24 July 2010
One thing that's seldom mentioned about Bryce is that it has two similar but slightly different Ray Tracers. Since Bryce 2 PC and B3 Mac it has incorporated a largely academic render model called Distributed Ray Tracing (not to be confused with Distributed Rendering, i.e. render farms). In Bryce 2 through 4, this was called the Fine Art render mode, in Bryce 5 it's called the Super mode. DRT was originally created as a better way to handle alising errors by using large oversampeling and, strangely enough, a type of controlled randomness. Along the way, some bright individuals found that DRT could also be used to simulate certain optical effects: Soft Shadows, DOF, Fuzzy transparency/reflection, Motion Blur and Color Bleed. Bryce 5 implements all these except Motion Blur and has only a very rudimentary (and pretty much useless) Color Bleed, called True Ambience. These effects are called Premium mode. Perhaps the most interesting of these effects is Soft Shadows.
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