The Latest Ways To Talk (and Listen) To Your PC The Control Palette Eric Grevstad
This palette contains all the tools that control your camera and the rendering process. At the top of this palette is the Nano-preview and the Memory Dots (doesn't that sound like the name of an old rock group? ;-> ) The Nano-preview is a very useful feature that will come in handy many times. It renders a quick and simple preview of the current camera view every time you create or change an object -- or click on the preview itself. With this feature, you don't have do a whole rendering every time you want to see what a new camera angle looks like. However, Bryce's rendering algorithm is very fast, although you might not think so -- ray-tracing is a very slo-o-o-w and time-consuming process, but it produces very beautiful and high-quality renderings. The Nano-preview is right next to the Memory Dots which give you one-click access to up to eight different camera angles. All you have to do to save a camera angle is to click on an empty Memory Dot. If you want to empty a Memory Dot, just Alt-Click on a filled-up dot, and it's ready for you to store a new camera angle. How intuitive can you get?
Below the Nano-preview and the Memory Dots are the Flyaround Preview and the View Control. The Flyaround Preview control is an interesting one; click on it, and the camera angle will temporarily switch to a position on a imaginary "monorail" track above and away from your scene and start rotating around. This lets you see your whole scene from every angle, which can be very helpful if the current camera is amongst a bunch of big objects. Next to the Flyaround Preview control is the View Control, which lets you change the camera to view the front, left, right, back, top, and bottom of your scene. You can either drag the control left or right to change views on the fly, or you can select one of the views using the View Control menu.
Above the Render Controls and the Multi-plex Text area are the Camera Controls. Here you will find all the tools needed to change your camera angle. And the best part of it is that the controls aren't fixed to your world space -- i. e., the directions indicated on the different controls pertain to the current camera angle. Thus, down isn't necessarily down relative to the ground plane, but down relative to the camera. This is a great feature, but it might be hard to use at times if Bryce didn't tell you what direction is X, Y, and Z relative to the world space. But since Bryce does tell you with pop-up up labels, you'll never have to figure out which direction is which yourself. The two crosses above the Trackball control are easy to use, but the Trackball control can be a little tricky. However, Bryce lets you switch the Trackball's behavior between a normal trackball and tripod, so you can select whichever behavior you want to use at the time.
The Render Controls are fairly straight-forward. The buttons include Render All (which starts a new rendering from the top-down), Resume Render (which resumes a render job that was previously canceled), Clear&Render (which clears the contents of the Plop-renderer [see below] before starting a new rendering), Fast Preview Mode (which lets you toggle between using the regular ray-tracer and an optimized ray-tracer which doesn't produce quite as clean images), and a button that toggles rendering textures on or off. Note that all these controls work with the Plop-renderer; the Plop-renderer lets you select a section of the render viewport, and render just that selection (which is great if you just put in a new object in a part of your scene, and you only want to render that object without rendering the whole scene all over again). Also, the Plop-renderer uses the same render settings that a regular renderer would, which includes the type of anti-aliasing (or none at all), spacial optimization, render mode (besides the normal mode, you can render a panoramic rendering for use with a 360o panorama viewer, a mask rendering, a distance rendering, or an altitude rendering), and document size.
Last, but definitely not least, the bottom of the Control Palette is where the Multi-plex Text area is located. Bryce doesn't use any tool-tips or a status bar to let you know what's going on, but instead it uses the Multi-plex Text to convey information to you. When nothing in the wireframe view is selected, the text tells you the total number of objects and polygons in your scene; when an object(s) is selected, it tells you how many objects and polygons are selected; in the render view, it gives you information about the rendered image; when the mouse is over a control or tool, it tells you what the control does; etc. As you can see, the Multi-plex Text is a very important part of Bryce.
