I think you're being quite dismissive about what really was incredibly innovative and groundbreaking technology at the time. I went to an Apple Expo in London around the time Kai's Power Goo was released and the show floor around the MetaCreations stand was one of the busiest parts of the whole show. I'm talking about large crowds of people watching live demos of someone using Kai's Power Goo with dropped jaws. It's hard to explain how amazed we were about this software at the time.
His UIs were what got me really into software as a child. Bryce and Power Goo were absolutely life-changing to me. There was NO other software out there which was so accessible and so powerful, especially to a child.
If you asked someone to make you a realistic looking 3D rendered image of an alien landscape or even just a regular earth-like landscape in 94/95, it would have been a hugely complex task requiring special skills and expensive, inaccessible software. I was around 12 at this time and I remember amazing my dad with my Bryce creations. A few years later I remember warezing Maya and having no idea how to do anything, I could barely make a single textured sphere in that program, it was so complex to use and the UI was not friendly to look at.
My point being that the UI may look "cute" but it was friendly and accessible and it got people being creative, unlike other 3D tools at the time which were intimidating, complex, and incredibly hard to learn. I still don't believe there is a better tool out there for making 3D landscape art than Bryce, if there is, I'd love to hear about it. I suppose young people these days will just ask Stable Diffusion "make me a cool alien landscape"
His UIs were what got me really into software as a child. Bryce and Power Goo were absolutely life-changing to me. There was NO other software out there which was so accessible and so powerful, especially to a child.
If you asked someone to make you a realistic looking 3D rendered image of an alien landscape or even just a regular earth-like landscape in 94/95, it would have been a hugely complex task requiring special skills and expensive, inaccessible software. I was around 12 at this time and I remember amazing my dad with my Bryce creations. A few years later I remember warezing Maya and having no idea how to do anything, I could barely make a single textured sphere in that program, it was so complex to use and the UI was not friendly to look at.
My point being that the UI may look "cute" but it was friendly and accessible and it got people being creative, unlike other 3D tools at the time which were intimidating, complex, and incredibly hard to learn. I still don't believe there is a better tool out there for making 3D landscape art than Bryce, if there is, I'd love to hear about it. I suppose young people these days will just ask Stable Diffusion "make me a cool alien landscape"