[traces of jazz music playing] [computer buzzes, beeps]
Ray tracing!
Up until five or so years ago with gaming, it’s a term I always associated with
images that looked like this. Mm yeah, that particular look, style, and feel of computer
generated imagery especially popular throughout the 1990s. And I blame my long-time fascination
with this stuff entirely on Trapper Keepers, both the 3-ring velcro binders and the hole-punched
inserts. Slathered in shiny 3D primitives, chrome spheres, sci-fi cities, and abstract spacey
landscapes. They provided some surreal visual fun during otherwise mundane bouts of schoolwork,
and the images grabbed my attention so fully that I used to download all kinds of ray traced renders
on America Online and the early internet back then. But what I really wanted to do was make
my own surreal sci-fi imagery, and boy howdy do I wish I had this as an 11-year-old: Bryce!
With version 3.1 being the one I have in-box here, sold as Bryce 3D, and published by MetaCreations
in 1997 for Windows 95 and Macintosh computers. “Bryce 3D: IT MOVES.”
“Set your world in motion. Easy-to-master animation, atmospheric effects, 3D terrain, materials and textures.”
“Use its vast 3D libraries, or import your own models, to quickly create dramatic 3D scenes and landscapes.”
With an emphasis on the landscapes, as you may deduce from the title ‘Bryce.’ Which comes from
Bryce Canyon in Utah, a region filled with jagged, rocky formations that the software was designed to
imitate using fractal geometry. Fun fact, Bryce was developed by Eric Wenger and Ken Musgrave,
with Mr. Musgrave going onto develop MojoWorld. The program that was used to create those awesome
spacey backgrounds used in games like Bejeweled 2. I dunno, I just think that’s neat! Uh, back to
Bryce though and its connection to Trapper Keepers. As in, I don’t believe there is a
connection, other than in my own mind. I have no reason to think the Mead Corporation used Bryce
to make Trapper Keeper Designer Series art. There were plenty of programs, paid and free,
capable of creating similar results, from 3D Studio to POV-ray. But I do know Bryce was one
of the most readily-available products sold in stores that let you create that style of
art in the mid 90s, with MetaCreations touting how easy it was to learn for users of all ages.
-[Narrator Lady] You don't need to be an artist to explore your creativity on the computer.
-[Computer Kid] My dad couldn't figure out, thought that... this program is too hard for me!
-And I use it. And I make great pictures like this now!
-[Clint] Despite being simple enough for kids, it sure wasn’t priced like kid’s software. Bryce 3D here
sold for a suggested price of 299 US dollars on its introduction in December 1997. With upgrades
costing $99 if you owned a prior registered version. It was frequently found for less though,
often between 150 and 200 dollars on sale. Still not cheap, and it was by no means the only program
back then letting you produce ray traced images. But Bryce was one of the most common to see in
stores and cost a crapload less than something like 3D Studio Max, for example, which went for
three-and-a-half thousand dollars in 1998. That was a proper professional application
that did tons of stuff though, whereas Bryce 3D was more limited in scope, focused on generating
its specific style of imagery using a proprietary ray-traced rendering engine. And to be clear, I
don’t mean real-time ray tracing you can interact with like in modern video games. Although it is
built on the same core concepts, and a whole lotta math that I do not comprehend. There is nothing
"real-time" about Bryce 3D, it’s all about setting up wireframe meshes, applying material properties,
and exporting them as a rasterized image one frame at a time. A couple of frames a minute, if you’re
lucky. Keep in mind we’re talkin’ the Pentium I and II era here, with Windows 95 and 16 megs of
RAM required, and a GPU was optional. That being said, for my own sanity I’ll be running the 1997
version of Bryce on the LGR Megaluminum Monster, with a 1GHz Pentium III from a few years later.
Once the program is installed and started up, you’re greeted with a 640x480 fixed workspace
and a friendly UI made by none other than Kai Krause. Or at least, it’s based on the 1994
design he made for the Macintosh version 1.0, back when it was known as KPT Bryce by HSC Software.
So yeah, Bryce didn’t actually get a Windows PC port until version two in 1996, when it dropped
the Kai’s Power Tools prefix and became its own brand.
-[Craig] This particular image took, I believe, 8 minutes to render.
With this texture? Yeah. And if I don't like something, I can always come through and
wipe it out if I'd like, or re-render it as well.
-[Stewart] The rendering took about 8 minutes, but literally this is this landscape you created
in just a minute or two, just using these tools? -[Craig] Exactly.
-[Clint] Anyway, back to ‘97 here and its Krause-ian user interface,
with the majority of the program utilizing Kai’s “padded cell” philosophy,
where everything is soft and friendly enough that you can’t fully screw things up. See my
old LGR episode on Kai’s Power Goo for more about that, the dude is a legend.
From here you can begin creating a 3D scene straight away, and really I’d encourage any
first time users to do just that. Simply playing around and seeing what does what goes a long way
towards helping you learn the ropes, especially if you’re familiar with darn near any 3D modeling
application of the past 40 years. It’s always worth thumbing through the stuff in the box
though, like this fold-out reference guide covering all the menus, features, and keyboard
shortcuts. And there are a deceptively large quantity, so this is something I always keep
open on the desk. Of course, if ya REALLY feelin’ nasty, there’s the Bryce 3D User Guide. A beefy
450-page tome of instructions going deep into the software’s entire repertoire of features, complete
with dozens of tutorials that reference the hundreds of example files included on the CD-ROM.
And that’s the next thing worth checking out, since inspecting and reverse-engineering exactly
how those example scenes were created is a great way to decipher how the program works.
At least it is for me, I rarely glean as much from reading as I do from hands-on experience.
So let’s dive right in and render our own sort of Trapper Keeper fan art! First step is setting up a
document workspace, with resolution and aspect ratio chosen either from the templates on the
right hand column, or typed in manually. In this case on this hardware, the default settings work
fine, and I’ll come back to antialiasing and render res later. So, here we go! We’ve got
a blank canvas, a camera view, a horizon line, and a grid representing perspective. There’s a
tiny preview render up in the top left, a buncha camera controls on the left-hand side, a pile of
primitives and 3D objects beneath the three main menus along the top, and a selection of primarily
animation controls along bottom. And seeing as my goal is to make abstract Trapper Keeper-lookin’
weirdness, let’s place a pyramid, a cylinder, a cube, and a sphere. And I’m gonna go ahead and get
my camera placed using a combo of keyboard, mouse, and UI controls. Camera navigation has its quirks,
as with any 3D program, but I find Bryce largely intuitive and it becomes second nature before
long. And yeah, you’ll note that as I move things around, the preview render updates on-the-fly,
so we can kinda see how things’ll look when fully rendered. Especially useful for things like adding
lights and adjusting its color and intensity, both the overhead sunlight and object-based
lighting emitters. As handy as that little preview window is for this though, rendering to the main
viewpoint is best when making minute adjustments. It just takes longer to update. And no surprise at
all, the more objects, reflections, and effects you add, the longer renders take. Which means that
changing things gets cumbersome fast. Er, slow. I dunno, it’s fast at becoming slow is what I mean.
Anyway, I now have things roughly where I want, so it’s time for a couple of effects planes. Namely,
water and sky, each of which are represented as a flat 2D object in wireframe. And when rendered
become a nice reflective or cloudy surface. And these really add a lot to a scene, with all kinds
of materials you can apply to change how surfaces and objects look, and both premade and fully
customizable options letting you go nuts here. The textures and effects Bryce comes with are already
great for that mid 90s look, and since that’s what I’m after, that’s what I’m using. Though
there’s nothing stopping you from like, making a trippy cloud layer from Cool Crabs or whatever,
it’s happy to let you import assets all day. But yeah, I’m diggin’ these authentic low-poly,
lower res objects and materials, especially with reflections cranked up. And since I want more
floating nonsense in the sky, I experimented with different things here, various rocks and models.
But I ended up going with these Symmetrical Lattice objects for their surreal, crystalline
nature. They don’t really look like anything, other than kind of awesome, and I approve.
In hindsight, I should’ve saved these for last, since each one slows down renders in the camera
window exponentially. One render went from taking 15 seconds to almost two whole minutes. So it’s a
good idea to hide complex items like those once they’re in place to speed things up.
And since at this point I’m choosing materials for each floating primitive, I want all the speed I
can get, since you don’t really see the final result in the materials editor alone. It’s a
tedious process indeed modifying a material’s properties, going back and forth between the
editors, and waiting for a new render between each step. Simultaneously though, it’s a bit
exciting seeing a new texture, surface value, or optical property come into existence line-by-line
in 3D. You’re never 100% sure how it’s gonna turn out till you see it rendered in the actual scene,
leading to some happy artistic accidents. Annnd a lotta stuff that looks like total crap, but y'know.
Win some lose some. Finally, after placing a mountainous fractal island in the background,
I’ve got a scene I’m pretty pleased with! It took about an hour to slap this together,
and really the majority of that time was spent waiting on rendering to complete. Otherwise it
was maybe 20 minutes. And now it’s time for the final rendering to disk, which I’m doing
with antialiasing enabled outputting to a 640x480 bitmap. Any guesses on how long that’ll take on
this Pentium III? 480x360 previews were taking about five minutes at this point, after all.
Well the answer is... 33 minutes, 5 seconds! [laughs] With 307,200 pixels rendered, 190,284
antialiased, and 5.62 billion rays traced. And all that for this one glorious 640x480 image taking up
900 kilobytes. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a weird thing happening on our red waffle cube,
a shadow or something is causing the texture to appear split down the middle. [chuckles]
So it goes, it’s not something I noticed in the lower-quality preview renders, but you never know
till you do the full thing. So I took it over to my modern editing rig to fix and see how long a
render takes on the AMD Threadripper 3970X. And yes, it works on modern Windows, barring some UI
scaling foibles. Any guesses on how long the same 640x480 bitmap takes on a Threadripper? All those
64-bit cores and threads and gigahertzes... and it still took 5 minutes for the one image!
Yeeeah, considering it’s a 32-bit, single-thread program from 1997, it’s unsurprising.
The whole time Bryce 3D uses one lonely core, and barely 2% of the overall processor. Fun!
And now for the final thing, changing aspect ratios and rendering as a full Trapper Keeper page,
9.5½ x 12 inches in size at 300 dots per inch, a resolution of 2850x3600. And that I left going
overnight, with the 3970X here taking over five hours to render that one image. Heh, I
can only imagine how long my Pentium III would take, much less a Pentium I or II back in ‘97!
The results were well worth the wait though, mm so many reflections and transparencies. Fancy!
Lastly, of course, is Bryce’s 3D animation. Something I have way less experience with compared
to making static 3D scenes, but thankfully it’s straightforward stuff. Animation is all based
on keyframes and relies on simple tweening to move objects and materials between frames on
the timeline. For instance, making objects move up and down is as simple as scrubbing to a point
on the timeline, moving the object, placing a keyframe, and that’s that. Bryce does the rest!
Same goes for moving the water, the clouds, different textures and so on. Naturally though,
the only thing you see moving in real time is the wireframe. And rendering a video
takes significantly longer than a single bitmap, multiplying render time by however
many frames are in the animation. Still, I admire how simple yet effective this is to
use for ‘97. And chances are back in the day you were making animated images and low-res
video clips for web use anyway, so keeping things short and sweet just makes sense.
And that’s the basic Bryce 3D experience! At least for what I sought to do in fulfilling
some childhood Trapper Keeper creation fantasies. Obviously the deeper you dive
and the more time you spend on each scene, the more your renders and animations improve
in quality and complexity. Practice may not make perfect, but it does make more pleasing.
Still, the big appeal of Bryce is that it was approachable and usable by anyone,
offering advanced results with amateur input. And if you happen to find its particular ray
traced imagery as appealing as I do, then I’d say it continues to have a niche use case!
I’ve seen those track compilations on YouTube, with surreal ray traced visuals accompanying
synth/vaporwave/drum and bass music. I would not be surprised if those were rendered in Bryce,
though I’d imagine using a newer version. The last release, at the moment anyway,
was version 7 released in 2012 by Daz 3D, who purchased the Bryce IP back in 2004. Making the
newest version over a decade old now, and I don’t know if there will ever be an update. But hey,
Bryce 7, Bryce 1997, those in-between. They all still work on modern Windows so whatever, I ain’t
picky! Just pump that old school ray traced CGI into my veins and my inner 90s kid is content.
[drum and bass intensifies]
And if you enjoyed this look at Bryce, check out my Power Goo episode! It’s
an older video but it checks out. Or stick around for new episodes
continually in the works here on LGR. And as always, thank you for watching.