Corel Bryce 5
Corel Bryce 5
| By Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club October 2001 With this super program from Corel, you can create breathtakingly realistic 3D landscapes and animations. Bryce 5 allows you to strike an optimum balance between power and ease of use, and this innovative software is an ideal way to integrate 3D technology into the creative process. Smooth Network Rendering as well as new Light and Tree Labs let you open whole new worlds of creativity. Create dazzling environments with Bryce 5, a highly specialized application that focuses on letting you create realistic landscapes. Incredibly powerful and easy to use, it lets you add natural-looking mountains, bodies of water, skies and fog to your images. Whether you are designing for print, multimedia, video or the Web, Bryce 5 will open new worlds of creativity. New Features With new Network Rendering, you can save time by rendering images on multiple computers (clients) over a network, speeding up the rendering process to maximize productivity. This method of image rendering is based on render farming, in which a pool of computers work to render a single image. These network-rendering capabilities support a mix of Macs and PCs to process images and animations more quickly. This feature splits 3-D images into 100-pixel tiles, each of which can then be processed independently on client Mac or Windows systems. As a result, a rendering task that would take several days on an individual machine can be reduced to a few hours via this render farming. You can also maximize Bryce 5 Network Rendering using Tile Rendering. With Tile Rendering, you can render tiled portions of the same image over a network, so that several computers are rendering different tiles of the same image. Now, with Bryce 5, you’ll be spending less time rendering and more time creating! The new Enhanced User Interface is unlike any other and lets users take advantage of handy palettes to create and edit objects, design scenes and render final images quickly – a great way for new users to learn Bryce! Bryce 5 now also contains a new Tree Lab, where you can create and edit trees to incorporate into your landscapes. The Tree Lab looks and functions very much like the Sky Lab featured in Bryce 4, so that you can easily familiarize yourself with it. In the Tree Lab, you can specify the type, branch density, leaf density, coloration, and other details. The unique and distinctive trees created in the new Tree Lab have a realistic 3D look, incorporating a high level of detail and even generating their own roots. A new Light Lab in Bryce 5 allows you to edit the effects of light in your creations. Using the Light Lab, you can control the direction, intensity, and tint of lights on objects and in landscapes, thus assuring a more accurate production of real-world environments. As well, many of the features from previous versions of Bryce have been incorporated into the Light Lab, where they are now easily accessible from one location. The new Metaballs is a powerful modeling technology that will simply and quickly allow you to create stunning organic shapes. By keeping the number of polygons low, it also saves you rendering time and increases productivity. With large monitors becoming more common, vast enhancements to the Terrain Editor include floating panels and fully scalable 2D Terrain Canvas and 3D previews, enabling you to take full advantage of your screen’s real estate. The improved look and feel will not only enhance your user experience, it will simplify and improve the design process. The Clipping Control and the Gradient Control in the Terrain Editor give you greater precision in creating terrains. When creating animated landscapes in Bryce 5, the Terrain Editor also features a Timeline which helps control the progression and timing of your animation. Always an integral element of Bryce, with Bryce 5, new Presets help to speed up and simplify the creative process. Vast collections including terrains, waters, skies, rocks, clouds and fog enable users to quickly explore a virtually infinite number of textures and landscapes. Quickly and easily create animation for use on the Web. Generate thumbnails to view quickly or preview frame-by-frame in a storyboard format. Make HTML image maps of your scenes with Web URLs embedded in specific objects and create virtual tours using QuickTime VR. The Sky Lab lets you control (from one control panel) the appearance and attributes of sky effects, including clouds, smog, sun, moon, comet, starfield and halo effects. Additional high quality rendering options include Soft Shadows, Blurred Reflections, Blurred Transmissions (frosted glass), True Ambient Lighting and Depth of Field, as well as new Optimizations designed to speed up architectural scenes. These options will help you achieve a whole new level of realism with your Bryce scenes. When Corel released Bryce 5, the first major upgrade to the program since Corel purchased it, along with other graphics applications, from MetaCreations in April 2000, they first entered the Mac OS X arena. Bryce 5 also features interface enhancements that make it much easier to simulate various landscape elements. Bryce 5.0 is designed to take advantage of the Velocity Engine, the vector-based graphics subsystem built into the PowerPC G4 processor that forms the centerpiece of high-end Macs. The software is tuned for Mac OS X's Carbon APIs, but Bryce features its own distinctive interface, instead of the Aqua GUI of Mac OS X. Look to Corel for more exciting news as the company plans to introduce a range of design
tools native to Mac OS X as well as Mac OS X versions of the forthcoming
Corel Painter 7.0, CorelDRAW 10 for Macintosh, Corel KnockOut 2.0, and KPT
7.0. |