Powerful, flexible landscape creator gets faster and easier
Ben Long
Reviews / 3-D Software
Rating: Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice)
IF YOU CAN'T GET AWAY for a vacation this year, you can still bore your guests with dramatic photos of faraway lands, thanks to the new version of Bryce, MetaTools' 3-D-landscape-creation application. Bryce 2 sports a new interface and useful new features.
Bryce 2's interface is surprisingly streamlined: In place of the original program's array of floating palettes, there's a single large tool bar you toggle to choose from three sets of tools -- for creating objects, editing them, and generating sky and fog effects. Users of other MetaTools products, such as Kai's Power Tools, won't be surprised to hear that Bryce's tool bars are not Mac-standard: Tool icons remain ghosted until you roll your cursor over them; then they "light up."
Scene Building
Starting a scene is as simple as selecting primitives from the Create tool bar. Bryce provides primitives for terrains (fractal-based mountainous shapes); infinite planes of ground, water, or clouds; and simple geometric solids, including cones, pyramids, blocks, and spheres. A new Rock primitive lets you easily create realistic boulders and rocks (although you don't have much control over their appearance).
Scene building is still performed in wire-frame mode, but the view has been greatly improved. Wire-frame meshes are now anti-aliased, for a smoother appearance, and Bryce provides helpful depth cues by displaying more-distant meshes in fainter shades.
One of the best additions to Bryce's modeling arsenal isn't even 3-D. The new PICT Object primitive lets you import 2-D PICT images for placement in scenes. Bryce now imports 3-D models in the DXF format, so you can place objects created in other programs in your scenes. Unfortunately, Bryce 2 does not provide DXF export.
Once placed in a scene, all objects can be rotated or scaled easily, and new tools make it easy to align objects' edges or centers along any axis and to scatter objects randomly in a scene.
Four new types of lights are provided, on the Create tool bar. Radial (point) lights, spotlights, square spotlights, and parallel lights all can be placed in your scene and scaled, rotated, and positioned like any other object.
Bryce has only one image window, which can make lighting and positioning objects somewhat tedious, compared to 3-D programs that let you view a scene in multiple perspective windows simultaneously. In most cases in Bryce, you have to position your object along one axis and then switch to another perspective to align the other axes.
World Building
Bryce 2's Terrain Editor may be the program's best new feature. If you have a PowerPC system, this editor lets you paint 2-D grayscale images in a window and see a continuous, updated thumbnail of the resulting extruded shape, as darker shades of gray are translated into higher elevations. In addition, the Terrain Editor provides a slew of controls for creating erosion, mounds, spikes, and other natural-terrain features.
Bryce 2's ray tracer renders subtle atmospheric effects and reflections beautifully, is noticeably faster than the one in the original, and competes favorably with other programs'.
The Bottom Line
MetaTools has greatly improved an already impressive product. Whether you actually need a high-quality landscape generator is probably questionable. But Bryce is fun to play with -- although at $299, it's a pricey toy. Professional users who need Bryce's power only occasionally may find that the nonstandard interface requires a frustrating reorientation at each use. But for users who want to fiddle and explore, there's a lot to play with.
Bryce 2, $299 (list). Company: MetaTools, Carpinteria, CA; 800-472-9025 or 805-566-6200; http://ww .metatools.com/. Reader Service: Circle #418.
Adding objects to a scene in MetaTools' Bryce 2 is as simple as dragging items from the tool bar to the image window.
