Bryce 5 Review

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(More customer reviews)Who needs, directors, special effect experts, location permits, robots, trained animals, movie stars, costume and set designers, etc.? Bryce 5.0 is all that in a single box and a heck of lot cheaper!
But, there's a fairly hefty learning curve! Bryce isn't easy to master. It's easy to use once you learn, but starting out on your own is tough. I did, but I wish I would have spent the money to buy Susan Kitchens book on Bryce 4.0 first! 'Would have saved me hundreds of hours.
I struggled with Bryce 4.0 in making prehistoric environments from geologic history and the plants and animals that lived in them. Bryce 4.0 easily makes phenominal landscapes, city-scapes, castles, or whatever, but just try to make a person or animal that will move through your scene and you've got your work cut out for you!
But now thanks to Bryce 5.0's Metaball technology where basic sphere shapes better blend into each other my T.Rexs look like the could stand in for those in Jurassic Park. Hopefully Bryce 6.0 will make meta technology for all the building block shapes. Perhaps Corel will even embed a sound generator in 6.0 so you don't have to dub with other software?
A lot of attention has been given to the new tree lab. As long as you don't expect the prefab trees to look anything like what they are named for you'll like it too. However as a forester I was disappointed! This is not to say you can't make fantastic looking sequoias, I'm just saying it's going to take a couple of hours of tinkering. On the other hand this is to be expected. You can't demand software "Industrial Light and Magic" powerful to be "Mickey Mouse" easy.
What I'm most thrilled by is the power and beauty of the animation capability. Long gone are the days of frame by frame adjustments. To make my T. Rex walk all I have to do is carefully link objects together, then show Bryce what I want my dinosaur to look like at this place at this moment in time and than what I want it to look like at a new place, a few seconds later. Then pitch, yaw, roll, zoom the camera as desired or set it to auto track and the software smoothly animates the 100 frames in between. It short you make and put the parts together to make a body and Bryce will bring it to life and make it a movie star!
I've worked with a lot of graphic design and animation software and all others (for public consumption anyway) pale by comparison. Here's the fun thing! Once you get to know Bryce, you'll see it everywhere. It's technology is used extensively in "B" Fantasy & SciFi movies and on prime-time Fantasy & SciFi TV shows.
The old philospher once said, "Give me a fulcurm and a big enough lever and I could move the world." With Bryce 5.0 I say "Give me enough time and enough hard drive space and I can simulate the world!" at any time period.....

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Bryce 5 lets you create realistic 3-D landscapes and animations. Striking an optimum balance between power and ease of use, Bryce is an ideal way to integrate 3-D technology into your creative process. Smooth network rendering saves time by letting you render images on multiple computers. The new Light Lab gives you robust control over lighting direction, and the new Tree Lab ensures a more accurate depiction of real-world environments.

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Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011 Review

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(More customer reviews)The Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011 is the best digital sketchpad I've ever used! I majored in art in high school and have always used art, crafts or designs in many of my jobs. I've designed t-shirts, done miniatures, sewn clothes for antique dolls, silkscreens for cloth patterns and general art work and photography. Once I owned a computer, I found many great photo programs over the years, but up until now, I really never found a great sketch or art program. I own Corel's Painter, which is not only time consuming to learn the media applications, but it's slow, misses strokes and has several bugs in it's applications. Corel keeps giving me patches, but it has become tiresome to keep downloading patches all the time! I actually would rather do my art by hand than deal with all of Painter's issues.
I've been using this Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011 every day, to see how smoothly it runs, and it not only runs smoothly, it's unbelievably fast! I have a Windows XP, and it took only a few minutes to download this great program. Once downloaded, I skipped the directions, as I wanted to see how quickly and easily I could learn to use this program on my own. Talk about easy to learn- anyone from 5 to 95 could use this without reading a direction! I am truly amazed that I could draw a sketch, a complicated geometric design for a piece of dress fabric and a dress pattern all in one sitting! The sketchpad itself is uncluttered with a small corner interface control, that allows you to bring up the nicely small tools window, brushes window or colors window. There is a brush property circle that allows you to choose both the brush size and flow for coverage. You can place these windows anywhere out of your drawing area or keep them off the screen completely.
The Brushes window includes a nice array of media types: pencil, airbrush, marker, chisel tip pen, ballpoint pen, paintbrush, felt tip pen, smear, blur, sharpen (does a great outline), hard eraser, soft eraser, flood fill and flood fill for all visible layers. The Tools Bar window has undo, redo, select, lasso, crop, zoom, rotate, ruler, elipse, symmetry X (top and bottom), symmetry Y (side to side), free hand, line, rectangle, polyline, oval and layers. Those symmetry features made my geometrical fabric design take only minutes to complete! What a great feature! The colors window features a color wheel, where you can create any color imaginable, then save it in the blocks below it. For your image, it has image size or canvas size, crop, adjust, rotate, mirror canvas, flip canvas vertically, mirror layer, flip layer vertically and both symmetry X and Y. Your finished art will work on the standard image formats- TIF, BMP, JPG, PNG and PSD.
I wish I had this program years ago, before I wasted so much time, money and constant patching on Corel's Painter! I'm just happy to have this Autodesk's super fast and easy Sketchbook now! For anyone who just sketches or draws, the inexpensive price of this program will pay for itself on the money you'll save on paper, pen, paints and inks! It's a wonderful, fast and easy money saving way to do story boarding, concept sketches, illustrations, fabric designs, pattern designs and anything that you would normally use a sketchpad and your choice of media for! Artists, designers and crafters will love the professional results they'll get with this BEST digital Sketchbook that I've ever used!
(With my review, I've included 3 images. If you don't see them on the top of this page in Images, you can find them by clicking on my name, then going to My Profile-Customer Images. The first image is of my computer screen, so you can see the corner interface control called the lagoon, which can be moved side to side or removed completely when sketching. You will also see the great moveable tool bar, brush window and color window- which you can move these three anywhere on the screen or remove, when sketching. It's simplistic screen design needs no directions! I made a City Skyline In Fall sketch in 5 minutes using the paintbrush and air brush along with the freehand, line and rectangle tools and spent another 5 minutes coloring it.
The second image I made in 20 minutes for a fabric print design using the symmetry tools. I used both symmetry tools X and Y along with flood fill, airbrush and paintbrush. The third image took me the longest time to create- 35 minutes, due to more detailed floral designs I wanted to create for a scarf print. I again used both symmetry tools X and Y along with flood fill, airbrush, paintbrush and the felt tip pen.
The fabric designs that used to take me endless hours by hand to create, now takes me a mere 20 to 40 minutes with these great symmetry tools! For fast painting, the airbrush and flood fill take seconds to use! The flood fill, which is a paint bucket, can be used to cover an entire area, or you will quickly learn like I did that you can also use this little paint bucket to splash a little color on for a beautiful effect! I did all three of these using only my mouse.
For more professional art, you will want to use a pen and tablet connected to your computer port. Wacom makes the best pen and tablets in all sizes and prices. For a beginner, try the inexpensive Wacom Bamboo or Bamboo Fun tablets and pens. For professional use, the more expensive Wacom Intuos4 Larger sized Pen and Tablets give you the ability to draw, design and paint anything with total pen control for hairline detail! I couldn't believe how easy and fast this program is to use- now everyone can be an artist!)

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Relied on by professionals, adored by everyone who loves to draw... SketchBook Pro translates sophisticated technology and professional functionality into a natural drawing experience; use it anywhere you would traditionally use paper and pen!

A Natural Sketching Experience A dynamic and streamlined UI that is easy to learn and fun to use.View larger.

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ArtRage Deluxe 2.5 Review

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(More customer reviews)ArtRage is a natural media digital art software with several very nice features, some challenging those of Painter and Photoshop. The first thing that I liked was the software's graphic user interface or workspace. Given the number of features and the amount of controls to customize the tools, you would expect a complicated and intimidating GUI similar to that of Painter or Photoshop. Instead, you have an uncluttered workspace with only six panels bordering the edges. Also, as you are working, these few panels automatically disappear out of the way as your brush approaches and reappear again as you move your brush away. Other nice features are a rotating canvas and pen tablet support. ArtRage can import and export several image formats including JPEG, BMP, PNG and PSD.
Those artists who begin their artwork by blocking out the major shapes and colors in their painting will appreciate ArtRage's Tracing Image feature. This feature allows you to import a photo or sketch as a starting point for your painting. ArtRage projects the imported tracing image onto the canvas and you can control the scale and opacity of the image. For example, while tracing the outline of a rose with the Pencil tool, I set the opacity to around 80% which allowed me to see the details clearly. Later when I began to add color, I lowered to opacity to about 30% to create an "onion skin" of the trace image. For artists who like to paint from a reference image, ArtRage allows you to "pin" a reference image or images directly on to the canvas. Once the reference image is pinned to the workspace, you can reposition the image next to the area you are working on.
ArtRage has two ways to work with color; Trace Color and Normal Color. Trace Color is a feature which takes all the hard work out of choosing colors. As you paint with any of the tools, the software chooses the colors for you, based on the trace image. If you prefer to choose the colors, you can switch to the Normal Color mode and ArtRage has several color pickers including a Numeric Color Picker and the basic RGB and HSL color pickers.
With the Custom Color Picker feature, you can narrow your color choices in the color picker panel to a smaller group of colors such as complements, warm colors or cool colors. Finally, ArtRage comes with several preset Color Samples. You can even create and save your own custom color sets and color samples.
Now that we have our digital colors, we are ready to paint or draw. Each of the natural media art tools in ArtRage can simulate traditional art media including oil, pencil, palette knife, airbrush, chalk, glitter, paint roller, paint tube, felt pen, crayon and eraser. The realism and amount of custom control over the tool's properties such as wetness, pressure, hardness and angle, are surprising for the price. The natural media tools can also be used with the Metallic Paint option which gives a metallic characteristic to the media and to the canvas. In the Papers Settings Panel, you can choose a preset paper type and control several aspects of the canvas such as grain, roughness, color and opacity.
Another feature that one would expect in only high end software is layers. ArtRage's Layers panel rivals its competitors'. You can work on individual areas of your painting on separate layers. You can also copy, group and merge layers. Each layer has its own properties, such as opacity and blend modes, and can be moved, scaled and rotated. You can control the characteristics of the paper or canvas for each layer. ArtRage also supports transparency for layers, Photoshop's blending modes and has the ability to retain layer information when you import or export your artwork in PDS format.
The Stencil Picker is a very nice feature that can have many applications. The stencils and rulers work in three modes. In the Stencil mode, you can use the stencil or ruler as a mask to prevent paint from touching the canvas. In the Ruler mode, the stencils and rulers act as a combination straight edge and snap to function. As you move your paint brush along the edge of the stencil, your brush will automatically snap to the edge of the stencil giving you a nice clean edge. The Guide mode works like the Ruler mode but allows paint to spread under the stencil or ruler, giving a softer edge. ArtRage comes with a nice selection of preset stencils and rulers. You can also create and store you own.
Besides the built-in resources such as color samples, preset paper types, trace images, stencils and rulers, ArtRage comes with several video and pdf tutorials, sample paintings, quick start guide and a nice user manual.
I almost feel embarrassed to suggest additional features. But if I had a "wish list" for ArtRage it would include just a few things. For art media tools, I would like to see a watercolor brush and a drawing pen with a really fine point. As for new features, I would like to see selection tools and tooltips. Although ArtRage does have a multiple undo feature, it would be nice to have a history panel.

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Paint blend sketch and draw on your computer!Easy-to-use ToolsArtRage Deluxe gives you realistic art tools in a simple and stylish environment. Start creating your own works of art right away just pick up the mouse and start painting!Tutorials and MoreArtRage Deluxe includes tutorials and videos to learn from reference images for tracing and stencils for painting precise shapes. You ll have the artwork and guidance you need to create amazing art!Tools of the TradePaint and draw with oils brushes pencils rollers pens and more. Blend and smear paint on the canvas and use the bristle texture of your stroke to add depth to the image. The Metallic Paint option gives you spreadable blendable gold and silver oil paints sparkling glitter silver leaf sprays and other incredible effects!ArtRage Deluxe makes creating art easier than ever!Start creating from the moment you open ArtRage!Creating your artwork has never been easier. Start a new painting using the tracing paper function. Loading your owntracing image gives you an image to use as a reference and creates a canvas for you to work on.Customize tools and colorsPick colors zoom in and out and trace your image as loosely or tightly as you see fit. Use layers to isolate colors effects and lines. Mix them at will! Choose areas and layers of your work for a variety of color and effects line quality blending paint thinners canvas roughness paper textures and more! Draw strokes using varying pressure with a wide variety of tools.Finish your work with fine detailing airbrushing distortions or varying backgrounds. The creative possibilities are endless!System Requirements:Windows:Vista XP 2000 or Tablet PC800MHz processor or faster256MB of RAMMacintosh:OS X 10.3.9 or laterG4 processor or faster256MB of RAMFormat: WIN 2000XPVISTA/MAC 10.3.9 OR LATER Genre:ENTERTAINMENT UPC:717103856488 Manufacturer No:ARDHBX2

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