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This includes intensity, softness, shadow ambiance and softness, volume, falloff, color and gel type. (Gels can include textures and images.) It also provides a space for animating a light's properties outside the main timeline and away from the clutter of the Advanced Motion Lab. (Actually, the Motion Lab isn't cluttered, but, since the window can't be resized, it's just easier to work in the Light Lab for animating light properties.)
Sky Lab
Not new to Bryce 5, though certainly improved, is the Sky Lab. The Sky Lab allows you to customize the look of the atmosphere in your scene and position celestial bodies (sun, moon and stars). If you're familiar at all with the KPT 6 Sky Effects filter for Adobe Photoshop, using the Sky Lab in Bryce will be a no-brainer. It functions almost exactly the same way—not surprising, since both KPT and Bryce came from the same developer, and they're both now owned by Corel—but works in 3D space. It also gives you a few added tools, including cloud cover and atmospheric conditions.
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Many of the features in the Sky Lab are accessible directly in the main composition workspace, but the Lab itself offers more options for customizing the scene, including animating cloud movement, adding volume to the atmosphere, etc. For night scenes, you can also add custom star fields or select a field based on the stars that are visible from the earth.
And the rest
Over the four weeks that I've had Bryce 5 on my system, I've had a chance to test a good bulk of the new features in various scenes. There's really so much that's new that I can't cover it all adequately. So I'll just cover a few of the more major ones here.
First there's new support for metaballs. For me, Bryce is first and foremost a landscaping program, and I won't pretend that it would be a great environment for doing character modeling or anything like that. Still, the addition of metaballs does give Bryce users one more tool to work with in the creation of their worlds, and that can't be bad.
There are new import and export filters for supporting a broad range of objects from popular (and not so popular) commercial 3D programs. These include everything from LightWave scenes and objects (but not LightWave 6 or above), OBJ, DFX, NFX, VRML, U.S. Geological Survey DEM and DDF and a whole lot more. I do hope that in a future release users will be able to export entire scenes to popular formats, especially the trees that Bryce creates.
It also includes new terrain grid resolutions (up to 4,096 for planetary scale) and five new mapping modes, including Sinusoidal, World Front, World Side, World Cubic and Object Cubic.
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