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The improvement over Bryce 2 was astronomical. Whereas Bryce 2 was probably
the most unstable program I had ever used Bryce 4 was probably the most stable.
I can not emphasize enough the value of a very stable program when doing
anything creative. It is easy to create something that is nearly impossible to
do again, then to lose it in the wink of an eye to a program crash. Not only
should you save often but save incrementally. It is easy to discover that way
back you made a simple mistake and now your whole model is skewed. If you could
only go back to a version before that mistake it might be easier than trying to
fix the mistake much later in the process. I always save versions as 01, 02 and
so on. There is nothing more depressing than saving over your working file and
having a program crash during the save process. Often this results in not only
losing your current work but losing the already saved file that you thought was
safe. But since you were overwriting it when the crash happened it has already
been mangled.
Bryce 4 gave me one of the most positive and pleasant 3D graphics experiences
I have had to date. At the time it was being sold and supported by Metacreations
who later divested itself of all of its retail software. When that happened the
included online forum called BryceTalk was shut down but until then it was a
wealth of information as well as a deep well into which I started to throw way
too much of my time. Bryce talk was a dedicated chat room accessible from
directly inside Bryce and only accessible from Bryce users. It had a pretty
interface and would run happily in the background while you modeled in Bryce.
When a new message came you could have it ping on the speaker and you could
assign each different person to a different text color so you could follow
comments by users whose work or advice you respected or admired. On the plus
side this meant you could get nearly instant help with any problem you
encountered. You could see examples of other users work in progress and
query them on how they had done it. There were even sessions with the
programmers where they would share little known tricks and features and take
input on future upgrades or bug fixes. On the down side it was a real time chat
room so you could easily spend all evening just reading and typing. Most users
would switch to the BryceTalk window when they were rendering then switch it to
the background when they were ready to continue work. But I had so much to learn
and these people were such a wealth of information that I spent more time
reading and less time working. When BryceTalk was shut down it was probably a
blessing for me. But before then learned quite a bit including some other
programs that I had not known about. Chief among these was Hash Animation Master
and Caligari trueSpace.
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