Bryce...

[superjari]

Hi there!

 

Don't know if this is the right categorie to ask this, but I thought this was the best place...

 

Does anyone here ever use Bryce for architectural work? I heard that there was someone who always imported his 3D models into Bryce. Does anyone here have any experience with this?

[nisus]

Hi Superjari,

 

I don't have expirience with bryce (not after version 1.0) but I've read (at T&T) that many people use it to make nice skytextures.

Have you experienced it? What are your findings?

 

rgds

 

nisus

[superjari]

I've looked at it briefly and found that making skies and groundplanes goes very easy, havne't figured it really out yet how to apply textures to parts of buildings as Bryce has no layers...

[ingo]

Huh, i've done that long ago but as you mentioned the problem is complexity. When you have to many "layers" or too big projects Bryce quits easily. And i don't wanna talk about rendertimes...

And good skies are nowadays possible even in "normal" 3d software, you simply use procedural textures or simple plugins.

 

ingo

[Don McClure]

For good skies I can recommend Aurora -- its a Photoshop plugin that does skies and water with reflections. Its a 2D solution, but skies can work with Field of View so if you need a sky dome is simple. They are also procedural 3D skies so height of POV is not a problem.

 

WorldBuilder is a 3D package similar to Bryce. You can load Viz objects or AutoCAD objects, but the AutoCAD objects -- though I think Viz helps with texturing.

 

Both of these products are available through www.digi-element.com

[Scott Baumberger]

Hi, I wish I had noticed this thread sooner - I hope you're still interested. I have done a lot of architectural rendering work with Bryce, and I've gotten some good results. I actually wrote an article for 3dArtist magazine last summer about this topic - if you can still find issue #47 (their last issue), it spells out this process step by step.

 

A lot of my work is non-photorealistic, so I can really exaggerate the sky & atmospheric effects in Bryce to easily to get the desired effect.

 

I've also used Vue d'Esprit in the same way, and I think it actually gives better results most of the time. For simple models though, Bryce is still fine.

 

In terms of using layers in Bryce - you can the "families" feature to organize the model. If you import a 3DS file, all objects on the same layer come in as a single object in Bryce and Vue - so I create my models with layer = material.

 

Vue has a more 3dStudio-like interface, complete with layers - so this may be more familar to most users.

 

The rendering time can be nutty, and Bryce & Vue don't offer GI / radiosity, etc. but for certain projects they can give very good results, and I think they are pretty easy to set up.

 

I hope that's helpful - if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them. Maya, Lightwave, etc have their place, but for $200 Bryce & Vue d'Esprit offer a great value imo.