Gamers like creating worlds, and that's what these programs are designed to let you do. If you are the type of GM that's always making maps for your players, you may well get hooked on landscape rendering-finally, there's a way to show the players just what they would be seeing, whether moon, a lush sylvan forest, or 7 on Mars. If you aren't a GM you'll still enjoy exploring virtual worlds without end. There are so many possibilities inherent in each of these programs that you may have many sleepless nights indulging your creative visions. Not being much of an artist myself, using these programs made me feel as if I had suddenly been granted to ability to draw or paint. Vistapro and KPT are similar in many ways. They each let you create fantastic landscapes. You have total control over the Colors used, the camera angles, the light, and the level of detail. Under the best conditions, you can produce images that actually took like photographs. Another similarity between these two programs is their insatiable demand or computer power. Depending on the speed of your computer and the complexity of the scene, you're looking at rendering times of anywhere from minutes to hours. Unless you like to wait, this is really PowerPC and Pentium territory. While these programs have many similarities they have enough differences to make choosing between them a difficult proposition. VISTAPRO Vistapro does a good job of rendering landscapes, complete with foliage and rivers, but that's where it reaches its limit. You can create some simple objects in a scene but there is no practical way to create anything with a lot of detail, like a castle or crashed starship. One of Vistapro's strongest points is the ability to create QuickTime animations. Once you have a scene you like, you can create a flythrough movie. It's easy to set up but it does take a long time to render, though it's worth every second of computer time. KPT BRYCE Bryce is a different sort of animal from Vistapro, sporting more flexible scene creation tools. Whereas Vistapro is exclusively a landsca generator, Bryce is a more general-purpose rendering package that happens to lean heavily towards landscape work. The rendering engine Bryce uses is extremely sophisticated, capable o producing photorealistic images for skilled users It is in fact professional quality, and you have likely seen Bryce images without knowing it. With enough skill and patience, you can create some complex objects that look eerily real when rendered. It's well within Bryce's capabilities to create a scene with two spacecraft locked in combat, for example. The challenge is in teaming how to build the ships from the basic shapes you have to work with. THE BOTTOM LINE If you are interested in doing nothing but landscapes, it's a toss-up. Go for Vistapro if you want to do animation--go for Bryce if you are more concerned with high-quality stills. However, if you ever wish to move beyond landscapes, Bryce is the clear choice due to its flexibility. Back to Shadis #23 Table of Contents Back to Shadis List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master List of Magazines © Copyright 1996 by Alderac Entertainment Group This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com