A hope and request: Bryce 7 on a MAC (Yosemite)
Marshian
Posts: 1,460
I've been exploring options to get Bryce running on my MAC (now with Yosemite) and it needs to be easier for me than anything I've found, explored (and failed) or read about. I've looked into and tested many similar programs. Blender and the new Photoshop seem the closest for working with height maps.
Wine (is not an emulator) seemed very hopeful and I got it to work with limited functionality but it quit and now I can't get past the Bryce serial number dialogue.
The crashing really seems to be related to Bryce taking over the whole screen with all the floating panels and viewports. When Wine and Bryce were working I was able to drag these different parts (prim and terrain generators for example) to multiple desktops using Mission Control/Hot Corners and Bryce responded kindly giving me a little more time before it crashed. Also I found some functionality in the main render area and the crashing happened when clicking on a menu in the terrain editor.
If the update for Bryce could point towards running in it's own window like most other apps (that don't go full screen) I think we'd be on to something.
I'm willing to throw in some money to get this program up and running again, what will it cost?
Could we take up a collection?
Who invented it and what are they doing now?
I soooooo miss this program- and as a PA this crashing has put my product production way behind.
I'll find my happy way through it, just thought I'd throw some ideas out and see where this goes.
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Originally started by Ken Musgrave who then teamed up with Eric Wenger. Kai Krause joined in later to further expand the idea and design a basic user interface.
Bryce 1 shipped in 1994 as a Mac only program. Bryce 2 arrived in 1996, although the first stable windows version didn't ship till 1997.
MetaCreations sold of all their software to concentrate on other things around 2000 I think. Bryce was then bought by Corel and then later (2004) by DAZ 3D.
Thanks for the history and quick response. Wow! I had no idea this lovely gem was handed down & bounced around so much.
Kai is working with fractals.
Ken is doing photography.
Eric seems to be doing everything from animation to movie scores.
Lots to look into here, just for fun. Researching "The Builders"
With all those past builders and versions I wonder the difficulty of DAZ deconstructing it to work on it.
Maybe it could work as a DAZ plugin?
More bouncing around.
Bryce is not a plug in for anything, and hopefully will never be. I have a habit of joikingly saying that DS or Poser are plugins for Bryce. :coolsmile: as many of the Bryce users do use DAZ 3D Content in Bryce. Bryce is fun as it is, although I do feel sorry for Bryce Mac users. There is still so much to be explored within Bryce 7. DAZ 3D has progressed Bryce majorly from what it was when they first bought it. It is still a very valid and well loved stand alone program, and it's render engine still stands up well even when compared to today's technology.
Some people do use Bryce on a Mac with either parallels or bootcamp.
There is a little info in this sticky thread at the top of the forum http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19948/
Buy an older Mac on Ebay for about £100... Run Bryce... Job done. :cheese:
I had no idea that Ken was involved with Bryce 1. It was always presented -- in my hearing at least -- as a collaboration between Eric Wenger and Kai Krause.
I knew that Ken had been one of Benoit Mandelbrot's students and had done work on fractal landscapes with him, but hadn't realized that Eric's algorithms were directly based on his work, as Wikipedia seems to suggest.
If I recall correctly, Ken ("Doc Mojo") was again involved in later versions of Bryce -- maybe Bryce 5 or 6? -- before going off to make his own tool, Mojoworld. Sadly, Mojoworld -- which produced stunning images but had a learning curve so steep that it was nearly vertical -- never caught on and is no longer under development. Even the websites are offline and about the only trace of the product are the Mojoworld forums at Renderosity.
Eric Wenger has also gone back to his roots, offering various pieces of software including the Bryce-like ArtMatic Voyager.
Apparently there was also a pre Mac version which worked on one of the older computers, can't remember off hand which it was. I guess it would have been a sort of Alpha version rather than even a Beta. A couple of people who frequent the forums here (but not this Bryce Forum) did have that one.
One of them was even involved with the attempt to form a collaborative group to raise enough Money to buy Bryce from MetaCreations when they said they were going to sell off all their software.
Given the problems that arose with Curious Labs and Poser I guess it was probably just as well for Bryce that the attempt didn't get too far.
I can remember using VistaPro on the Amiga in the early 90's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro
There were another couple but I can't remember the names. FractalPro jumps to mind but I don't think that was a landscape generator.
When I moved to Windows around '98/9 I'm sure I used Bryce and at some point Carrara as I have an email folder going back a long while for it :)
I think it was the Amiga. But it wasn't a general release, as I said it was pre Beta and quite a while before the first Commercial release.
I was lusting after Bryce when it was still Mac only, Was so pleased when they released Bryce 2 in a windoze version.
Jumping through hoops here -
I found my old install disk of MAC OS Snow Leopard (which Bryce will work on), partitioned an external hard drive and used disk utility to copy it there but my MAC won't boot to it. I just get the start up screen and it hangs there.
There were some warning dialogues and posts on the web about not being able to do any kind of installing of older operating systems on newer MACs. I thought I could still do it using the external as my start up disk, bummer.
I feel I'm about to give up or I need to throw some more money at it. Buying another computer with Snow Leopard would work but that seems excessive, maybe it'll take that. I could transfer the files back and forth easily.
I've tried Wine but maybe I'll explore Boot Camp a bit more.... Ahh I'd have to buy Windows to do this.
Yes it does say about 10.6, in the thread at the top of the forum, "however you can not install it to a Mac that shipped with an OS later than 10.6."
DAZ_Spooky specifically asked me to add that to the post.
It's due to something which was included in the programming of 10.6 and earlier which is no longer included in 10.7+. If you upgraded your Mac from 10.6 then it will work, but if you bought you Mac with 10.7+ installed then it won't.
This page describes how to install Snow Leopard on a free VirtualBox VM. I haven't tried it myself, but it might be worth a try.
I believe that Snow Leopard may also work under the newest versions of the Parallels emulator software.
Interesting thread. I've read the sticky and understand the reality. But as one who has moved on from Bryce my heart longs to work with it again. So periodically I check in to see if anything regarding Mac development has changed. In many ways I have a great computer for Bryce - 4 core processors, enough ram / disk space / video memory to run anything .... but Bryce. Ironic.
But I did notice that I can't even find the Bryce product page when entering the DAZ Studio site. Where is it?
Thanks (& hello to my old beta buddies)
Barb
Put Bryce in the store search box and it takes you here.
http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Bryce
We have remarked on the absence of any directions to it or the Carrara and Hex pages as well, but not sure if they are planning to do anything to change it yet.
Thank-you. It's difficult to know what an absence actually means. But in its silence absence doesn't sound promising. It's funny - the Bryce interface was so intuitive your body always knew what to do and it was soon enough your mind and hands talked Bryce. That's how I felt about Kai's Power Tools, too. My two greatest stand by. And now both are gone.
@Barbfmc.
There's a direct link to Bryce 7 Pro here.
http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro
Just to follow up on my own post ...
I haven't tried running Snow Leopard under Parallels. However, I can confirm that Bryce 7 Pro works just fine under Windows 7 Home Premium running on Parallels 9 under Yosemite. (there's a new version of Parallels, Parallels 10, which is supposedly optimized for Yosemite. However, the final version of Parallels 9 is also Yosemite-compatible). I didn't test on Windows 8.
I did a quick test with Bryce 7 and found that my biggest problem was that some of the controls -- zoom, rotate, drag etc -- are a little hard to use precisely, because my machine (a stupidly-fast MBP) is too fast.
You can usually pick up older versions of Parallels for not too much money -- Amazon has Parallels 9 for about $40, for instance. The sticking point is more likely to be Windows. Windows 7 Home Professional seems to be about $65 and up, so you'd be spending north of $100 just to make Bryce work again. Still, this route does seem to be a possible solution.