The Interface

Old Bryce 4 Interface

New Bryce 5 Interface

My initial impression was that the interface was basically the same as Bryce 4. Some of the tool icons were modified, such as giving the camera, and edit controls a metalic look, but basically everything is in the same place, and works the same way as version 4. Naturally there are some additional new icons to cover the new functionality as the Tree Lab and MetaBalls, which I'll cover next.

The Tree Lab is a great new feature of Bryce 5, providing the tools for the creation of limitless variety of organic tree, and shrub objects. There are over 60 pre-defned tree and foliage types to choose from, such as Douglas Fir, Aspen, Apple, Bamboo, Weeping Willow etc. This will give you the overall shape of the tree, and leaves. From there you have slider controls to further refine, and customize the tree. You can adjust the branch distribution, randomness, number of segments, branch and trunk thickness, number of leaves, and even the effects of gravity on the branches. The tree lab also connects to the Materials editor allowing you to change the material settings for the leaves, and bark.

The Sky Lab provides controls for refining whatever type of atmosphere you desire. Skies are not simply backdrop images, but an infinite volumetric 3D environment which interacts realistically with the other objects in your world. Changing the suns color, and intensity, and direction will light up the clouds and your terrain. Adjusting the amount of haze and fog in the atmosphere provides the ability to recreate realistic distant views of mountain tops, or a thick toxic alien atmposhere.

The Terrain Editor in Bryce allows you to design a customized terrain object. You create the terrain by painting onto the terrain canvas with an adjustable brush. The terrain brush is adjustable for size, hardness, flow, and elevation. In addition there are selectable brush behaviours of elevation, errosion, paint, unpaint, and others. Bryce also provides a wealth of elevation editting tools which act globally on the entire terrain object. Dragging your mouse over these tools such as Raise, Lower, Smooth, Sharpen, Errode, Spikes, Mounds, etc. adjusts the intensity of the effect. A real time 3D preview window provides instant feedback of what your terrain object will look like as you adjust it. One really cool feature of the terrain editor is the animation controls. Bryce allows full keyframe animations of all changes to your terrain, allowing you to do some cool morphs such as an animation of the effects of time and errosion on a mountain.

The Material Editor provides a complete interface for controlling a limitless number of shaders for both solid, and volumetric objects. The Materials Grid provides the main interface for adjusting, mixing, and matching your materials. The grid is organized into 3 channel groups - The Color, Value, and Optics (or volume group if working on a volumetric object). On the right is the texture component windows which display in real-time a preview of what your current texture looks like. It also provides access to the texture editting tools, such as the Deep Texture editor which allows you to combine up to 3 texture sources into a combined one. It takes some playing around to get the look you are after. Playing in the material editor seemed more like random experimentation rather than science to get an effective texture, however it is quite fun to see the wild texture possibilities you can come up with. There are naturally tons of built in procedural textures which you can use without even needing to dig into the materials editor - or as a starting point to further refine the terrain, or object texture.

MetaBalls is a new modeling feature in Corel 5. Metaballs placed in proximity to each other exhibit a sticky attraction, similiar to liquids. MetaBalls allows you to create some unique objects, and animation effects such as flowing water, or perhaps bubbling lava.

In conclusion: Corel has provided us with some great improvements in this version. Bryce 5 should appeal to both novice artists looking for a easy learning curve into 3D scene generation, as well as for more seasoned 3D animators that are looking for realist backdrops for their characters and objects to inhabit. Two thumbs up!