By chance I found out that Plant Factory from e-on software is now free. e-on software has been acquired by another company, that does not want to proceed with the 3D software and therefore made all products of e-on free for download. With Plant Factory, you can make all kinds of plants. There is also a quite extensive Plant Catalog with all kinds of premade plants. The catalog comes in several downloads. I have not yet downloaded them all, but the ones I have seen look very good. Of course, they come with a downside for Bryce: high polygon count and large memory use. But it can be worthwhile to use some of these plants if you want some. You can export them as 3ds for the best result (fbx does not put the constituents in the right place and I have not tested obj yet). You can also create plants from scratch and should be able to import meshes for leaves, etc. (I think). I have not tested a lot of options yet.

I exported some plants, including one ground cover plant, that I instanced multiple times. Most of them I gave quite some wind effect in Plant Factory. The plants come in quite some subdivisions, so you do not have to have the same texture on all of the leaves, for example. This render uses the plants as exported to 3ds, but for some textures the transparency was set at 100%, so I changed that. The present scene is around 203 MB, so at the border of what Bryce can take in practice. However, I used the textures as exported (pictures) and could have lowered the memory use by changing into procedural textures.

By the way, also the e-on product Vue is free for download now. Vue looks to me like a kind of a Bryce on steroids with options for growing plants in an ecosystem, etc., but not with all the options Bryce has for e.g. lights. I tried Vue many years ago on another computer with much less memory and that was no success. 

Neither Plant Factory, nor Vue will be updated anymore (of course).

Bryce 7 pro doesn't give me a Launch option after download - why? I've tried numerous times but it just doesn't want me to use it!  WHY? WHAT am I doing wrong? I used Bryce on and off fo many years on different desktops, laptops etc. Now, I can download a version, but after download there is no option to Launch the programme. It just wants me to click 'Finish' and whn i do. No Bryce. I might be sinple for you nerdy people but for me its incredibly frustrating! Becaause nothoing happenss - what am i doing wrong?

I have a render in that folder called column-3.br7  

This is the render.  Is this your render or mine?  I can't remember.  So frustrating that I can't remember stuff.  Thanks

I ordered Bryce 7.1 Pro from your website, but instead I received Hexagon and did not receive a serial number. I would like to return Hexagon and either receive the correct product (Bryce 7.1 Pro) or be issued a refund.

Thank you for your assistance.

Sincerely, Alexandria Walker

I'm using Bryce 7.1 Pro to generate pre-rendered backgrounds for a game I'm making in Godot. To try and be clever and save myself a lot of hassle, I'm writing a shader that essentially takes a render, takes a distance pass, and then maps that depth out so a player could walk around, say, a pole, without having to manually tell the engine where the poll is in 3D space. However, I'm running into some problems getting what I need from Bryce for this.

1. I have no idea where the near/far clipping planes/distances are (basically, where distance-wise the camera starts rendering and where it stops). It seems like Bryce moves the far clipping plane around based on the geometry of the scene? More specifically, it seems to set the far plane to intersect the furthest point of geometry from the viewport while remaining parallel to it). Here's a diagram showing what I mean:

However, I still have no idea where the near plane is, and putting in the distances from the camera to the far clip plane (doing some basic trigonometry and converting out of BU (assuming 1 BU == 8 feet, please correct me if I'm wrong)) seems to still misalign with the render. Does anyone know how exactly Bryce calculates its near/far clipping distances?

2. The distance pass seems to be awfully faded even when close to the camera. This is usually because the near clip plane is too small (i.e. far from the start of geometry) but it might also be because the distance pass algorithm is non-linear. Does anyone know if the distance pass calculates linearly?

General advice is also very welcome, happy to share any assets if it'll help, anyone who's had experience exporting Bryce renders for pre-rendered backgrounds or any sort of depth shader wizardry with them would be sorely appreciated. I've been slamming my head into the wall for the past week trying to get this to work and this is the most I've been able to squeeze out of the depth pass...

(Ignore half the character's body being obscured and their head sticking through the pole. Their torso is behind it which is the intended effect! (The torso that is. The body disappearing and head being piked by a rail beam is not an intended feature))

I brought a scene over from DS but one of the transparencies aren't there.  I'm thinking that this is because of the new technology from DS where it might not be using a trans map. I looked at it in DS and couldn't make it bring up surfaces.  A lot of instances being used in the objects I'm working with.  Anyhow, image of roll in DS, image in Bryce and texture editor.

Quick question: Does your DS bridge still work in both directions?

Way way back when Bryce 7.1 was first released, I know the DS versions at the time were very compatible with Bryce. At some point, with DS constantly being developed, at some point I vaguely recall that as least for me, the bridge started working only in one direction, DS to Bryce, and not vice versa.

Currently, when I try to send objects from Bryce to DS via the Bridge, it asks me to choose which version of DS I desire, yet no versions show up on the list. OR the dropdown itself is broken.

Maybe I've missed a step, installed the applications in the wrong order? 

I feel confident Horo has an answer, but I dont think he's running Bryce or DS on a windows 11 OS, so perhaps anyone else with advice could help me out?

It's not the end of the world if the bridge only functions in one direction, just want to be sure.

Thanks, Commune!

Firstly, yes - I agree that those Eric Wenger's (and others) demonstration scenes are indeed impressive. However, this line of thoughts made me thinking about "how far we all can go with Bryce?". I then remembered reading a post (I think it was written by KinemagiK) that Bryce handles structures made from 20 000 metaballs or something like that. Without giving it too much of a thought, I've launched Bryce and started replicating objects. Though I decided to use a simple sphere instead.

It was fine and easy up until I've got 5 000 spheres. Trying to double their amount led to Bryce freezing (maybe I could wait for an hour or something, but I lack the patience for it). However... I've decided to add "just" another thousand - and it worked, giving me 6 000 spheres. Then I tried to bite a bit larger piece and added 4 000 more - also worked. In the ended, I've managed to reach 25 000 spheres, alternating 1 000 and 4 000 spheres addition. I stopped after that as the more spheres I was adding, the more lag for actions like selecting/deselecting objects or changing sun position was being introduced.

Well, that was about the objects. Now, how about imported models? Now, I think Bryce is pretty generous with them! For starters, I've loaded the "Lythos mecha" model (it's a freebie available at CGTrader, made by a pretty cool author called Megalord) which has around 2.4 million polys. You might want to open the image in a new tab if you'd like to appreciate the details in the model.

Then I added 10 more... which gives us around 26 million polys. Not bad, huh? Also I think they look pleasant with Bryce procedural materials.

But hey, let's increase the challenge! Another freebie by Megalord, the amazing "Juggernaut" mech that has, like, 10 million polys itself. Wow. (Again, open fullsize to check the detail level). Had to wait, like, 7 minutes during import, but it loaded in the end!

If "Lythos" model was taking, like, ~600 mb memory, then "Juggernaut" eats around ~1700 mb. Good to know we have instancing! I've stopped at 4 copies, which led to the amazing 50 million polys scene. Stopped after that as, like in experiment with spheres, simple interactions started getting more and more slow. Still, I think it's pretty impressive!

All this cool and what not, but... the initial "challenge" said the following: "billions of polys". 50 millions can't compare to that, for better or worse. I was ready to accept that, but... but... Rashad comes to rescue, and he did it before "nanites" were even announced :D Sorry, this is my attempt to joke, but.. Remember this amazing set of scenes? https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2025691/ so I've opened (took quite a time as it used 3100 mb of memory during that) the amazing "MgScp Sunday Picnic EGFPLS Full" prepared by Rashad as part of his MegaScapes and Lighting tutorial and it says more then one billion polys there (and I think C-ram most likely had the similar polycount as well). So, yeah... I can now feel the satisfaction! 

Bryce is pretty much obsolete with my RTX 3090 card...

What should take minutes takes hours...

I need multicore rendering on the "render to disk" function...

Been working again more heavily in Bryce, and while I never am away from it for long, I still feel like I might be missing simple things.

Below is a wip, a rework of a scene I rendered many years ago.

The problem is that when I try to exclude items from the influence of this particular light, the list extends off the page both above and below, and I cannot move up or down past the area already displayed. I feel confident I used to be able to scroll up and down the list no problem. I tried pressing the up and down arrows, I even tried pgUp and pgDown, yet the list doesnt change.

I also tried holding Shift, holding Cntrl, even holding Alt, yet the list doesnt move.

I'm wondering if its a Windows 11 issue, thouhg I very much hope its just a silly user error. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks guys and gals!

Just getting back into Bryce (yes I know it's old - but so am I!)

Anyone point me in the right direction. Thanks

If any of you was exploring this topic, please share your experience. I think the problem with output that I'm getting from Adobe software, however when I try searching for infromation of how to deal with that, I mostly arrive at solutions that are made to "hide the problem visually" aimed at print production or web design via using a mixture of blur and noise grain or blur and dithering. Howevever, I wonder if there is a way to get those gradient morphs (transitions) as smoothly as possible. Now, I understand there still will be some colour/tone gradation especially if my terrain target is 1024 x 1024 pixels. However, I'd prefer it to not have "terracing" and instead do all the needed changes between each pixels instead of lumping them together into terraces.

I think in late 90s and early 00s "brycers" maybe had solution to this problem, I think perhaps that was one of applications of BSmooth software (just my guess). But I don't have an old Macintosh with it, so...

Anyway, here is a picture of results I'm not satisfied with, and I also attach my original gradient mesh vector file (saved to PDF) and rasterized picture.

P.S.

I also don't know why I got those "low poly" looks on the hills...

just purchased Bryce, and i'm looking around for tutorials.

unfortunately, the pinned thread has plenty of dead links, including the basic tutorial and documentation.

has some of it been preserved in any form? are there any up-to-date guides that are still being maintained?

thank you, have a good one

Shem

I mean, I was often repositioning objects by taking a sceenshot of one object's attributes window and then manyally typing in the needed values and thinking "I wish Bryce would have ability to move object in the place of existing object". Sure, I did see "Copy Matrix" menu command, but for some weird reason I always assumed it was related to Material Lab just like "Copy Texture" above it. Recently that wish crossed my mind again, and I decided to blow away some dust from the great and allmight "Real World Bryce 4" book by Susan Kitchens (which is still an absolute marvel regardless of which Bryce vesion you're using). And, to my surprise.. Yes. Yes it is. Yes it is indeed. "Copy Matrix" does the stuff I wanted to and thought that Bryce didn't have. Oh, all the aliens from cheesy sci-fi tv show can now laugh at me.

So the moral is simple. It's always good to go and refresh the basics, especially if you're returning to software after a long pause. 

What i noticed recently:

- if i edit existing terrain in TE, and then "undo" on main screen, i often get crash, so i save scene before revisiting terrains in te and revert to saved instead of undo if needed.

If anyone can confirm same behavior, than this 'll be added to list. Sorry if there is already such a thread.

Other stuff i think about..

- i've not tried anything, but something something with displacement experiments, i've read that you might not use setting higher than specific value for stable work

- and now, i just had crash which i don't understand what exactly was a reason (i haven't pressed "send report", sadly):

I bridged genesis 8 (which i set to base resolution, does that even help?) and clothes from DS; i removed all genesis figure materials but kept clothing textures. Then i did multireplicate to have 40 instances. I got slowdown in viewport, btw. I got crash.. when i decided to change camera FOV from 60 to 120. I wonder if i got to memory limit (is that cause i kept image textures on clothing?) or some bug... EDIT: weirdly, tried again and have no problems - around 250 mb ram usage, ~5 million polys of instances. Maybe i forgot some steps that lead to mistakes.

Which means I would have to make a camera "Top View" (for example), perhaps disable most of the lighting/atmosphere, and then make a render.

However... what should be scale of both material and camera to crop your render into the "seamless texture pattern element"?

I wonder if anyone was trying to do the same.

There were a few trees that I had grouped with this light. I didn't "ungroup" the objects first.. just deleted the tree and forgot about the light. This is the only scenario I could figure that happened and now it thinks it is part of a group still?

Does anyone know what is going on or had this issue?  

Thanks in advance.

J'ai importé plusieurs centaines d'items et ressources dans les bibliothèques de Bryce 7.1 pro.

Je souhaiterais sanvegarder sur disque dur externe ces installations, mais je ne les trouve pas (je suis sous windows 7.0).

Où se trouvent elles normalement?

Merci d'avance.

Jean Luc Rostoucher

so fun to use 

Hi everyone.  Download the attached file and do what you will with it.  It's a 360 perspective file but you can change it back to regular.  Move the parts around, delete the different parts.  Change the camera angle, the sky color, the object colors, make it brighter...whatever suits your fancy.  Post here.

Update: okay nevermind, need to Alt + click to bring up the fine tune which allows different modes.  That works.  Weird that the swatch pick doesn't work though.