A short history of Bryce
S Ray
Posts: 399
In the late '80's Eric Wenger saw a presentation by Ken Musgrave "Doc Mojo" at a SIGGRAPH. Wenger then went on and made his own little program for making landscapes based on Musgrave's thesis. Kai Krause joined in and put an interface onto Wenger's program and that's how Bryce 1 came about in 1994 . The company's name was MetaTools. MetaTools went on to release Bryce 2 in 1996. In 1997 Bryce 3 was released by MetaCreation, they also released Bryce 4 in 1999. In 2000 Bryce was purchased by Corel Corporation. Corel released version 5 of Bryce in 2001. In 2004, the software was sold to DAZ who released Bryce 5.5 in 2005 (Anybody who owned Corel's version 5 got this release for free). DAZ has gone on to released Bryce 6 in 2006 and Bryce 6.3 in late 2009. Then Bryce 7 in mid 2010. Not sure when Bryce 7.1 ( current version) came out, cause I fell of the planet from 2011 till 2015.
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You forgot to add that Bryce 2.0 was also ported to the Windows platform, although the first stable version, 2.1, was not released until 1997.
Yea back then almost all graphic programs we're Mac only…where today many don't support Mac anymore.
I was a tester from Bryce 6 on. I've been a little disappointed that DAZ3D seems to have essentially abandoned development; there are glitches that we pointed out in the last round that have never been addressed, especially with the Materials Lab and Texture Source Editor, and in general it seems very crash prone. I wish they'd pick it up again.
Bryce should be upgraded. I am angry with DAZ for abandoning Bryce customers.
Metatools should have NEVER gone public and become MetaCreations. That was the first in a long line of mistakes. I believe this caused them to become star-struck by Wall Street, resulting in a distracted and discombobulated corporate mission. They lost all vision of excellence and victory in UI development, software development, and customer satisfaction. They should have worked harder to keep Bryce (and Poser, which they also had in their stable at that time) on the cutting edge.
And then MetaCreations should have NEVER sold to Corel. Kai Krause bought a castle in Germany, and then basically dropped out of sight. So the world had to make do with "blog entries" from him. I'm sorry, but in the absence of actual cutting edge software releases, that's just not enough. We were left high and dry and waiting to see what he might come up with next (and being answered with silence and blog entries that (to me) seemed to have little more than a vague air of self-importance).
The upshot is that innovation and quality in UI design basically stopped for years and didn't really become a "thing" again until Apple and Android devices started making waves.
Also, selling to Corel was the start of a long chain of abandonment. Corel's version was crash-prone and they made up for it by killing Bryce Chat. Innovation basically stopped at that point. Yes, I count Bryce 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x as part of the chain of abandonment, because nobody it seems, has any desire to fix the current known bugs, improve network rendering, or make it easier to bridge or import objects between Bryce and other, more mainstream products. And nobody seems to give a damn about the not-so-difficult job of at least making Bryce 64 bit compliant.
64 bit does take labor to accomplish, but it's not like we're asking for a neurosurgeon's skilled hands here. There are tools to make this happen!
I love Bryce and I want it to be upgraded. But I refuse to use and support it in this sad state because I think that would provide even more incentive for DAZ to keep ignoring Bryce and Bryce users.
DAZ, I know you have the ability to do the right thing here. I wish you would hear my voice and the voices of hundreds/thousands of others who would gladly pay for a well-designed 64-bit Bryce Version 8.
IMO Metacreation got out of the low end graphic software industry while ahead of the game, selling Poser, Ray Dream Studio ( now Carrara ), Bryce and KTP before the dot com bubble burst that put many software companies into bankruptcies. All they kept was metastream which is now a plug-in used in smart phones. If they had not sold theses apps when they did, they would most likely be dead and gone now.
Didn't really start this tread to beat the old when are we going to get an upgrade dead horse.
Even though Bryce hasn't had an update for 6 1/2 years, it is still breathing ( on the win OS ). Just the fact that it can still be purchased means it still has life. I have an ACIS Geometric Modeler and a Mesh/Sub-D Modeler that are still my go to Modeling software, but have been off the market for 15 years.
Many?
I wonder if a kickstarter would help. Could daz be pursuaded to bring about bryce 8 with a 100,000 dollar offering?
It might be enough to pay a single good programmer for one year. Perhaps two good programmers for half a year. Not enough money to buy the time needed to fully implement, test, troubleshoot, repair.... in my view. $300K might be the least amount to start with for one full year. $200K for programming, and another $100K for promotion of the new version of the software. Once the development end date is set, new feature development ends no matter how far along that given new feature may be. That's why some things are broken. And worse, for some reason with Bryce, every new feature that is implemented seems to break an old feature or two in unpredictable ways. They might implement a change to the Skylab, not realizing that it has caused the Noise function in the DTE to become inactive. Imagine the poor beta tester trying to figure out why his textures don't look right anymore thus submitting a bug report, and it is up to a programmer to figure out which new feature broke this old one. So time consuming and seriously frustrating.
All of this assuming you don't have to pay anyone for the beta testing phases. Often Daz consigns community memebers for this purpose, so I think some amount of money could be saved there. If not, if a few dedicated beta testers needed to be paid on top of the programmers and promotional details...then it becomes even more expensive.
Bryce 8 needs two things that would alone improve Bryce's standing considerably. First is 64 bit support, which according to rumors I've heard, could take a couple of good programmers multiple months to accomplish. Not to mention testing each and every feature of every single lab to ensure eveything still works. And this doesn't even include implementation of new features.
Next is a major update to the Render Engine. Once Bryce's code has been rewritten in new modern languages, a lot of rendering speed optimizations become possible. Even in CPU rendering, Bryce could be made much faster. And once the new code is implemented, applying plug-ins for 3rd party applications like Octane will be feasbile. No sense re-inventing the wheel in terms of rendering. No need to ask for a native unbiased render engine when we can just ask for a plug-in that is already robust and well supported. Octane, Lux, Cycles, and lastly but not least; Iray.
All considered, I think it would take upwards of $400K to do the process justice. Selling at $20 a copy, returning on the investment could take 10 more years. Seeking to charge more than that, Bryce needs to have the power to justify the cost. Admittedly, I paid $350 for my first copy of Bryce 5 so many years ago. By todays standards that would easily be $500.00. But no one who is well in the head would consider paying that much for Bryce right now. Remember, Blender is FREE
It isn't enough to simply keep up, Bryce must innovate. Bryce needs features that can be found nowhere else, while still providing the practical tools found in other applications. So if Vue, Terragen, Modo, all have Instancing technology, then for Bryce to be competitive it too must have that feature. But Instanicng can only go but so far without 64 bit support. So Bryce needs to catch up to the other applications in that regard.
Then on top of that Bryce needs at least a few things that ONLY BRYCE can do that people will want. For example, the ability to bake Bryce procedurals directly onto a model. What about a really advanced plant modeling suite, like Plant Factory is for Vue? You cannot get Plant Factory without Vue. And Plant Factory probably is the best Plant modeler in existence currently.
Cutting edge technology takes a lot of programming resources. That is why higher end applications get updated so often, because the revenue produced from sales helps to fund development and bug fixing all year long. It funds innovation.
It seems unreasonable to expect any development on Bryce if it cannot produce a financial return on that investment. So in that regard...it might already be too late.
But Daz has given us hope in the past. Bryce 7 development came out of nowhere, with a situation not much better than the current one. And Daz made the substancial investment. And in my opinion, the developent cycle for Bryce 7 was probably the most productive in the application's recent history. Once released, I was suprised by how many people rejected the new features of Bryce 7 that Daz had worked so hard to implement. Many swore not to upgrade from Bryce 5 or Bryce 6 seemingly out of spite of some sort. It made me very sad and worried that with a reception like that after so much effort, there really was no pay-off for Daz3d. We should have embraced the new version, showing Daz how serious we were at the time. People were upset that the feature they wanted werent implemtned, but the feautres that were implmented such as instancing were more important than some of the other things. The Light Lab alone seemed to throw a lot of epople, which annoyed me personally because Bryce 7's lighting far exceeds anything available in Bryce 5. Just my opinion.
Daz3d deciding to develop Bryce 8 is still our best hope. But there is little to nothing we can do to encourage that action, Daz will only do it if it seems feasible, the decision isn't emotionally rooted for them at all. It doesnt matter how much we few love it. Numbers are what seem to really matter most of the time.
I still have hope in Daz3d. Go Daz!!
I remember when DAZ said that Bryce 8 would be coming out soon and then nothing else was ever said about it. I often wonder how far Bryce 8 had gotten before work was halted; had they just started, is it half way done, or is it 90 percent done just sitting on a shelf somewhere. I guess I’ll never know.
The Dev cycle ended when Bryce_7.1.0.109 was released. They will need to restart the dev cycle if they are to work on any further upgrades. I have to admit I do not recall DAZ 3D talking about Bryce 8 and a possible release date.
I do remember it. It could have been when Hexagon 2.5 came out, maybe 2008 just before the change in management. They said Hexagon 3 and Bryce 8 would be coming out soon. They gave a list of Bryce 8 improvements, the two I remember were the ability to edit vertices, and the ability to repose rigged models imported from Daz Studio, after that it was never mentioned again. Maybe Bryce 8 was just a proposal, but if it were coming soon you would think that they would have worked on it. So I waited a long time for it to come out, and it never showed up. But after all it’s just me musing about what might have been.
But Bryce 7 wasn't released till 2010 Daz acquired Bryce in 2004, in 2005 they released Br 5.5 which gave the Bridge between the two apps. The release of Bryce 6 was in 2006. In 2009 Daz released Daz Studio 3, which seemed to break the bridge until they then released Br 6.3 and as I said Bryce 7 was released in 2010.
I said maybe 2008. Hexagon 2.5 came out in the summer of 2009, the tread would have been sometime after that (perhaps a year). It was a long time ago, it’s hard to remember exactly. Sorry you don’t believe me.
What I said was that I did not recall any talk of Bryce 8 from Daz 3d, I have used Bryce since Bryce 2 (About 20 years) have been the Bryce dedicated Mod since some time in 2012, and before that I was the Brycentric member of the Daz Community Volunteer team. I remember posting stuff in the old forum, having passed it through Daz_Staff, to make sure it was OK to be posted. There were several dedicated threads in the old forum, with all sorts of ideas for Bryce 8, but they were not Official threads, and no one from Daz posted to them, although certain members of the then DAZ_Staff were pleased to see the discussion that was taking place and the friendly manner in which it was being done.
I at one point I began a mock-up for an updated GUI for a potential Bryce 8. I posted it in a few places and the timing seems about right for Greycat's recollection. But it was an independent thing, nothing sanctioned by Daz3d. I haven't worked on it since then.
Here's an interesting read about Bryce Talk during the transition from Metacreations to Corel...http://2020hindsight.blogs.com/2020/2000/05/my_take_on_bryc.html
Maybe I’m not making it clear; this was a discussion about Hexagon and Hexagon’s future and not something that was in the Bryce forum. This was sometime soon after Hexagon 2.5 came out. I believe it came from DAZ in saying that Hexagon 2.5 was just a placeholder until Hexagon 3 came out and oh by the way Bryce 8 is in the future also. They listed all the things that would be in Hexagon 3 and all the things that would be in Bryce 8. Soon after DAZ management changed and Hexagon 3 and Bryce 8 were never mentioned again. I remembered it well because I wanted what was in Bryce 8; I waited for years for it to come out. I have no way of proving this discussion ever existed, and it’s unlikely Hexagon 3 or Bryce 8 will ever come out so. I didn’t make this up, it is what I remember from nearly a decade ago.
Rashad, I find your economic assessment above to be just about the best, most well-thought out analysis.
For the US, your numbers might be just about right for contract labor and maybe somewhat low for employee labor (you almost have to "times 2" to account for built-in health care, retirement, compliance, paperwork/reglations, and then of course the minor infrastructure items such as a desk/office, free-flowing caffeine, and so forth), considering the cost of good programming skills here in the US. If a US hiring company has fewer than 50 people, then the cost of health care, which is required by the US government, would end up being borne by the employee. This would likely make the salary (after benefits) thousands of dollars under the going market, which would make it harder to get qualified, experienced candidates skilled in modern programming languages and techniques.
I think DAZ could still make it work, but probably has zero budgeting and even less marketing desire to do so. A disappointment, for sure.
Until an upgrade announcement is made, I will continue to use more modern software with more modern available features and rendering engines. Bryce, Hexagon, and of course Truespace; truly are among the last-gasp vestiges of the 1990's.
The issue is always money but it is not the most important one. Bryce 6.0/6.1 was not programmed by US programmers, neither was 6.3/7.0/7.1. A dollar in other countries buys more - or less - than in the US. Therefore the final costs depend on in which country the programmers work.
A more important issue is the focus of the company. It may well be that Bryce and Carrara do not belong to the core business anymore, neither Hexagon. It is vain to speculate why these programs are not sold to a company that would continue developing them.
64 bit support is mandatory and it was attempted for 7.0 but it turned out to take much longer than anticipated, mainly because of all the Axiom code, and the idea was abandoned. Apart from that, Bryce is programmed in C++ which is considered a modern programming language that almost everybody uses. Compressing the scene before writing it to disk introduced with 6.0 was a bad move because compressing/decompressing is done in memory. It is faster than incremental save/load but in the memory limited environment of a 32 bit application it is not a clever idea. Disk space is cheap and easily extendable by the user, so where is the benefit of compression?
Bryce has two different native render engines and both of them honour the materials. Adding support for other render engines also means to adapt the materials. This can be a very laborious undertaking for the user, as tests with Octane showed. There is big talk about physical correct render engines. This only tells that the renderer honours the materials correctly. There are metallic and dielectric materials in this world and if you set some properties of a dielectric (or non-metallic) material that only a metallic one can have, the result of your render will never be physically correct - but may look as the artist wanted it to look.
Speed is always a source of complaints, no matter what program you use, everybody complains. Raytracing calculations need time. The problem here is rather overkill. A user does not know what options in what quality setting are actually needed to get the desired result. Maybe some programs have their default settings less generously set than others and are therefore faster, or machines with different hardware are used, or scenes that cannot be compared. We do remember that some 7.0 beta versions could use up to 16 CPU cores of the processor but this was halved to 8 for memory considerations.
There was indeed some unofficial talk about Hex 3 and Bryce 8 in some possible future in the old forums. If I remember correctly, also some Daz staff posted but never as employees, just as fellow Bryce enthusiasts, not as official company voice. It is unfortunate that the old forums were deleted and the Mantis bug tracker abandoned. Great sources of information for Studio, Hex, Carrara and Bryce lost for good (or rather for bad).
If/when development for Bryce is resumed, bug tracking and testing will be essential. As it is, Bryce has so many options that I doubt there is anybody out there knowing everything profoundly. There are definitely many Bryce users that have in-depth knowledge of one or several aspects of Bryce. People with such qualifications must be found to form a group of volunteers that scrutinise the working of the parts they are "experts" for after each new alpha and beta version. Unfortunately it often happens that when one bug was fixed, two new ones pop up elsewhere. When one option was added and works flawlessly, another part got broken. The bug tracking process is much more time consuming than the programming work. I'm certain there will be volunteers that take over this heavy workload for free. This would be the "thank you" for keeping up developing of Bryce.
S Ray - do you remember AuntieAlias?
Horo - I remember how helpful she was in Bryce Talk ( I think the link I posted is her blog ) I didn't participate very much in Bryce Talk. I observed more, like I do here. I never read Real World Bryce 2 or 4 either. If not for Calyxa's Bryce Camp Group pic. http://calyxa.com/pearl/bc/groupshot.jpg I would have never put the face to the name.
Look at the bottom strip, where the select groups by colour icon is: they're in Bryce 4 coloursthere. I reported it in the B5 beta cycle and that colour clash has never been corrected...
For anyone interested, here's a Bryce animation done by the creator of Bryce Eric Wenger
https://youtu.be/zX_Hw65m7dY
Thanks for sharing history of Bryce, I really enjoy working with Carrara, Hexagon, Bryce and DAZ 3D for fun and hobby. There is a lot to learn and explore.
It seems like that I am not alone here; we all are expecting some sort of upgrades for Bryce, Carrara and Hexagon.
I started with Bryce 3 shortly after it came out and am still using bryce now going on 70 after Thanksgiving this year, 2017. I remember when MetaCreations developed streaming video and that is when the apples started to rot in the barrel. Kai was fired not long after that and Corel bought Bryce. They made some useful improvements such as the tree lab. I definately remember Daz saying they had big plans for Bryce but it is they who became starstruck with the need for more wealth and consequently dropped further development on bryce to consentrate on gaming. Also I find that a lot of materials in Bryce 5 somehow did not find their way forward into 7. As a result of this I find myself making forays back into vers. 5 to find and use the mats which were developed by some of the original Carpenteria gang who knew what they were doing! As to the current time had it not been for the awesome mats from Horo I probably would have gone back to solitare.
Does anybody know what the price was of Bryce when it first came out? I am just curious.
heck, can anyone remember the price of anything they bought more than 20 years ago?
Bryce 5.5 was 5 cents short of $120 back in 2006 but that would probably have been an upgrade price.
Bryce 6 was just under $100
Bryce 7 pro was just under $200 as upgrade price.
I cannot remember what I paid for Bryce 2, 3 or 4, indeed not even Bryce 5. They were all physical copies and of course not bought at Daz.
Bryce 2 on the Mac was launched at a list price of $299 in 1996. I have a vague recollection of paying two hundred and something pounds when the Windows version came out in the UK, in 1997 I think.
One of these days I'll get around to learning the program...
Some minor corrections: the first version of Bryce (KPT Bryce 1.0) was released by HSC Software Corp., not MetaTools. (I have a vague memory that 'HS' stood for 'Harvard Square', can't remember what the 'C' was for). The initial version, Bryce 1.0, ran only on Macintosh computers with Motorola 68K chips inside. The next version, called Bryce 1.0.1, also ran on the new Macs based on the PowerPC chip. HSC then turned into MetaTools, Inc. in time for the Bryce 2 launch. The correct name of the third version was actually Bryce 3D, and MetaTools had become MetaCreations Corp. (note the 's'). Bryce 4, as you say, was also released by MetaCreations. (This is based on the README files for each
When MetaCreations Corp. blew up, Corel acquired not just Bryce but I think also the products in the Kai's Power Tools line. Bryce 5 is referred to as 'Corel Bryce 5' in the release notes. After it moved to DAZ and the 6.0 release, DAZ also released a Bryce 6.1 between 6.0 and 6.3 (presumably there may have been a 6.2 as well, but I don't seem to have it in my archives).
With regard to Kai Krause, my recollection is that the 'castle in Germany' was gifted to him or at least partially funded by the German government, as part of a project to create 'centers of excellence' for technologists, artists etc. I don't know what he's doing now. Eric Wenger, on the other hand, is still making software: he has a Bryce-like product called ArtMatic (split into ArtMatic Designer, which seems to be a general visual synthesis program, and ArtMatic Voyager, which turns Designer into Bryce on steroids), and a sound synthesis program called MetaSynth. Ken "Doc Mojo" Musgrave, a former student of Benoit Mandelbrot (and the programmer behind many of Mandelbrot's famous fractal images), joined MetaCreations to work on Bryce. He later started his own company called Pandromeda and put out a Bryce-like landscape generator called MojoWorld. MojoWorld went through 3 versions before Pandromeda went out of business. The learning curve for MojoWorld was kind of hellish, but it could produce spectacular results. The Mac version was always fairly sluggish, and will no longer work on recent Macs/Mac OS's. The Windows version, however, was pretty good and still runs on Windows 10 (I run Mojoworld 3 Pro on a Windows 10 VM under Parallels on my MacBook Pro, and it works very well indeed. I think it's single-threaded, though, so it can't take advantage of all the cores).
I was told by someone who worked for MetaCreations that the implosion of the company was a giant clusterf*ck. The company was originally a group of technologists who didn't really know how to run a business, so they took venture capital (not bad in itself) and were then forced to take on a bunch of managers to turn the company into a profitable business. The people who called the shots reportedly never really understood what the products were or how people used them. My understanding is that it was already difficult to keep maintaining Bryce -- there was a lot of very obscure code there, written using development environments that were getting harder to support, by people who'd left the company. They therefore started to give more emphasis to a new product called Carrara, which would be built in-house, and which had its roots in an earlier 3D modeller called Ray Dream Designer. (I can't remember if Antoine Clappier, the Carrara lead, had been on the Ray Dream team; I think he had, but it doesn't matter). The aim was for Carrara to offer an alternative to the aging Bryce and also to support MetaCreations in their planned pivot towards the 3D-on-the-web space.
Then the money ran out. The 'suits' called everyone into the company meeting room, and told them that half the workforce was being fired (I was told two-thirds, but documents online say half). They also sent faxes to their French and German subsidiaries saying "You're all laid off. Clear your desks and go home." The French and German subsidiaries sent back faxes that said "We don't think so. Read up on European labor law."
So the first nasty shock for MetaCreations was that they had to pay a chunk of money to the French and German employees by way of severance. The second was that they discovered they'd fired the Carrara team, and Carrara was still unfinished (I think there may have been a first version by then, but it wasn't really usable). Carrara, remember, was supposed to be the tool that would let them build models for the new 3D web that they all thought was going to happen. So they went back to Clappier's team and said "Uh, we're sorry we fired you, could you like, come back and finish this software, pretty please?" And the Carrara developers said "We're consultants now, bitch, and it's going to cost you." (Not their exact words).
MetaCreations did their pivot and became Viewpoint, offering a browser plugin to display 3D models on the web. It was not a huge success, because 'please download this plugin to see this content' was pretty much the curse of the early web and many people didn't see the need to install yet more software just so they could see a computer model of a running shoe rotated in 3D. Some time later, Viewpoint turned into Enliven Marketing Technologies Corporation (headed by Gary Lauer, who was the CEO of MetaCreations when it blew up, stepped down as CEO at the time and then somehow rejoined Viewpoint). Carrara never sold very well, and Clappier's team were eventually able to set up their own company under the name Eovia, buy it back from Viewpoint for a song, and start releasing their own versions. It still wasn't a runaway success, so DAZ bought it from them -- again, I think, in the hope that it could eventually replace Bryce and they wouldn't have to maintain Bryce any more. Unfortunately, Carrara, although about a generation 'younger' than Bryce, is also a challenge to maintain, so development has languished. But that's another thread.
I think that's how it goes. My 'inside view' of the end of MetaCreations is based on something told to me many years ago by someone who worked for their French branch, so it may not be 100% accurate (my memory or theirs may both be at fault). But I think that's roughly what happened.
Wow, that's a lot of knowledge of the history. Wish we had some knowledge on Bryce's future!
Wow, this thread brings me way back...I still had hair then.
Rashad Carter: I totally agree with you on many points, especially the criticism that Daz3D received in regards to Bryce 7's release. Personally, I think Daz3D did more than I ever thought possible with Bryce 6.5 & 7.1. That being said, some of the layout decisions that were made should be revisited, for example, the Brushes in the Terrain & Lattice Editor should have Rock & Terrains Alpha brushes already installed (ZBrush/Mudbox-like); the default brushes have no relevance to terrain or rock design. Another addition that Daz3D made was the Tree Lab (as it was very much needed); the issue is that it takes a tree wizard and lots of time in order to make good looking trees.
If there are any upcoming updates to Bryce, 64-Bit would be a great start, even if that's all they can offer its users. I'm not sure how Daz3D would feel if they would let us do a Bryce 8 "Go Fund me" development page; some software companies ask for donations.