Bryce, for those of you who are ignorant of such things, is a fantastic, incredible, utterly wonderful 3D rendering program that has amassed quite a cult following since its introduction several years ago. The brainchild of French artist / musician / mathematician Eric Wenger and computer graphics wizard Kai Krause, Bryce is an application that literally lets users create entire worlds using only their mouse and their imagination. You can create planets, build castles, or sculpt entire mountains from the ground up. You can place rivers and lakes, shroud them in carefully crafted layers of fog or ice, and design immense reflective spaceships to hover over them. You can animate your creations as well, or convert them into 3D panoramas to be viewed on the web. Bryce's revolutionary interface and wide library of presets have made it possible for anyone and everyone to become an impressive 3D artist - and you can do it all for less than the price of a DVD player.
For those of you who are familiar with Bryce and have been anticipating the new version as eagerly as I have, version 4 has all sorts of interesting new features that are certain to keep even the most savvy of experts busy.
What sort of features, you ask? Where do I begin? First of all, you can export meshes - yes, export meshes! - to just about any sort of file format you could want, including the most popular .DXF, .OBJ, and .WRL (VRML) formats as well as Ray Dream, InfiniD, and other proprietary MetaCreations formats. You can export texture maps to, and a fully-textured preview window allows you to examine your mesh in real time before exportation. The import options have been expanded too; you can even import USGS satellite map data for an unprecedented level of realism in your landscapes.
And that's not all. A new Sky Lab gives you ultimate control over the look and feel of your sky, with several new features such as spherical clouds and sun / cloud shading. All of the sky properties are animatable, so you can create sunsets, storms... you might say that the sky's the limit.
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