June 2014 Video Tutorial - Creating 3D Semi-Transparent Cubes in Xara

[Gare]

somewhere, rotting away on a backup drive, i have a copy of bryce2, if you remember that
i used it once and hated its ui so much i never used it again

Bryce has been under the stewardship of several companies and I consider it Orphanware, unlike the fate of Poser when MetaCreations blew themselves up after a spending spree.

Bryce's companion programs under HSC Software, grew into holding of Fractal Design Painter, Carrera (which is the cheapest, most intuitive of 3D commercial software, KPT plug-ins, and a few more baubles. Corel snapped up KPT filters after the newly named MetaCreations, and DAZ took up the remainder. DAZ was originally called Zygote and contributed a lot of accessories and poses and stuff designed from Poser, but they has a severe disagreement which lead to DAZ creating their own environment, their own figures which are completely incomparable with Poser clothes and poses, and back to why Bryce sucks.

It was originally engineered by Eric Wenger (with help from Ed Muscgrave —now developing MojoWorld), and Benoit Mandelbrot. The funny thing is that Vue (d-Esprprit) kicks the daylights out of Bryce, from rendering time to breatakingly photorealistic clouds. It's prices in terms of features, from $100 to a thousand U.S. I think; here's the ironic part: Nicholas Phelps, living in France as well as Wagner, who lived only miles from one another, had no realization that the other was working on a terrain generator.

Bryce has stumbled and fallen itno the Poor Man's Vue, probably because the brilliant developers have moved on to more personal and lucrative things. Bryce feels as though the new versions are created by someone's 10 year old nephew at DAZ.

If you want a good start to 3D modeling, Blender is open source and free, you can do positively amazing things with it including fluid simulations,



but the learning curve is just as steep as a commercial modeling/animation program.

I'd suggest Art of Illusion a pretty straightforward modeling program that requires a little time to get on board, but the results can be seen like this:



The scene is a little "dark" for my sensibilities, but the thing does support ray-tracing, and produce acceptable, photorealistic scenes with a pretty straightforward UI.

MtyBest,

Gary