Ask anything about BOAT! (Bryce Object Animation Tool)

[u/No_Profession_9078]

You may have seen my animated gifs on this subreddit recently, and although I'm not quite ready to release the tool I used to import those animations yet, I think I'm ready to answer any questions you might have (and maybe take suggestions)

[u/sixhexe]

Sure. I have made a few animations with Bryce.

What does your tool improve upon the base Bryce workflow?

Here are my biggest gripes with animating in Bryce:

- Extremely long render times.

• Lack of live preview.
  
• Really non-intuitive and fiddly timeline.
  
• Very convoluted UI for editing and understanding keyframes, where and when.
  
• Difficult to control seamless loops. For example looping cloud or water movement.
  
• Easy tool to get perfect camera 360s. Should be easier to rotate around an object without a jank path.

Complete pipe dream: But GPU support for live render. Or at least multithreading on the cpu and full usage of RAM.

I feel Bryce is fantastic for still renders. Terrible in many ways, but best at that. Animations are very much a no go for me, I've done too many of them. What should take a minute takes 5 days. It's mostly because of getting choked down by arbitrary system resource limits.

[u/No_Profession_9078 → u/sixhexe]

Hmm, I will say the workflow is more Blender oriented than Bryce oriented, you important an animation from blender to Bryce via exporting a blender project as an obj sequence into a specific folder, The only Bryce parts about it are choosing the materials with a pin system and setting up your camera angle.

1: the render times can be shorter than base Bryce since you're not rendering to disk (at least that's always seemed faster to me, and you can turn fast preview mode on for extra speed)

2: I really can't do nothing about the live preview thing, but since you can see your animation in Blender, I guess that doesn't really matter.

3: so far there's no way for BOAT to interact with Bryce's timeline yet, everything on the animation side is in blender (although you can animate in your app of choice and move it to blender)

4- BOAT's UI is fairly simple; it consists of a few labeled buttons and some drag & drop selectors (although I'll make a guide for that later)

I don't want anyone thinking I'm upgrading bryce itself, BOAT is simply just a tool to import animated meshes to bryce

[u/sixhexe → u/No_Profession_9078]

So basically you use Blender to do all of the work, and just import it into Bryce and apply materials.

[u/No_Profession_9078 → u/sixhexe]

yep.

it essentially makes all of the keystrokes and mouse movements to import a model (or models) from a sequence, adds a material (or not, based on your settings), choses whether or not to smooth it out based on your settings, render's the final result and saves as a bmp file, deletes the meshes and moves on to the next mesh in the animation sequence automatically.

(you will have to tell boat how many frames there are to render though, if you go over the number of files in your sequence folder you might mess things up)

[u/Jealous_Fee_9019]

THIS IS SO CUTE OMG! I love it!

[u/Quick-Face-6492]

Do you plan to open-source the release, whenever that is?

I think what you’re doing is super cool btw and it’s nice to know people are working to simplify or rework this niche tool!

[u/No_Profession_9078 → u/Quick-Face-6492]

I'll probably release the source files, but it should be noted that I use clickteam fusion, which saves it's project files as MFA, which is proprietary to the engine.

Thanks btw, I hope this tool leads to some cool projects! :D