Not New, but Still Relevant... Reconciling Daz and Corel (legacy) scale in Bryce

Brycescaper

Quite a few years back I reluctantly switched from legacy scale to the current scale Daz uses when importing figures into Bryce versions 6+. A major flaw in Bryce is the upgrade from 5.5 to 6, i.e., when DAZ got a hold of it. It increased the size and scale of the imported figures by 1120%, where an object 8.4 Bryce units (BU) jumped to 100 BU. We'll refer to the different scales as 'Legacy' and 'Current'.There have been several issues in doing so. This has probably been kicked around for a decade since Daz acquired Corel's Bryce 5 software, and most probably have never used 'legacy' (pre-Daz Bryce 6) scaling, but in refining photorealistic scenes using all the proper elements correctly, the change in scale of which Daz/Poser/etc. figures and props must be re-examined.

One, it is far more difficult to navigate because of the scale of the figures. Obviously, a speedboat that was once 84 BU was more quickly navigated than an object now 1000 BU. Very irritating, as it just takes 20 seconds to navigate stem-to-stern. To rectify this, I re-installed Bryce 5.5 and work with scenes from there. Not a problem with objects/props, except with Gen 4+ figures. When I tried to scale Gen 4 figures from current scale to legacy within DAZ STUDIO there was a crack visible around the forehead of Victoria 4. I tried to import Gen 4 figures directly into Bryce 5.5 but textures were missing on both the hair and characters. Worse yet, everything below the waist was a geometric anomaly quite difficult to describe, angular and stretched out. This also happened with figures I imported from my library of legacy scale figures sent to Bryce and saved in the object library in Bryce 6+. Gen 4+ figures do not imprt into Bryce5.5. Nor can be downscaled to legacy scale because their geometry won't resize correctly. Generation 3 figures work and play well together originating in Daz1>Bryce 5.5, but they always have. But aside from navigation inconveniences and backwards incompatibility of newer figures, why does size matter in the first place??

The reason this is a big deal is that when resizing Bryce, you missed an important element... the environment. The mist and fog and other environmental elements such as haze, which made Legacy Bryce so realistic was not realistic in the upscaling of the objects. Now, I brought this up a few years ago, ( I even included a scene that was a resort motel and pool, and the image was looking from across the pool to the motel, and the legacy atmosphere gave the entire scene a bluish haze) and I was all but rudely informed they had answered this issue eight years ago, when Bryce 6 was released, and the solution was to turn off the atmosphere completely. Well, that won't fly because the natural haze is what gave legacy Bryce its realism. Try turning off the atmosphere and see what that does to the clouds in any scale. They take on a ridiculous watercolor appearance without the softening effects, and in many cases they revert to the original colors, such as dark blue and white. Its horrible. The atmospheric effects is what set Bryce apart from other 3D programs and by committing to a larger scale you've turned a 7.0 Victoria figure into an 85. That's like turning a 6 foot person into something around 85 feet tall, and at that scale 200 feet legacy scale from the far end of the pool to my poolside motel is 2,024, or almost a half mile!!
Even with HDRI, the softening effect of the horizon, say on a seascape, is gone and the horizon between sea and sky remains unrealistically sharp and clear. I aim for photorealistic scenes, and upsizing everything by 1120% has pretty much killed Bryce's realism.. I'd rather use Bryce skies because HDRI takes ten times as long to render with light simultaneously coming from around the sky dome. I've noticed also that the installed or stock skies are STILL legacy scale, nothing has been altered. I know DAZ is a model-creating company, rather than an artists tool, and updating Victoria to a higher number version each year (with few improvements-- I suspect the newer 'versions' are more marketing gimmicks rather than actual advances in technology) is more important than Bryce, but us faithful Bryce users are still out there. If you plan on releasing a Bryce 8, could you kindly resolve this atmospheric anomaly and dedicate yourself to update Bryce's atmosphere and clouds to an appropriate yet realistic scale? I notice most of the newer skies are sci-fi and not the 'natural' of years gone by. Is Daz surrendering Bryce to the interests of pursuing models and modelmaking with ever increasing (but little changed) revisions of the Victoria/Michael/Genesis figures?

I can live with awkwardly huge models. I love the HDRI feature though Bryce could probably be tweaked to be more responsive rendering HDRI lighted scenes. I believe Bryce to be in its time the most advanced entry-level 3D natural landscaping tools out there. I mean it has everything- not only a global light source (and moon!) but actual atmosphere, something 3D Studio Max can't do as well, if at all (I don't use it, I just import the models). Now if the navigation were quickened, the textures rescaled, and the atmosphere rescaled to realistically retain legacy reality at Daz scale, I'd be a happy camper. So, when is such a Bryce 8 being released?

Dave Savage

The atmosphere in Bryce 7 is more controllable than it has ever been.
Mist and haze can be controlled as to not only how thick the effect is, but also how far away from the camera it starts and it's clour casting can be altered in several ways to make it more or less noticeable.

If you are getting really really long render times using HDRI, you can try just using the HDRI simply as a backdrop adding realism to the sky while swtching it's lighting options off, thereby retaining the simplicity and faster render time of the Bryce sun (which you can now increase and decrease the brightness of making it much more useful).

Though usually when people get really really long render times from HDRI scenes it's usually because they are still using the basic legacy render option settings, when a different approach is required to get the best from the new features and setting up the lighting is a bit more involved because of the new options available.

I've never had a problem reducing figures and models once they are in Bryce, but I don't use Genesis. I rarely try and sort the scaling out first (with the exception of if I'm using Ivy Generator as it can save a bit of time messing round trying to get the leaves the right scale). Though the fact that figure models arriving without trans maps is a pain especially because I'm a Mac user and I can't simply import the trans map picture files without having to apply them to a block in Poser, then exporting the block as an .obj and importing it into Bryce so it automatically goes into the picture library, from where I can apply it to correct figure component... But it only has to be done once for each imported figure and then saved into the object presets and it's done.

I'm no massive fan of DAZ as a company and I don't use DAZ Studio at all, but they have improved Bryce more and added more useful features than anyone else who's owned it over the years (partly if not mostly down to the steering committee who are members here)... Sadly, there are no plans (at the moment) to release another version... And that sucks big time.

Rashad Carter

I can agree with this observation. but I also can see another way of looking at it.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know WHY Daz altered the scaling of V4 imports the way they did. I think the new owners just hated how small and insignificant an imported V4 appeared against that empty landscape. Not to draw an obvious parallel, but it seems they really wanted to make certain that the Daz figures became the prominent focus in Bryce renders when historically, human figures were rarely the focus of Bryce renders. The environment is all that mattered to us.

What we need is a scaling dialogue that allows us to import from DS to Bryce at whatever scale we decide, large or small, on a scene by scene basis. If you are animating, you don't have the option of downscaling your figure for each frame, so some sort of universal scaling control is essential.

Contrary to your experience, my experience with Bryce was that the default scaling in Bryce 5 was far too small. This is because I have always attempted scenes with a high degree of geometric complexity covering large areas. When scenes were built at small scaling, I would find even slight mouse movements were too coarse. I almost always had to scale things up several times.

Another issue is the decimal places. In Bryce 5 scaling was really small and numeric inputs were limited to only 2 decimal places. This made truly fine tuning impossible. Now at least we have three decimal places worth of accuracy which helps a ton.

I will also differ with you because I rarely found Bryce's skies in the 5.5 days to be all that realistic. For me it was the assumption that users would always work at such a small scale that was the problem. How far away is a foot, a mile, ten miles? Scaling in Bryce has always been arbitrary. That razor sharp horizon line is a Bryce render giveaway for sure.

It seems to me your primary issue is with the atmosphere not fitting your expectations. Believe it or not there are appropriate atmospheric settings for working at the new scale without any loss of atmospheric interaction. It just means relying less on presets and allowing yourself to try out new things. Here are a few suggestions.

1. The nasty horizon line:
Even when they are not enabled for visibility, The Cloud Height setting for the Cumulus layer is what determines how sharp the horizon gradient will be. My suggestion is to always use Maximum cloud height for Cumulus. Generally speaking, the higher the cloud height setting the better the clouds themselves look because the camera views the clouds at a more flattering angle. Being merely 2d impressions, when viewed more from "below" than from the "side" hides the 2d flatness much better.

2. Most likely you will need to completely rethink haze. As crazy as this will sound try the following.
Increase Density to 90.
Decrease Thickness to 1

These settings are completely the opposite of what you are accustomed to employing, but they actually work really well at V4 scaling. Basically, you are telling the field not to thicken at such short distances allowing you to feel comfortable working at these larger scales. Below is a link to a few images I made many years ago using settings just like the ones I suggested to you. The haze is thin in the foreground and thickens in the distance in a manner I consider to be convincing. I don't think having built the scene at a smaller scale would have helped in the haze department. But again, I have pretty much always worked at a scale much larger than the Bryce 5 default scaling.

http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/15019
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/15023
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/14995

You can also adjust the haze height. Basically, the haze controls in Bryce can do a lot more than the preset library can demonstrate, but it takes some trail and error to find the best settings at least it does in my experience.

But yeah, count me as plus 1 that we definitely need the option to import at scales smaller than the current one if we so desire.

Horo

@brycescaper - An HDRI has more than one application. If it is used for RNL (render with natural light) you need to use a high Quality setting with the long render time that goes with it, particularly if you use IBL shadow softness. If you use it only as bckdrop, you can turn HDRI Effect (actually diffuse for the embedded point light sources) to 0 and the render time is as short as if you wouln't use IBL at all. If you mix IBL with conventional lighting (sun, radials) to get the ambient light, you can turn off IBL shadows and even with a high quality setting the render time will increase only a bit, if at all. If the HDRI is used inside, the quality can stay at minimum because a higher setting won't make any difference; and if you use this mode for obscure light in a TA render, no shadows are needed and there is no discenible difference in render time for TA.

I usually don't use the bridge to get DAZ Studio (DS) or Poser objects into Bryce. I export as OBJ and import into Bryce. Bryce uses a "random" unit for size we call Bryce Units (BU). When I set up a scene, I define what a BU is. For an indoor, a BU is a decameter (10 cm approx. 4 inches), if I do a landscape, 1 m (about 1 yard) so a terrain tile at 4000.000 x 4000.000 is 4 km (roughly 2.5 mi) square. Haze depends on the size of the scene, if you keep the terraain tile at the default 81.92 x 81.92 BU, setting the haze is more difficult than if you set it to 1000 x 1000. From this follows that I scale every object according to the scene at hand and it doesn't matter at what size it comes into the scene. I either enlarge or shrink it.

As you can see in the post of TheSavage64 and Rashad Carter we agree in some parts and may have a bit different ideas on others. That's quite all right because there is always more than one way to accomplish what you have in mind. At least for me, the disagreements are the important bit because it makes me think over my strategies and chances are that I can learn something to improve.

Brycescaper

Excellent observations and suggestions all. I based my scale based on a 5'10" V3 figure being 8.4 BU tall when imported in original Legacy scale. I hadn't caught you can use HDRI skies as a backdrop only and not as a light source. Now that my atmosphere can be adjusted as suggested, I won't really need to rescale. Like I said, spinning and spinning and spinning a trackball just to move around a scene is annoying but I appreciate the advantages of the fine tuning available at larger scales. Problems solved :coolsmile: Have a great New Year everyone!! .

Horo

@brycescaper - glad we could help. Happy New Year to you, too. Just a note to HDRI as background:

Blend into background moves the HDRI farther away than the sky and the higher Transparency is set, the less you see from the HDRI and the clouds remain.

Blend with sky puts the HDRI nearer than the sky and Transparency controls how much of the atmosphere is mixed in.

Add to sky just adds sky and HDRI.

For all three options, you can use Use sky color, this adds the horizon, sky and sun glow colors. Whenever you change the mode (blend into background, blend with sky or add to sky), use sky color is deselected and must be set again. If the HDRI has too much contrast, enable Tone map.