POV-Ray Competition Winners 168
An anonymous reader noted that you can "See how far POV-Ray developers have pushed the limits of raytracing in the POVCOMP 2004 Raytracing Contest." Yes it's from 2004. It's still neat. And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)
The thin line between reality and digital reality. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:5, Funny)
It's all too clean (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's all too clean (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say the big dinosaur is a further tip-off that is is not real!
Re:It's all too clean (Score:2)
Re:It's all too clean (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's all too clean (Score:2)
I thought the same about render time, but one guy mentioned in his tech notes that to render a simple blue glow on some cables (OK, so it wasn't really *that* simple, but still, nothing earth shattering), took him a MONTH running on a dedicated FreeBSD machine that was "decently powered", running at niceness -19. I was stunned. Hopefully, "decently powered" didn't mean a Pentium 133.
Check the "Hall of Fame" for a great col
Re:It's all too clean (Score:4, Interesting)
Over time raytraced images will no doubt look more natural, but I hope to still be able to see new and interesting images rendered 20th century style in the future.
Compare the essence of a Bach fugue with the bombast of Mahler. Both have their place.
Um, well. (Score:2)
How about this/ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about this/ (Score:2, Informative)
what about this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what about this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Also, for anyone who's not familiar with Zbrush 2 and what it can do, the Zbrush central gallery [206.145.80.239] is worth a look
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
No need to go that deep - look at the stuff on the fridge. Besides, there's not enough slight bends, dings, unevenness or wear on any of the surfaces. For a rendering of a sleek new kitchen you can get away with that, but look at how the vent hood, tile grout, and table have never seen a speck of food, water, or abrasion.
That having been said, it's damn impressive for the constraints POVRay users labor under. But photoreal? No way. Hardly anything
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
However, saying that raytracing is old news isn't really accurate as a blanket statement - most of those GI techniques involve tracing rays, and no newer tech for rendering reflections and refractions has come along. Mental Ray is a raytracer, for example.
Global illumination also isn't a panacea - having light behave in "r
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Re:The thin line between reality and digital reali (Score:2)
Cool.
Callback (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Callback (Score:1)
Re:Callback (Score:2, Funny)
Holiday? (Score:1, Funny)
Quicklink Top-25 (Score:5, Informative)
3. 'Dissolution' [povcomp.com] by Ziga Petric
4. 'Victoria's World' [povcomp.com] by Douglas Eichenberg and 'Twin Girls With A Pearl Earring' [povcomp.com] by Rene Bui
6. 'Pirates' [povcomp.com] by 'seawolf'
7. 'Bradbury Atrium' [povcomp.com] by Gary MacKinnon
8. 'Model Expo Entry' [povcomp.com] by Chris Holtorf
9. 'Waiting for the relief' [povcomp.com] by Marc Jacquier
10. 'Sentinel Rock' [povcomp.com] by Glenn McCarter
11. 'Song For The Earth' [povcomp.com] by Fabien Mosen
12. 'Natural History Museum' [povcomp.com] by Sean Day
13. 'Cybernetic Organism Caealis - Narcissism' [povcomp.com] by 'selsek'
14. 'The Three Blind Mice Return' [povcomp.com] by Jeremy M. Praay
15. 'Autumn' [povcomp.com] by 'Slime'
16. 'The buzzard and the dove' [povcomp.com] by 'emkaah'
17. 'Evie Evolves' [povcomp.com] by Joanne Simpson
18. 'Early morning tea' [povcomp.com] by 'St Dunstan'
19. 'Christmas Eve' [povcomp.com] by Gennady Obukhov
20. 'The Peek-a-Blocks' [povcomp.com] by 'danBhentschel'
21. 'After the Storm' [povcomp.com] by Christoph Gerber
22. 'Montezumas last meal No.2' [povcomp.com] by 'splendor'
23. 'Pathways' [povcomp.com] by Robert W. McGregor
24. 'Japanese spire!' [povcomp.com] by 'miyoken'
25. '13 Spiral Spheres' [povcomp.com] by Robert W. McGregor
PNG formats available? (Score:1)
JPEG is soooooo 2004. You need to sit back and blur your eyes just to hide the visual artifacts.
Re:Quicklink Top-25 (Score:1, Funny)
But what about... (Score:2)
Re:Quicklink Top-25 (Score:5, Informative)
And shame on you, Johannes Vermeer [wikipedia.org]!
Re:Quicklink Top-25 (Score:2, Funny)
Holiday monday? (Score:4, Insightful)
Try looking outside the US. it's not a holiday here.
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:3, Insightful)
They are largely supported by advertisements, though, and not putting up news stories on holidays, especially holidays observed in America where most of their readers live, would cut down their hits. Plus, the link's nice and I hadn't seen it before.
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:1)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:2)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:5, Funny)
Try looking outside the US. it's not a holiday here.
I think taco is just saying it's hard to find news on a holiday Monday because he is really sunburned and drunk.
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:2)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:1)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:2)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:2)
Re:Holiday monday? (Score:2)
Gilles Tran (Score:5, Interesting)
Has he entered the competition? Haven't seen his name anywhere so far...
Exemplified (Score:2, Insightful)
Quoting:
It can be used to generate photorealistic http://www.povcomp.com/hof/1b.html [povcomp.com] images that resemble objects in the real world, or to visualize 'virtual' objects that do not physically exist.
Re:Exemplified (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, later in the text...
D'oh! Note to self: in future, read article, don't just look at pretty pictures...
Needs new caption (Score:3, Interesting)
(You can see the homepage of the same image here [oyonale.com] if the pov website gets slashdotted)
Re:Needs new caption (Score:1)
I'll bet you're probably one of those that though the Native Americans were wonderful stewards of the land (notice that I'm using the past-tense), rather than simply dumping all their broken pots and such all over the place, then moving on. The only reason things aren't trashed more is because they used mostly organic mater
Re:Needs new caption (Score:2)
Thirdly, it was actually rendered on a laptop in space thanks to a certain Mark Shuttleworth [markshuttleworth.com], most recently known for his Ubuntu Linux distribution [ubuntulinux.org].
He may be a multi-zillionaire, but I have to admit he spends it on some pretty cool stuff.
Re:Needs new caption (Score:2)
Yow. (Score:2)
I hear people complaining about how we don't need better video cards or whatever, how we can't possibly get any better or need any more power than what we've got.
To these people I say, come back when my Playstation produces graphics like this in realtime.
Re:Yow. (Score:2)
Re:Yow. (Score:2)
Very sad. When will people start building programs where they can say "ok, here's a model, detail it for me" and it'll throw in your imperfections, age the surface, and fill in details based on hinting and metadata.
Re:Yow. (Score:2)
If you look at the description text of this picture, for example, you notice that the submitter had used Povray's internal programming language in making the scene - to place the building, for example. And Povray newsgroups are full of clever macro
Re:Yow. (Score:2)
Forgot to fill in the link... I meant this picture [povcomp.com].
Also of interest.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Also of interest.... (Score:2)
Aaaah,,,the memories (Score:2, Interesting)
Make movies! (Score:2)
Pov-ray is cool, man. It'd be cool to generate a film with it. On today's computers, with a small cluster to split up the work, it shouldn't be any trouble at all.
Re:Make movies! (Score:2)
Re:Make movies! (Score:2)
Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
Some frames from the Jellyfish Scene [cgnetworks.com] from Finding Nemo took twelve hours per frame to render.
A study of raytracing which simulates how light behaves on a normal scale really gives one a good idea of how many intricacies there are in our world.
Learn povray in 24 h (Score:2)
So what is the best way to learn to program povray images such as these?
Any tutorial links? Free pdf books online? Or is the only way to "learn by doing"?
Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:2)
Then go to help, and select pov-ray help (not windows help).
The first few chapters are a fanTAStic tutorial.
Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:2, Informative)
Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on
Start with the simplest sample scripts and step through e
Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:2)
Learning by doing is fine, but it really helps to read the docs too - that way you'll know that the best way to mark paragraphs is to put the paragraph between <p> and </p> tags. This lets the browser know that the text is a paragraph and render it as the user is used to, leading to the minimum of confusion - especially if the
Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:5, Informative)
Here [povray.org] is a link to the documentation. The first section is a tutorial, the second is a reference for all of the povray features.
The language is very simple, yet includes programming language constructs like loops, variable assignment, and procedures (which can be recursive). Modelling by typing into a text file works suprising well for most things. I have two pieces of advice: 1) use graph paper for initial planning and 2) if you use the same number more than once, declare it as a variable rather than hardcoding it (it makes it easier to tweak the shape of complicated objects later).
Povray takes much longer than 24 hours to learn to use well, but you should be able to learn to program simple scenes with a camera, a light, and some geometry in a few hours.
Recursive macros in POV-Ray (Score:2)
The "FRACTAL" macro here references itself with
Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/ray_tracing [digitalhermit.com]
The link is to a presentation I gave to my LUG on Linux Ray Tracing. It's very basic, but (hopefully) is a good start.
And here I was thinking... (Score:2)
POV? Point Of View Gun? (Score:1)
I was thinking to my self "Self, if your wife see's this, you are in BIG trouble!!!"
Fortunately it is just some lame Persistance of Vision crap.
And you try finding something interesting... (Score:2)
Re:And you try finding something interesting... (Score:1)
Re:And you try finding something interesting... (Score:1, Funny)
This is Slashdot. You're lucky they spelled it right.
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
I expect them to be more advanced than... (Score:2)
rednering contest (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the modelling required... (Score:5, Interesting)
...to make something photorealistic you need to create extreemly high-poly models, plus you need either humungous texture files or to write a dynamic shader. All that takes lots and lots of time.
The only thing that makes that office render not photorealistic is that a lot of the textures are too "perfect" for want of a better word. Look at the filing cabinet in the background, if this was a real office there would be lots of tiny dings and scratches. That kind of thing takes a lot of time to model.
Re:rendering contest (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say a little of both.
I read a very interesting interview quite a while ago in (I think) a Wired magazine article. The topic of discussion was the creation of realistic 3D human models. One point, if I recall, was that you have a lot of leeway as you're moving toward a realisting image, but once you cross a certain line, the absence of the most seemingly benign details will give it away.
I think the same applies to modeling in general. Take the office image for example. The lighting is very good - if you look along the edges where the walls meet the ceiling, you'll see subtle light "spots". It's not that this is anything unique, but that they were rather well done. They're subtle - if they were missing, you might not notice at first, but I can pretty well bet that it would still register- not as something that would be readily identifiable, but something that's just "missing".
If you look at something in real life, and you set yourself to reproduce an exact replica, you're forced to deal with the collective imperfections that make the object what it is. Suffice it to say, straight edges are rarely perfectly straight, but 3D modeling makes it exceedly easy to produce them as such. The challenge is introducing just the right amount of imperfection.
Add in lighting - that's often something that will make or break an image. In fact, lighting is so important (imho), and getting it "right" takes a lot of time and tweaking. When you factor this into the length of time required for a good test render, you may find yourself settling for "not exactly what I want, but good enough."
So, it's a combination of things. Even if someone had a supercomputer at their disposal, I think you'll still see a lot of work that comes close, but just slightly misses the mark for one reason or another.
Re:rendering contest (Score:2)
I might be wrong, but I guess this might be due to the "radiosity" feature of povray. PoV does not use the classical radiosity approach, but a distribuion raytracer with an irradiance cache. These dark specks result from incorr
The problem is they're using POV-Ray (Score:2)
Interesting... (Score:1)
Lots of entries on IRTC use POV (Score:3, Informative)
Linux Mirror Project (Score:1)
Remember when... (Score:3, Funny)
This IS News (Score:4, Funny)
Better (Score:1, Interesting)
The Grand Prize... (Score:1, Funny)
Yawn? cgtalk.com (Score:2)
Want to be *more* impressed? (Score:2)
I was impressed (Score:2)
Re:Irritation (Score:1)
Try pounding them with a large sledgehammer. I guarentee 100% that the itching will either stop or not be noticable if you keep on pounding. Then you can get back to your POV composition.
Re:The server... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The server... (Score:1)
OTOH, so too has been the renderer as the versions have changed. It seems to render on a Pentium IV 2GHz machine today as slowly as it did on a Celeron 550Mhz with the then current version.
So maybe they're using the server to render at the same time? I dunno...
Re:Yay for POV ray! (Score:1)
I kinda miss those. Now everybody is trying to make a renaissance painting.
Re:Yay for POV ray! (Score:3, Insightful)
Have a look at "The Kitchen" [povcomp.com], it has a reflective-sphere-on-checkered-plane fridge magnet and "POV Flakes" "with checkered board inside!"
Re:Please, don't disrespect Memorial Day (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:How much longer before... (Score:2)