It's easy to create images of intense complexity and beauty with Bryce, a landscape- and scenery-generating program for the Macintosh. Bryce works for a variety of media, including videos, games, posters, and magazine illustrations.
3-D graphics programs have made a lot of progress in power and features, but the key interface issue has been all but ignored. Bryce's interface is a work of art: it makes use of intuitive visual representation of operations and commands.
Bryce's scenes and moods vary enormously, from bright, vast horizons to dark, foggy alcoves. It's fun to play and experiment. However, Bryce is not limited to scenery generation. Primitives - basic three-dimensional shapes you can insert in your landscape and manipulate - allow for some very interesting surreal and abstract possibilities. A quick look at the sample images on the CD-ROM shows the wealth that Bryce offers for backgrounds and textures.
Nevertheless, with all the usability and high-res output, there are drawbacks. Because some of the commands and controls are slider-based rather than numeric, it's sometimes difficult to repeat an exact command twice. But the major problem is rendering time. Bryce is a slow renderer and even slower at anti-aliasing. You can get an idea of what your image will look like quickly, but to complete it could take hours. After the first pass, an estimated time for rendering is displayed. But the figure represents only naked rendering time; anti-aliasing can sometimes take two to three times longer. There are a few features that help: rendering and anti-aliasing can be stopped at any point and later resumed, so you don't have to tie up your machine for hours at a time. There's another handy feature that allows you to save unrendered scenes in a folder, then open, render, close, and save for as many images as you want. This way you can go on vacation and leave your Mac rendering the whole time.
None of this speeds up the rendering time, however. The good news is that a native Power PC version that renders four to five times faster should be ready by the time you read this.
Bryce for Mac: US$199. HSC Software Corp.: +1 (805) 566 6200, fax +1 (805) 566 6385.
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