Bryce 3D: Making 'Trapper Keeper Art' on Windows 95
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Date: 2023-02-17
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Comments and reviews: 15
Jbus
This kind of rendering has very little in common with modern real time video game ray tracing. The biggest difference is real time ray tracing doesn't bother figuring out every ray, it just does a couple and uses tensor matrices to figure out the likely result of the next ray and so on. Its short cutting the process but I'm not criticising it.
Video game graphics are all about cheating to achieve whatever you can as efficiently as you can. Full scene ray tracing like how Bryce 3D (and Poser) managed it is still a heavy load on modern CPU and GPU's unless the scene is fairly simple.
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This kind of rendering has very little in common with modern real time video game ray tracing. The biggest difference is real time ray tracing doesn't bother figuring out every ray, it just does a couple and uses tensor matrices to figure out the likely result of the next ray and so on. Its short cutting the process but I'm not criticising it.
Video game graphics are all about cheating to achieve whatever you can as efficiently as you can. Full scene ray tracing like how Bryce 3D (and Poser) managed it is still a heavy load on modern CPU and GPU's unless the scene is fairly simple.
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Renzsu
Ohh Bryce 3D as a kid was just so much fun. Endless crazy snowy mountain landscapes that somehow arose from the tropical oceans: ) Bryce and the Kai Powertools stuff for Photoshop was just everywhere back then. I moved on to Corel Draw 3D and soon after that 3D Studio 4 (and Max from that onwards. It got me into 3D art and eventually 3D CAD and industrial design. These days I mostly use Solidworks and Blender (and a little bit of Rhino still. I bet Bryce got many people started in their 3D careers.
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Ohh Bryce 3D as a kid was just so much fun. Endless crazy snowy mountain landscapes that somehow arose from the tropical oceans: ) Bryce and the Kai Powertools stuff for Photoshop was just everywhere back then. I moved on to Corel Draw 3D and soon after that 3D Studio 4 (and Max from that onwards. It got me into 3D art and eventually 3D CAD and industrial design. These days I mostly use Solidworks and Blender (and a little bit of Rhino still. I bet Bryce got many people started in their 3D careers.
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Richard
Duuuude! I downloaded the entire MetaCreations software set even on dialup (yes, that took a very, very long time) I loved Bryce, PovRay and there was one other that allowed you to 3D models and apply very high resolution (for it's time) textures. I made a simple box of the software from high quality photos and it looked real since the textures were photos and not hand drawn. I never got much farther than some simple experimentation but I loved these tools in the 90s.
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Duuuude! I downloaded the entire MetaCreations software set even on dialup (yes, that took a very, very long time) I loved Bryce, PovRay and there was one other that allowed you to 3D models and apply very high resolution (for it's time) textures. I made a simple box of the software from high quality photos and it looked real since the textures were photos and not hand drawn. I never got much farther than some simple experimentation but I loved these tools in the 90s.
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miniG
A guess as to why it still takes so long on a fast computer, it's because it has to run in chunks so the progress can be visible to the viewer and the computer doesn't freeze for the duration of the processing. And because the computer was slow, for every small chunk of data, the duration was hard-coded to be a fixed number. There are techniques to make it scale to all kinds of speed, but I guess this software didn't use them, this was ahead of its time anyway.
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A guess as to why it still takes so long on a fast computer, it's because it has to run in chunks so the progress can be visible to the viewer and the computer doesn't freeze for the duration of the processing. And because the computer was slow, for every small chunk of data, the duration was hard-coded to be a fixed number. There are techniques to make it scale to all kinds of speed, but I guess this software didn't use them, this was ahead of its time anyway.
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bradley163
Oh, Bryce 3D. I haven't heard that name in a very long time. My uncle, who happened to be the district manager for Circuit City, had this installed on his desktop PC, and I would spend most of the summer toiling away on this nifty little piece of software. I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread at the time, too. No worries, no stress, just this, some Sunkist orange soda, a two pack of Ressee's, and my wild imagination.
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Oh, Bryce 3D. I haven't heard that name in a very long time. My uncle, who happened to be the district manager for Circuit City, had this installed on his desktop PC, and I would spend most of the summer toiling away on this nifty little piece of software. I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread at the time, too. No worries, no stress, just this, some Sunkist orange soda, a two pack of Ressee's, and my wild imagination.
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Carson
My Trapper Keeper was just green, with the logo and a beige line about a half-inch inside the outline of each panel.
Year later, I think I got Bryce free with Kai s, or the other way around, in the late- 80s, for Amiga, I think. I know I got one of the two free with something, but just waking up.
I had no idea they revived the Trapper Keeper, in the 90s, though. Oh, that Mead!
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My Trapper Keeper was just green, with the logo and a beige line about a half-inch inside the outline of each panel.
Year later, I think I got Bryce free with Kai s, or the other way around, in the late- 80s, for Amiga, I think. I know I got one of the two free with something, but just waking up.
I had no idea they revived the Trapper Keeper, in the 90s, though. Oh, that Mead!
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hsinn3r
I remember using the shareware version on PC. The UI working only on 640x480 was a weird choice, but I guess it makes sense, as it wouldn't scale properly, and also would increase the render times significantly.
I think I used print-screen to export my renders, as the demo had a watermark, and of course no save functionality. Good times
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I remember using the shareware version on PC. The UI working only on 640x480 was a weird choice, but I guess it makes sense, as it wouldn't scale properly, and also would increase the render times significantly.
I think I used print-screen to export my renders, as the demo had a watermark, and of course no save functionality. Good times
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Lawrence
Oh man! I loved Bryce 3D, it was probably my first foray into 3D graphics. So good for environmental art (with the exception of making caves) until Vue came out, and now of course any major 3D modelling software does it extremely well. The interface was so intuitive too, so much better than anything since.
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Oh man! I loved Bryce 3D, it was probably my first foray into 3D graphics. So good for environmental art (with the exception of making caves) until Vue came out, and now of course any major 3D modelling software does it extremely well. The interface was so intuitive too, so much better than anything since.
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Andy
Oh, man. I used to code the heck out of POV-Ray back in the day. Unlike Bryce 3D, it was script-based. On a 286 40MHz PC, renders took _hours_. It's kind of unfortunate that those old programs couldn't take advantage of multiple cores (not that we had them anyway, since ray tracing is embarrassingly parallel.
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Oh, man. I used to code the heck out of POV-Ray back in the day. Unlike Bryce 3D, it was script-based. On a 286 40MHz PC, renders took _hours_. It's kind of unfortunate that those old programs couldn't take advantage of multiple cores (not that we had them anyway, since ray tracing is embarrassingly parallel.
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rrr99gp
My uncle used to use Lightwave on the Amiga 4000 he owned. He used to make some pretty awesome designs. Insanely intelligent man, sadly a serious stroke robbed him of his talents.
Still have fond memories watching him as a kid making all these wireframe models and seeing them come to life.
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My uncle used to use Lightwave on the Amiga 4000 he owned. He used to make some pretty awesome designs. Insanely intelligent man, sadly a serious stroke robbed him of his talents.
Still have fond memories watching him as a kid making all these wireframe models and seeing them come to life.
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Ben
Flashbacks to my computer graphics course where we wrote a CPU (single threaded) path-tracer, and I had a bug with my monte-carlo section that made it far slower than it should have been. My final render took 12 hours and then I messed something up so I needed to do it again.
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Flashbacks to my computer graphics course where we wrote a CPU (single threaded) path-tracer, and I had a bug with my monte-carlo section that made it far slower than it should have been. My final render took 12 hours and then I messed something up so I needed to do it again.
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Otaking
And yet modern 3D rendering software seems incapable of recreating that Silicon Graphics look and feel, which is a shame, because I'd love for someone to recreate all of the sprites and backgrounds from the Donkey Kong Country games without any of that SNES compression.
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And yet modern 3D rendering software seems incapable of recreating that Silicon Graphics look and feel, which is a shame, because I'd love for someone to recreate all of the sprites and backgrounds from the Donkey Kong Country games without any of that SNES compression.
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Tactical
I downloaded Bryce, blender, 3d studio max, and all sorts of other 3d stuff that I cant remember off the time of my head and used them all as an 11 yo
I don't know anyone in the 90s that paid for this stuff.
I had your same PC case back then too.
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I downloaded Bryce, blender, 3d studio max, and all sorts of other 3d stuff that I cant remember off the time of my head and used them all as an 11 yo
I don't know anyone in the 90s that paid for this stuff.
I had your same PC case back then too.
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Alexander
Good old Kai Krause. Good times back then.
And while his user interfaces were seen as very innovative, he is a die-hard creative guy, and using numbers to create art is seen as uncreative, so nearly no numerical inputs.
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Good old Kai Krause. Good times back then.
And while his user interfaces were seen as very innovative, he is a die-hard creative guy, and using numbers to create art is seen as uncreative, so nearly no numerical inputs.
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Franken
In the 70's - 80's Trapper Keepers were all Airbrush, Guasch and Watercolors (also Photography. Oh, and Bryce was very crashey and for me as much as I wanted to, could never find a use for it, maybe the occasional landscape.
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In the 70's - 80's Trapper Keepers were all Airbrush, Guasch and Watercolors (also Photography. Oh, and Bryce was very crashey and for me as much as I wanted to, could never find a use for it, maybe the occasional landscape.
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