new PC by mail arrived + bryce 3d anyone?

[swords]

Hey folks,

Today my custom quad core extreme PC system arrived. Apparently Ace Ventura took care of delivery cos my second hard drive was knocked loose in shipping and was rattling around the PC Case when I took it from the shipping box! It was nicely packed/padded but somehow it had come loose (I see todays drives don't screw in but "snap" in with a "tooless installation" (as the box the case came in says). The guy will send me a new drive and cord to replace that one. But I've still got drive C up and running and I'm sure I won't fill the single 500 GB hard drive before the second one comes.

Do any of you have DSL? I will get it for the new PC but it has a extra large phone cord jack looking thing that the guy said was for the DSL line (built into my ASUS motherboard). Is that the correct slot?

Since the PC is up and humming I installed Bryce 6.1 3D environment, modeling & animation generation program and I was wondering if any of you have it (or an earlier version) and more importantly can tell me how to get started. I have lots of buttons and thi\ngs to do stuff with but the manual only folds out to say what the onscreen icons are, not what to do with them! I ordered Making 3d Worlds in Bryce 4 (the only book with a good review on amazon) but it won't arrive for several weeks yet.

 

[Clint]

We have a big giant phone cord thing for our DSL. I think it's called an ethernet cable or something.

What do you need a whole terrabyte for? I can't even comprehend using that much space.

It it was an ipod, that's about 250 thousand songs!

 

[adnedarn]

the big telephone cord looking plug is an ethernet connection, used for any broadband. DSL is "faster than dial up" but Cable is faster I love my cable and using other's DSL connections drive me nuts!!! If you are OK with dial up, then DSL will likely be fine.. If you wanna get into a lot of downloading or uploading of videos or running a website or something, I'd go with Cable.

 

[swords]

Ok, cool, so I will have net access with this guy! I'm calling the phone company tomorrow! Is "high speed", DSL or Cable their ads say high speed but don't define which it is anything has to better than cheezy old AOL dialup!

I do run several websites but my uploads so far have merely consisted of small Jpgs and text.
This PC will be for music production/recording and 2D/3D digital paintings so I figured a terrabyte would be a good starting point since some of the orchestral software sets I want to get is 30-100 gigs and who knows how much the billions of polygons in a rendered 3d scene could chew up?

 

[seedjar]

The best way to start with Bryce is learning to work the texturing and terrain mapping functions, if you ask me. The atmospheric tools are good to play with, too. Bryce has many dynamic texturing methods that aren't just binding raster images to vertexes, and you can get a lot of mileage from them if you do scenes with an emphasis on background detail. For modeling, you should probably just import models from another 3D suite if possible - back when I used Bryce it didn't really have much in terms of modeling tools, besides for some very minimal geometric figures and solids, and few tools to combine them.
~Joe

 

[adnedarn]

If it is through your phone company it is DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) it is defiantly better than dial up, but defiantly NOT cable ;-) "high speed" or "broad band" is anything other than dial up. If you've never been on anything but dial up, DSL will blow your mind. And Cable would put you in comma either way, ENJOY IT!!!

 

[swords]

I got my DSL signed up today. I took the middle package of 3.0 but I can upgrade to 5.0 later if I want (whatever those numbers mean?!) It will be nice to at least be as fast as my dads DSL which is the cheapest package. Mainly I need it so I can download drivers for my hardware to work on XP 64 bit. Tried to connect my Yamaha MIDI synthesizer last night but it wanted a 64 bit driver... doh! I don't bother trying to download on my AOL cos I can't even open PDF web documents without crashing AOL!

Hey Joe thanks for your input, I fooled around with Bryce last night and made some headway in figuring which way is up, depending on which button you push. It will be hard getting used to the z axis and thinking in terms of 3D on a 2D format. I might be using Corel Painter and Photoshop more to start with since I'm familiar with those. I found a number of interesting Bryce tutorials on google late last night but I'll have to wait til I've got the web on the same PC so I can read and attempt the same things.
I installed Blender 2.4 modelling, animation and rendering software from the book Introducing Character Animation with Blender that I picked up at B & N. I can import models sculpted in blender into Bryce, I can even have them rigged and move through the environment if I run it through Bryce's DAZI Studio (comes with Bryce). First I gotta figure how to use Blender to make figures and props to export. But at least it came with a book!