try and install it on my Windows 7 partition.

Has anyone any tips on the smoothest way of working between OS’s, I use VMware fusion.

chohole - 25 July 2012 10:48 AM

At present the System rrequirements for Bryce 7, as detailed on the product page, do state that Bryce 7 will not work in OS X Lion, so will not work in Mountain Lion either, that does rather stand to reason.

It has been stated by one of the Daz3D management team that when Bryce is brought back into the Dev Cycle they will be working on getting it operattional on a Mac using the latest OSXs.

Further to this it has also been explained that B7 was released, and the dev cycle wound up, before OSX 7 was released. As the Mac dev was on contract, his contract had come to an end before anything could be fixed. So Daz3D has had to wait till they could find another Mac dev with Bryce knowledge.

oranda - 27 July 2012 02:33 AM

What alternatives (free if possible) are there to Bryce?

The obvious leading contender is Vue. It’s extremely capable, but by the time you’ve got a version that matches Bryce’s features, you’ll have spent rather a lot of money. There are free ‘learning editions’, but they’re restricted.

Another possible is DAZ’s own Carrara, which - in addition to being a full-fledged modeling, animation and rendering program - has evolved into a surprisingly-good landscape modeler. Plus it handles DAZ/Poser content well. It’s a real Swiss Army knife of a program. Again, though, it’s not free. It also currently has some irritating show-stopper bugs on Mac at the moment: not enough to make it unusable, but enough to make you scream and punch the walls once in a while.

TerraRay is relatively inexpensive (and they have special offers from time to time) but, in my view, pretty limited. It’s quite slow, too. A nice toy if you can get it for $5, as I did, but not worth it otherwise.

Terragen produces truly stunning landscapes and skies, and there’s a free edition - but the free edition is limited, and the full edition is not cheap.

If you like working in DAZ Studio, the Infinito plugin lets you make landscapes. Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, not all features of the generated landscape can be saved, which may be a deal-breaker. Not free.

Personally, I alternate between Vue and Carrara these days. If I had to pick one, I’d go with Carrara. Vue produces much better landscape images, but Carrara is a better general tool. If you use DAZ content, you’ll also find the workflow for inserting figures into your scene much simpler.

Have I missed any?

My favorite is Voyager:
http://uisoftware.com/artmatic/indexAMVY.php
Mac only and coded by Eric Wegner, the guy that coded most of the original Bryce code.

Not cheap at all, no import/export but some of the technology is bleeding edge. And boy is it fast!

dan whiteside - 27 July 2012 06:06 AM

My favorite is Voyager:
http://uisoftware.com/artmatic/indexAMVY.php
Mac only and coded by Eric Wegner, the guy that coded most of the original Bryce code.

Not cheap at all, no import/export but some of the technology is bleeding edge. And boy is it fast!

Thanks Dan, now for the first time in my life I wished I could afford a Mac!  *sniff*  Yes thank you indeed Dan, I will go to bed tonight sniffling into my pillow.

Sorry to be late responding but I’m having problems logging in…

It really is too bad that UI software is about the only company doing serious new procedural stuff. There’s still quite a bit of work in Academia (notably Cornel U.) but it’s not making it’s way into commercial apps.

As far as Parallels and Fusion are concerned they’re not emulators but “virtualization” - for all intents it’s almost exactly like having a PC. And my experience with Fusion and Bryce 7.0 is that PC Bryce is faster on multicore Macs. That’s because Bryce Mac multicore support doesn’t work with skies and terrains (only uses a single core) while PC Bryce does. Bryce Mac is also limited to using a max of 4 cores and if I remember correctly PC Bryce will use up to 8 cores (or maybe 16?)

Yes, max. 8 cores on the PC. During the 7.0 dev cycle, we were up at 16 supported cores. There is a memory trade off for each additional core and still sticking to the 32-bit application made limiting to 8 cores an acceptable compromise of speed and memory.

Wow, for once I remembered something correctly! Thanks for the info Horo.