MetaCreations Bryce 2.0: 3-D Landscaping Los Angeles CA

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Originally published at Internet.com

You can't help but notice how ingenious Bryce 2 is after using it for only a few minutes. The sleek, beautifully rendered interface, the way the icons pulse slightly after the cursor has been over them for a few seconds, the anti-aliased object wireframes - they are all products of a well-designed and carefully thought out program. Programs costing well over a thousand dollars more don't have the same flexibility and ease-of-use that Bryce 2 features. What's this? A 3-D modeling and rendering program...easy?! That's right. I have used 3D Studio, Fractal Design Ray Dream Studio, Caligari TrueSpace, and several other programs - but none compare to Bryce 2. There's a reason, of course. Bryce 2 is specifically designed for creating beautiful landscapes and virtual worlds. 3D Studio, Ray Dream Studio, and others may be more adept at just pure modeling of 3D objects, but Bryce 2 is in its own field for being the best program available for creating 3D ray-traced landscapes.

The Interface

The interface of Bryce 2 is unlike any I've ever seen - and certainly unlike anything I've seen in a 3D modeling program. Most 3D modeling programs have interfaces that are dry and confusing, or else just plain weird (like Caligari's TrueSpace) - but Bryce sports an interface that anyone could use, graphic wizard or no. The anti-aliased wire-frames and background paper texture may not seem like much at first, but if try using another 3D program for a while, you'll wonder why you ever settled for anything less. One of Bryce's most winning features is that it packs an amazing amount of tools into such a small screen space. Bryce's interface seems light and airy, even with a 640x480 screen size - and the reason is that Bryce put its tools in palettes, all but one of which you can hide at any time to save screen space. At the top of the Bryce workspace is the Create, Edit, and Sky&Fog palettes; of which only one is displayed at a time (the Create Palette is selected in the above screen shot). Only the Control Palette, which you can see is on the left of the workspace, is displayed at all times, because this may be one of the most important palettes in all of Bryce. The Display Palette, Zoom/Pan Controls, Display Selector, and Selection Palette are normally hidden along the bottom and right edges of the workspace (they all are visible in the screen shot above), for you wouldn't be using them much during the course of your scene creation. When you do need them, all you have to do is move the mouse cursor over where one of the palettes would be, and they pop right up for you to use. When you don't need them anymore just move the cursor away, and, after a few seconds, they'll fade right out of existence. And, of course, Bryce has a menu bar, which is normally out of view. Just move the mouse to the top of the screen, and the Bryce title bar and menu bar will pop up, giving you access to commands such as New, Open, Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Duplicate, and others. Next: The Basics

When you first run Bryce 2, you are presented with a new world. There are no hills or trees to start out with - just a blue sky and a gray ground plane. Bryce worlds are built starting out with infinite planes, i. e., the ground is a visible square in your wireframe viewport, but it stretches on to the horizon in the actual rendering (or the Nano-preview - more on that later). Of course, you can have more than one infinite plane (such as a cloud plane or a water plane). With an ocean scene, you would probably just change the ground plane to have a water texture, but for a clear mountain river, you would probably create a water plane right above the ground plane (so you could have a river-bed). The sky is not considered an infinite plane (because it's part of the virtual environment), but you can create a cloud plane if you want low-lying clouds. If you want to start out with some rolling hills, just create a new terrain object (which is highly visible on the Create palette). Terrain objects are created each time using random fractal noise, so you'll never get the same terrain twice. You'll no doubt want to edit your terrain, however, since the terrain Bryce generates is usually spiky and rocky. The easiest way to edit your terrain is to click on the E button next to the selected terrain, and bingo! The powerful and fun Terrain Editor will appear on your screen. The Terrain Editor is definitely one of the most incredible features of Bryce. It uses the standard method of creating 3D terrains - a grayscale height map - but with a twist. It includes tons of powerful effects specially designed for editing landscapes. And, since you can edit the height map directly using any number of specially designed brush effects, creating realistic terrains is as easy as creating sand mounds at the beach! If you want to decorate your terrain objects with trees and plants, never fear. Bryce includes many pre-built objects to put in your scene, such as trees and plants - as well as hills, mountains, pedestals, boolean objects, and others. Next: Materials and Manipulating Objects

So you've created all these hills and mountains. Now what? You have to edit your environment. This includes the atmosphere (sky, sun position, fog, haze, cloud cover, etc.) and, of course, the objects in your scene itself. The atmosphere is controlled by the Sky&Fog palette - however, since Bryce 2 includes a large amount of sky presets, you may never need to adjust this. However, the scene objects are up to you. The first step is assigning materials to your terrains and ground planes. As I said before, Bryce is designed to create 3D landscapes, therefore it excels in the area of landscaping capabilities. It features a wealth of landscape materials, ranging from plain, desert, hill, and mountain materials, as well as over twenty different water types. However, Bryce also has many of the usual 3D modeling materials, such as glasses, woods, metals, and more.

Manipulating Objects

Of course, there is more to landscapes than just terrains. Bryce 2 includes several primitive objects, such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, pyramids, and toruses. However, Bryce has several modified versions of those primitives that can come in quite handy, including eggs, discs, bricks, towers, and others. Unfortunately, these primitives won't let you create more than a few simple shapes - unless you could group them together with boolean properties (e. g., moving a negative object into a positive object would create a new shape with a cut-out of the negative object). And following in the footsteps of its other features, Bryce does indeed have those features - which makes Bryce's reliance on other programs for sophisticated 3D object modeling even less. And, better yet, if the textures of the negative and positive objects are different, the cut-out part of the positive objects inherit the negative objects' textures! Now that is certainly impressive.

Instead of hard to use virtual trackball tools - or manipulation using many different camera angles - terrains, planes, objects, and lights are all easily manipulated using the Edit Palette. The Edit Palette includes ridiculously simple tools such as Resize, Rotate, Reposition, Align, and Randomize - all of which are 3D interactive tools. Just click on one of the highlighted sections of the tools, and drag to the left or right, and the object will perform the selected action as you drag one way or the other. All of the tools can be customized with their related pop-up menus, which can be accessed by clicking on the arrows below them. Next: The Control Palette