Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 5

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Comments

  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    I can only start doing that once I have enough of them loaded with different poses;
    You've already got twice as many as you maybe think you have. Use the flip x command under the resize icon on the main toolbar shelf. :)

    if you replicate animals in a herd with identical poses it becomes horribly obvious.
    Yes, but it's amazing what a difference different angles can make with the same object. Trees also can look full of variety by flipping them and rotating them.

    What annoys me is knowing that on Bryce 5.01 I could have assembled this scene with ease and added at least ten more of those creatures without a problem.


    What annoys me is when people go to the trouble of reformatting the default forum text to make it bigger than everyone else's. :-)

    I may be starting a greetings card business next year, and if I do I will be buying an older Mac so I can use Bryce 5.01 for building scenes instead of any of the later ones. I have one scene I built in Bryce 5.01 that I would happily let DAZ have to test Bryce next time they decide to work on it. I can load and render it in Bryce 7 to get much faster rendering, but any attempt to save it crashes Bryce 7 every time. Attempts to build the scene in Bryce 7 were also pointless.
    Does Bryce 5 only run in "classic"? I don't remember now. I donn't think your problem with "object missing" has anything to do with memory though. There are some of us here who put much more into scenes and not run into such problems.

    Try this: Every object you place in your scene, create a user pre-set library and 'Add' it to the library (maybe call it "My Scene"). Then delete it from your scene and choose the one you just added to the library. Bryce should have collected and converted the object and mats to it's own format and you shouldn't have missing objects... Unless your library folder for that sub section gets to over 2gb, in which case that library will corrupt and you can't get it back when that happens (it's easy to keep a check on though especially on a Mac).

  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited August 2013

    Long renders – a possible solution.

    I’m not sure with long renders in Bryce...can you stop them at some point, save the file, turn off the computer, and later continue on where you left off by turning the computer on again? My experience is that you can pause and resume...etc., but if you stop them midway in, they won’t continue on from where you stopped them, but instead starts again from the very beginning.

    You can certainly do all of the above (pause/resume, stop/save) with animations! That is, say you have an animation 24 hours long, you can pause it at, say, 3 hours into the animation, save it (and, that portion of the animation), close down Bryce, shut off your computer. You can later turn on the computer...etc., and continue on from where you left off – producing the next portion of the long animation. In effect, what it allows is splitting up the animation into several pieces, and then later adding them together in a Graphics Software.

    So what might be the solution for the above long, static-type renders (that is, the usual single images presented here) that might allow you to pause/stop them without having to redo the render from the very beginning again?

    Simply, treat them as animations? That is, instead of setting them up normally as you would do for your static render, use the animation setup instead. That way, it might allow you to stop/save the render midway, and continue on from where you stopped it at another time. I’ve never tried it, but it might be a solution for long-type renders, as, personally, I find leaving on the computer for long times isn’t helpful for its innards. And also, it doesn’t tie up my computer time, and my day.

    Jay

    Post edited by Jamahoney on
  • Electro-ElvisElectro-Elvis Posts: 842
    edited August 2013

    @Jamahoney: You can a static-type render stop, save it and later load it again and the render will start exactly at that point, where you have stopped it. But it is not so obvious. I used Bryce for more than one year, before I learnt this actually nice feature. And you can spoil your attempt quite quickly, if you press or click the wrong button.

    The easisest way IMHO is this. You start your render by clicking the big render button or by pressing CTRL + R. For stopping it, you hit the Escape-Button and then you have to wait and this is the point, until the render really is stopping. you can control this, when the render button is not light anymore. And now you save your render.

    But your method is also quite interesting.

    Post edited by Electro-Elvis on
  • Electro-ElvisElectro-Elvis Posts: 842
    edited December 1969

    And on my other test pic, some vegetation on the hills has been added.

    @David: Your picture with some vegetation. Is the vegetation on the hills in the background a material, too? I guess so. It looks incredibly! I know, there is a tutorial. But I would pay for the material you have made. You have achived an absolut fantastic modification. I am sitting here in front of my screen open-mouthed.

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited August 2013

    As with this method
    Wings 3D project - wings things with loops - by David Brinnen but taking a dodecahedron as the starting point instead of a cube.

    Edit. Oh, material and render setup taken from http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-50-metals-the-heating-room-set one of the example scenes.

    Dodec_loop1.jpg
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    Post edited by David Brinnen on
  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @Pam: That is a really nice scene. Love how the light explains what is happening without the need of object detail.

    @David: Those first images are neat, and as Horo's, a place one would like to walk through. The added vegetation for the grass image really enhances the image. And the loop thingys are excellent looking. The first two each stand on their own merits, maybe that's why I like both. The last one reminds me of pottery. When time permits I will give these a try.

    @Dave: Pattern of the object is really detailed, looking at the larger image. Though I couldn't decide what it reminded me of at first, I finally decided it looked like nylon rope. Sorry, I don't see strawberries in that image.

  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited August 2013

    The easisest way IMHO is this. You start your render by clicking the big render button or by pressing CTRL + R. For stopping it, you hit the Escape-Button and then you have to wait and this is the point, until the render really is stopping. you can control this, when the render button is not light anymore. And now you save your render.

    Now that's quite an interesting way to pause long renders...didn't think of the ESC option. Must give it a try my next long, static one (which I don't generally do, btw - I'm currently rendering an animation over 1-1/2 days long, but in pieces as above mentioned). I would imagine your info., will be quite useful to others, too, as anything over 24 hours long for a single render can be quite taxing for one's computer.

    Cheers

    David...that material is very unusual, but gorgeous, too...defintely worth the bigger picture look, as Guss suggests like with Dave's.

    Jay

    Post edited by Jamahoney on
  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    Stop-Go renders: in my experience it is mandatory to start Bryce and load the file. Double-clicking on the file launches Bryce, loads the file and it usually starts rendering anew.

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Jay and Jamie.

    Here's another mind damaging shape made with Topmod and Wings3D.

    Materials from the Treppenhalle set. And one of Horo's HDRI, Garage Closed, for light and background.

    Used the obscure lighting approach, Bryce sun, soft shadows, dof and TA. 1 hour 40 to render.

    Double_cross_mobius1.jpg
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  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited December 1969

    ...another mind damaging shape...

    Looks like two separate Mobius Strips (Wikipedia link) vying for attention of who has the best surface or side :)

    Jay

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    Rather intriguing shapes. Mind boggling.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    A lot of mundane chaff held me off serious work today so I needed a bit of fun to cheer me up. I watched David's Wings Things with Loops video and gave it a try with a Tetrahedron. Four separate objects, all have materials, including the ground, from the 50 Metals The Treppenhalle Set (though slightly modified). Lit exclusively with the very HDRI which supplies the reflections, the specularity and the soft IBL shadows. Renders with 36 rpp in just a bit over one hour. Is a bit busy ...

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  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 4,956
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Guss, David and Horo.

    Chohole – lovely accident.

    Fire Angel – looking forward to seeing the final render.

    Dave – love your doodles.

    Cool experiments David.

    Horo – I like your render, the ground plane material is awesome.

    Joining the fun, here’s my take on the new Wings 3D loop tutorials.

    wings3d.jpg
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  • Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,798
    edited December 1969

    Fire Angel-
    I agree with you. I love the look of David's most recent clover-like ground level veggies. But because they rely on transparencies, the render time hit is too much to stomach. I decided to give up entirely on anything relating too much to transparencies. Which brings me to the next point.

    The plants look great. My only question is about the leaves. Is the foliage geometrically shaped or is it based on blend transparency? I tend to only use 3d leaves, no more transmapping because the cost in ray firings and render time is far too high. Sticking to fully 3d leaves renders much faster. As your scene becomes more complex, you will see that compound transparencies become a problem. A compound transparency is when you have leaves on trees and other transparent object all along a ray's trajectory. A ray that has to pass through multiple transparent objects on its way back to the camera will be extremely slow arriving there.

    On scene construction...Anything Bryce 5 can do, Bryce 7 can also do. I am inclined to agree with Dave Savage, maybe there are already more copies in the scene than you realize? Or maybe it has to do with the textures. Are all the animals sharing the same maps or are the maps being loaded uniquely for each copy of the animals?

    For what you are doing, I think the instancing lab is surely the way to go. But it takes time to learn how to use it and with grouped objects there is ever more to consider due to a particular bug with groups and instancing. I've had a good deal of success with the IL. Here is a link to a few recent renders I've made using the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19391/P540

    And here is a link to a quick tutorial that will give you all you need to get running. After that, you will see KineMagic has another set of mind blowing tutorials about the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3381/

    Best of luck. It looks great so far, please don't give up.

  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @David: The shapes in that image are indeed mind boggling. You actually got TopMod to produce that? Any idea when the video will be released? ;-) Nice work.

    @Horo: Beautiful results.

    @mermaid: All of those are really nice objects. I see it's my time to give David's tutorial a try.

  • TLBKlausTLBKlaus Posts: 70
    edited December 1969

    Hey folks, sorry it's been so long since i posted but I've been busy making t-shirt designs... I thought I'd
    share some of those and a couple of new renders as well.

    First the renders, and then the shirts... the shirts are tiled Bryce renders, other than the three that are
    assembled from individual renders of dragons, sharksm, and dinosaurs lol. Thought you'd like to see
    some of the uses Bryce can be put to.

    You can see the shirts and other ones that follow at http://store.letsrageclothing.com/carlbrowncollection...

    Gotta get on here more oftern... :D

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  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @TLBKlaus: The new ones are stunning. Your abstracts work well on shirts. Nice job.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    @mermaid010 - those shapes are very nice.


    Fire Angel-
    ...
    For what you are doing, I think the instancing lab is surely the way to go. But it takes time to learn how to use it and with grouped objects there is ever more to consider due to a particular bug with groups and instancing. I've had a good deal of success with the IL. Here is a link to a few recent renders I've made using the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19391/P540

    And here is a link to a quick tutorial that will give you all you need to get running. After that, you will see KineMagic has another set of mind blowing tutorials about the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3381/

    Best of luck. It looks great so far, please don't give up.

    Rashad and Kine_magiK were both kind enough to give me permission to publish the assembled posts as tutorials on my website (see sig). Go to Bryce Documents > Guests (PDF) > Objects. I recommend to start with Rashad's and continue with Kine_magiK's.


    @GussNemo - thank you.


    @TLBKlaus - The first looks like a carpet. Very nice. Great to see the T-shirts with your abstracts on them.

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited August 2013

    TLBKlaus, the T shirts look great, really vibrant. Tie-die for the digital generation.

    Horo and Mermaid, well, shapes, very cool, I begin with your offerings in this video.

    Wings 3D project - wings things with loops 2 - by David Brinnen

    Renders, first Bryce then Octane.

    Edit, Jamie, not ready to do any videos using Topmod yet, not unless you want to hear a lot of grumbling and beeped out foul language - it is very very crashy in my hands and really uncooperative.

    Alien_toastrack1_octane.jpg
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    Post edited by David Brinnen on
  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    Great shape! Bryce render is much superior here, the Octane one is too much blurred for my eyes.

  • Fire AngelFire Angel Posts: 229
    edited December 1969

    Fire Angel-
    I agree with you. I love the look of David's most recent clover-like ground level veggies. But because they rely on transparencies, the render time hit is too much to stomach. I decided to give up entirely on anything relating too much to transparencies. Which brings me to the next point.

    The plants look great. My only question is about the leaves. Is the foliage geometrically shaped or is it based on blend transparency? I tend to only use 3d leaves, no more transmapping because the cost in ray firings and render time is far too high. Sticking to fully 3d leaves renders much faster. As your scene becomes more complex, you will see that compound transparencies become a problem. A compound transparency is when you have leaves on trees and other transparent object all along a ray's trajectory. A ray that has to pass through multiple transparent objects on its way back to the camera will be extremely slow arriving there.

    On scene construction...Anything Bryce 5 can do, Bryce 7 can also do. I am inclined to agree with Dave Savage, maybe there are already more copies in the scene than you realize? Or maybe it has to do with the textures. Are all the animals sharing the same maps or are the maps being loaded uniquely for each copy of the animals?

    For what you are doing, I think the instancing lab is surely the way to go. But it takes time to learn how to use it and with grouped objects there is ever more to consider due to a particular bug with groups and instancing. I've had a good deal of success with the IL. Here is a link to a few recent renders I've made using the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19391/P540

    And here is a link to a quick tutorial that will give you all you need to get running. After that, you will see KineMagic has another set of mind blowing tutorials about the IL.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3381/

    Best of luck. It looks great so far, please don't give up.

    Thanks, I won't be giving up, even if I have to render in several passes and assemble the result in PhotoShop.

    However one thing you've said above must be corrected; don't know where you got the information but it is wrong. Bryce 7 cannot assemble scenes anywhere near as demanding on memory as those that can be assembled in Bryce 5.01; not even close. All versions of Bryce are 32 bit and so they are limited to using 3Gb of RAM on the Mac; windows users are normally limited to 2Gb without some workarounds to allow the same 3Gb limit. However Bryce 7 has code in it to compress saved files, but instead of implementing the code in the sensible way, as a pipelined task, the DAZ code compresses the data in memory. That means there has to be room in memory for the compressed version, some workspace and the uncompressed version. This severely limits the size of scene that you can build. In Bryce 5.01 almost all of the 3Gb of memory that it can use is available for your scene, and that means you can import a lot more meshes with UV mapped textures and not have to scale them down. I am hitting memory limits frequently that are much more severe than anything in Bryce 5.01 and it is annoying. The compression code needs to be removed or written properly, disk space is cheap and the ability of earlier versions of Bryce to use more memory is more use to me than saving some disk space.

    Ask David Brinnen, he will confirm the above.

    I know Bryce very very well as I have been using it since Bryce 3.1 was the latest and greatest version. If I post any statement about what Bryce versions can or cannot do you can rely on it.

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited December 1969

    Bryce 5 was always by fave version, and I still go back to it sometimes, but of course it doesn't have all the new goodies that are in Br6 or Br7.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    Bryce 7 cannot assemble scenes anywhere near as demanding on memory as those that can be assembled in Bryce 5.01; not even close. All versions of Bryce are 32 bit and so they are limited to using 3Gb of RAM on the Mac; windows users are normally limited to 2Gb without some workarounds to allow the same 3Gb limit. However Bryce 7 has code in it to compress saved files, but instead of implementing the code in the sensible way, as a pipelined task, the DAZ code compresses the data in memory. That means there has to be room in memory for the compressed version, some workspace and the uncompressed version. This severely limits the size of scene that you can build. In Bryce 5.01 almost all of the 3Gb of memory that it can use is available for your scene, and that means you can import a lot more meshes with UV mapped textures and not have to scale them down. I am hitting memory limits frequently that are much more severe than anything in Bryce 5.01 and it is annoying. The compression code needs to be removed or written properly, disk space is cheap and the ability of earlier versions of Bryce to use more memory is more use to me than saving some disk space.

    This is correct. File compression came with Bryce 6 and it was a bad move for precisely the reason you state. A 32-bit application is already severely limited in memory space to burden it with file compression/expansion. HD space is cheap and can be bought if needed. You cannot add memory to be used by a program that cannot use all of it.

    Therefore, Bryce up to 5.5 is more memory conscious than the later versions and thus can manage more elaborate scenes.

  • Fire AngelFire Angel Posts: 229
    edited December 1969

    Horo said:
    This is correct. File compression came with Bryce 6 and it was a bad move for precisely the reason you state. A 32-bit application is already severely limited in memory space to burden it with file compression/expansion. HD space is cheap and can be bought if needed. You cannot add memory to be used by a program that cannot use all of it.

    Therefore, Bryce up to 5.5 is more memory conscious than the later versions and thus can manage more elaborate scenes.

    Thank you! For me it has to be Bryce 5.01, Bryce 5.5 crashes too much. DAZ have done us a favour by continuing to develop Bryce but they have done us a serious disservice as well with their poor standard of debugging and poor decision making on that compression code.

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    Ask David Brinnen, he will confirm the above.

    Yup. I was and still am against this compression of the source files on saving. I can't access bugtracker right now, but come the time, that will be one of the many bugs that will be getting re-added. One of the many.

  • Fire AngelFire Angel Posts: 229
    edited August 2013

    chohole said:
    Bryce 5 was always by fave version, and I still go back to it sometimes, but of course it doesn't have all the new goodies that are in Br6 or Br7.

    Bryce 5 doesn't crash nearly as often either. The new goodies would be more use if they were properly debugged. I don't go near the instancing lab much because I don't like the insanely frequent crashes that it causes. It is potentially very useful, but in the current state I find it too frustrating to use. For me the most worthwhile improvements to Bryce that DAZ have implemented are the ability to use multiple processors when rendering and the volumetric clouds. Everything else I'd happily give up in order to return to the stability level and the memory efficiency of Bryce 5. As I wrote before, if I do start that greetings card business I'll be buying an old out of date Mac just so I can run Bryce 5.01 on Mac OS X Jaguar (10.3.9) because scene building in that version is so much less frustrating. It is possible to build a complex scene in Bryce 5.01 and then render it in Bryce 7 as long as you don't try to save it from Bryce 7. So I can use the advantages of Bryce 5 for scene building and memory use and get the multiple-processor rendering of Bryce 7 on my much faster quad-core Mac.

    I would still prefer it if DAZ removed the compression code so that I don't have to use Bryce 7 only for the simpler scenes I want to build.

    Post edited by Fire Angel on
  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited December 1969

    There IS a reason why I have all Bryce versions since 4 installed. Never replace a working piece of software.

    Though to be fair, it must be pointed out that DAZ 3D has given us a great many working options with Bryce 7.1. IBL is stable and probably the best implementation you can find on a 3D application. We've got Random replicate which works great. And a whole new Light Lab with true parallel light and dome lights, which were before rather tedious to construct. We got Anisotropy in the Mat Lab and Curvature filters in the DTE. True Ambience in the Render Options works a treat and the render results that can be obtained are awesome.

    Yes, there are some severe bugs that remained after development stopped. Again to be fair, there are bugs we only now discover, still figuring out options we've got and haven't realised until recently. fact is, such a piece of software ought to be constantly in development, but somebody has to pay for it.

  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,241
    edited December 1969

    I can't access bugtracker right now

    FYI, the old Mantis bug tracker is no longer accessible to us (although DAZ still has access and will still work on the bugs in it), so you will need to start using the new ZenDesk bug tracker in it's place in the future.
    (although since Bryce isn't in active development, I haven't bothered to report any of the bugs I've been seeing these days.)
  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    I can't access bugtracker right now

    FYI, the old Mantis bug tracker is no longer accessible to us (although DAZ still has access and will still work on the bugs in it), so you will need to start using the new ZenDesk bug tracker in it's place in the future.
    (although since Bryce isn't in active development, I haven't bothered to report any of the bugs I've been seeing these days.)

    New ZenDesk bugtracker? So where is that lurking then. I'll start filling it up. I hope the database search and filtering is as good as Mantis was. That was a very good system.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,069
    edited August 2013

    That's good news, Sean. I've noticed that Mantis is down and got quite vexed. I did report a bug perhaps 2 weeks ago. Hopefully, things haven't gone lost, it's the most important database DAZ 3D has got.

    EDIT TO ADD: I'll comment on that in private emails, David.

    Post edited by Horo on
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