Bryce 5.0 free! Bryce 5.5 for $20! Woohoo!

Hey, everyone. Sorry about the long post.

I am a member of a site called 'ArtZone'. a kind of MySpace for 3D artists, animators, etc. This is actually the place I found the character artists, modelers and texturers for the game I'm working on now. They also sell 3D models and I am trying to get my friend to offer low poly models that will work for games. I think it's a good match for Unity.
Anyway, the site is owned by a company called Daz (who bought Carrara and Bryce) and they are trying to make inroads on Maya, Lightwave, 3DS. etc. so they are offering Bryce 5.0 for free and then upgrade to Bryce 5.5 for $19.99 if you become a member of the site. You sign up for free (like Myspace), pay $119 for the download and then they give you $100 voucher for the upgrade to 5.5. I have no affiliation to them, BTW. This is just a good deal.


Bryce itself is not a great modeling app.for characters but it makes terrific terrains and trees, and gorgeous terrain renders for cut scenes and such. I use Carrara for modeling and I am going to try to get them to support .fbx so we can use their animations in Unity as well, but I will have to get David H. or one of the other Unity Gods to hammer it out with them about that. Carrara is really cheap and pretty powerful although the interface is a little odd at first.

Copy and paste this link and get busy! Woohoo! Free commercial software! ;-)

http://artzone.daz3d.com/index.php

 

OK, I got mine. One correction, though. They don't send you a voucher, they just apply $100 to your payment so you only pay $20.

Very cool. I love Bryce. Enjoy.

 

Just to be clear--this is not for Intel-based Macs, right? Not a Universal Binary?

So on recent machines it will be running under Rosetta, at a performance penalty?

(And according to MacInTouch, 5.0 doesn't run at all on Intel Macs, but 5.5 does--with Rosetta.)

 

Not sure about that, although I know they are offering both Mac and PC versions.
Check out daz3d.com for the specifics, though.

I don't have an Intel Mac so I didn't even think about it. Good call. They also said that 6.0 will only be available through them- maybe that's their universal version if this one isn't.

Mark

 

What can you actually get with the 100$ coupon?

 

You don't actually get a $100 coupon for other stuff, you get a $120 program for $20. The coupon is applied to the price of Bryce when you check out. You can also get Bryce 5.0 for free (I think).

REMEMBER: This is strategy for them to add to the Artzone community, so you have to become a member of Artzone for this to apply. It's free and once you are a member you don't have to do anything else, but I'm a member and I found some good working contacts for my own project.

I just downloaded it and it's working fine. They have another program called Daz Studio that's also free (that's a rendering tool with a link to their store). It asks if you want to install that program as well when you install Bryce, but that's it.

Like I said, I am trying to get them to offer low poly content for games as well as the animation stuff they already do, so it could benefit everyone in the end. At least that's why I brought it up to my friend there. he emailed David and they will talk about it.

Mark

 

A bit more info: Daz Studio wouldn't work on my iMac Intel Duo and from what I learned on their forums, I'm not the only one with this problem.

There was a "chat" with the big wigs at Daz this morning on the Carrara IRC. Didn't learn anything more than I already knew, except the future doesn't look very bright for Hexagon. No UB and no SDK. Daz says they'll fix the existing bugs, but no commitment on when they'll be done. They basically said that they were "dissappointed in the state" of Hexagon when they bought it, and if you read between the lines it sounds like they're gonna just let it die. I'm guessing that whatever technology exists in Hex that they feel is worthwhile will probably eventually end up being put into Carrara. Carrara 6 is currently in Beta, but no upgrades for Hex are planned.

To anyone whose thinking about getting Hex for a Mac, I'd suggest you consider Modo or Silo instead.

 

Carrara pro 5 already has most if not all the Hexagon tools in it so I think you may be right. Still, Carrara Pro is still pretty cheap considering that it animates, models and textures. It's a little odd to use someimes, but it has been since it was first released.

If they will someohow make the animation compatible with Unity, it would be really useful. Until then, it's just a modeler. I do like the terrain generator, though.

 

Follow-up: Bryce won't work on ANY Mac, Intel or otherwise, if you have TIger:

"NOTE: Bryce 5.0 does not run under Mac OS X Tiger (Mac OS 10.4 and above)."

 

FWIW, people are reporting that it's more compatible than it claims. I'm downloading now.

And there seems to be no ArtZone membership required for the free download (but probably for the cheap upgrade):
http://www.daz3d.com/program/bryce/bryce5free.php

EDIT: I got it, but it won't run. I think they're serious about no Tiger compatibility

 

Actually Morgan, I runb Tiger and I have had no problems at all. Let me know if it works for you.
Great for terrains and probably even sklyboxes....

 

I have found I can run Bryce, but try opening importing exporting and it seizes.When u use force quit , it doesnt even say "not responding"
Hey so macupuncture, u got it up and running? using osx or classic?
AC

 

10.4.7.

Actually I went ahead and spent $20 to get 5.5 with (I think) a built in upgrade path to 6.

$20 for bryce 5.5 is, for me a great deal. Just to generate terrains and cut scenes if for nothing else, you know?

 

Full details on Bryce 5.0/5.5

http://artzone.daz3d.com/index.php

A Limited Time Special
In addition to being part of the hottest online art community anywhere, ArtZone members with active profiles set up before September 6, 2006, will receive a coupon to upgrade to Bryce 5.5 for only $19.95 - a $100 savings!
Here's how it works.

Create an account here at ArtZone and complete your profile.
Then log into DAZ3D.com using your same ArtZone email and password.
Add the ArtZone Promotional Bryce 5.5 to your cart and check out.
If you've completed your ArtZone profile a coupon will be automatically applied to your purchase reducing the cost to $19.95.

And as if you needed one more reason to jump into Bryce now, the upgrade to DAZ Bryce 6.0 will only be available to owners of Bryce 5.0 and Bryce 5.5. Owners of older versions of Bryce will not be eligible.

 

I had the same problem with exporting - its basically that the file save dialogue is not showing up. Pressing Enter (NOT return) worked for me and made it save the mesh to my home dir.

Is it just me, or has Bryce development effectively stopped? I don't see any really cool features since something like 3 years ago.

There's also something that peeves me off. When you make an app and an OS upgrade suddenly makes save not work anymore, that is a BUG and should be fixed. People should not be forced to pay $20 for making their app usable again. There are limits to what you can support and for how long time, but save dialogs? Come on.

 

As i already said on other forums:

The model is to throw a buggy v5 on the market, make the update cheap and offer some further content. Ready is the bait to go for 5.5. Get users registered to your services and send them further offers over the time. It seems to pay out for them.

Anyone remembering Hexagon2 and all the bugs?

If you can afford it go for vue as this one is in development by a serious company.

 

I believe 5.5 works in Tiger, but 5.0 doesn't--although I too found the Enter key helped me get a little further! (And Return DID work for me--it made the serial # dialog appear when it had previously been invisible.)

Anyway, $20 isn't bad, but if it leaves me with Rosetta and an uncertain future, it's not worth it to me.

 

It crashed on me at first, but now it works, sort of. Aside from the dialog issue, it does not play well with OS X...Exposé fragments it into individual panes (which then cease to function), can't show the dock while running. It does work fine in Classic, but frankly I'm not sure it does anything for me that I need.

--Eric

 

I agree. I had put Bryce down for a long time simply because it had gotten kind of odd (and a little buggy) , but since I don't really use it for anything other than terrains, I decided that $20 is not so bad for a very usable, if a little narrow, tool.

From what it says on the site, though, there is 6.0 in the works so maybe they will expand it more then.

Now if I could figure out an easy way to export the procedural textures as texture maps Unity can eat ( I am still learning about texturing so I amy be missing something), then I would be really happy.

I used a tutorial by boxy to create a good skybox with Vue, I should try the same technigue with Bryce and see how it goes. I LOVE Skyboxes. ;-)

 

It's workable, I believe, by using Expose to make the dialog visible.

 

Works like a charm for me. And came in handy when I wanted to make a 3D Island for a logo. n_n

 

seems hit and miss as best I can tell. expozay and other methods dont cut it
AC