Animation Bryce:

 

Why Bryce:

 

            When designing an animation, the first real task after you have ideas is to figure out what system(s) would be useful in creating your idea so others can share in images. The 2 ideas that came to my mind both centered around Battletech, the first being a lance (4 Mechs) marching along a street, and getting ambushed in the process. This idea would defiantly be full of large amount of movement and weapons fire creating a very entertaining animation short. But this would also require the motion of several Mechs, landscapes, explosions of Mechs and way beyond the abilities of a first time animator. The second idea and the one the ultimately got selected and expanded on was more of a military base with some flybys, and some movement of things, but more about making complex scene and looking around the scene. The space scene and the bombardment which I believe added a lot to the animation where thought of when the main scene’ where in development already.

 

            Before the animation idea was finalized, several systems where being looked at including Softimage, Bryce, 3d Studios, Blender and poser. Poser was the first to be chopped as it did not lend itself well to animating anything but human forms, even though the Mechs have a some what human look to them, it was not enough for poser to be a option. Blender for those that do not know is a open source animation program, so the price of free was a great plus in its case. The issue that I came across was a lack of material available to help me learn how to learn how the system works. 3d Studios was cut from the list because of its high costs and the fact it’s a large animation suite with a larger learning curve.

 

            Softimage and Bryce became the 2 finalists, with copies of both available to me, and large amount of tutorial material available online, both seamed like great solutions, and hinged on the style of animation. If the first idea won out, Softimage would have been the far better system, but with the final idea being a military base, Bryce was the obvious choice as it’s specifically designed to create landscapes in very high detail, and can import just about any other animation suites fields.

 

Learning Bryce:

 

Being a newbie to animations, it was clear I could not just jump into Bryce; I would have to read a book, or do some tutorials. After some extensive looking around online I found a relay good site http://www.robinwood.com which had a extensive tutorial section that took you from what everything is on the Bryce screen to animation, and complex lighting. I ended up taking about 2 days to do the majority of the tutorials skipping only a few often most advanced ones for lack of time and the fact the things they covered where not useful for my animation. I had spent some time playing around with Bryce before I actually started the tutorials, and had figured a lot of the functions out, but always found things seamed to be missing, and these tutorials where great at explaining where all the hidden features where. Bryce at first glance dose not looks that complex, but there are quite a large amount of different windows and setting to play around with. Below is one of the renderings of the finished product of one of the earlier tutorials.

 

 

 

Bryce Likes:

 

• Creating things like mountains, Trees, rocks, sky and train or any sort, this thing is absolutely amazing. The trees alone, you could set them up in just about any imaginable fashion, from style or bark, the type of leaves, branch thinness, even something as different as gravity on the tree.
• The controls that where not hidden where generally easy to handle. Things like sliders, and simple buttons for may features. One that comes to mind as relay good is how you set sun and moon position, basically imagine a ball with a picture of a moon on one side and a sun picture on the other. Role the ball to what ever position u want them to appear I, it’s literally that easy.
• The textures setup in Bryce was amazing beyond belief. It had a large store of built in textures which you could use, or modify (did a lot of modification of textures) you can import images to create your own.
• Lighting was one relay great thing Bryce excelled at in my opinion, considering it how easy it is to add light sources or many kinds to almost any picture and modify how the light works. I was able to add textures to a light source to come up with interesting effects.

 

 

 

Bryce Dislikes:

 

• Bryce was not the most difficult system to learn and deal with but there defiantly room for improvement. The first major issue would be how you move around in Bryce, specifically in 2d. Say for example if we decide to look from the right in an ortho fashion. You can not move up, down left or right, you are stuck right there. It basically keeps u centered around (0, 0, 0) even though there ode not seam to be much of a limit of where you can place objects. You would think that a program made to do scenery would make it easy to move around the scenery that is not close to (0, 0, 0).
• Lack of primitives was a disappointment, as you have only a few basic objects to make anything in Bryce.  You would expect at least some ability to draw a simple line that you would expect to have.
• Some items even when you knew where to find them, menus and such, still felt hidden, and tossed into the system. They are there but seam like they where added as afterthoughts
• The animation of objects could use some work, it was very difficult to make smooth flowing animations. I understand Bryce was not designed for animating objects like other programs, but if they add animation capabilities to it, make them at least easer to use.