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KPT Bryce
"The first Bryce Image I saw amazed and confused me . . . ."
by Dustin Taylor
Brycian, Bryce-like, KPT Inspired, fractal terrains. These catch phrases and many others like them have germinated in our culture to describe the awesome output of KPTBryce. A new sub-set of language is needed to describe the complex and amazing images you can produce with this 3D modeling and ray tracing render software.
The first Bryce Image I saw amazed and confused me; how did they do that? And what kind of graffix genius do you have to be to even approach the visions I see before me? For those of you who have not seen a Bryce Image I have included one that I myself (a competent computer graphic artist but certainly no genius) rendered just this past weekend.
I bet you're suitably amazed,a jaw-on-the-floor-drool-stains-on-the-shirt level of awestruck.
So you'd like to know if you can get into this too, do some of your own images, so you don't have to steal this one right off the screen (I saw you reaching for those "command", "shift" and "3" keys -- Mac screen capture command for those PC users out there). Well my advice to you is: buy the software. It's under $200 Canadian which is about 10 bucks to you Yanks, well maybe about $149.00 American or so, quite inexpensive for what you get.
The second good reason to buy this software is that it's easy to use. Bryce's innovative Interface is so amazing its almost entertaining. It will disintegrate any pre-conceptions you might have about the difficulty attached with 3D modeling and rendering.
You pro's out there are probably saying: "this is probably just a toy, what level of quality will I get from this?" How does 2000 lines of perfectly anti-aliased image sound? So well anti-aliased that a Bryce image looks near photographic at resolutions as low as 100 dpi in print where scanned images start to look jagged.
Now that you're sold on this software here's the down side: A 3000 line Bryce image would take approximately a week to render on a Quadra 650, so you might want to take a little vacation. The Power PC version KPTBryce 1.1, which shipped recently speeds this up considerably. If you do get into trouble with this unconventional and unMac-like Interface the manual will be of little help. Their version of a tutorial is the "whirlwind tour" which will leave you more confused than you started and your hair out of place.
My final observation here is a personal concern. Bryce images often lack originality and individualism. In a way, the program can seem more like a clip art disk with millions of subtle variations of the images available. It takes quite a bit of practice to produce unique images with this software. My solution to this has been to use it as an element of a finished image, adding other images and using other software to make the image my own when it is finished.
KPT stands for Kai Power Tools which is another great piece of Graffix software that can augment your digital images. Kai Krause is the man behind these products; watch for this name, because he often has his hands in some of the neatest stuff within the Mac realm. I had a chance to meet Kai at MacWorld San Francisco in January of 1995 at several seminars he gave there. Thank you to Kai and the team from HSC for such a wonderful piece of software (Bryce). I eagerly await the next version with animation fly through ability.
