On 13-1-2010 7:59, nemesis wrote:
> Amazing the amount of self-denial one has to go in order to cope with excuses
> for why his favorite rendering engine should not evolve.
> 
> Sabrina Kilian <ski### [at] vtedu> wrote:
>>> Can you imagine what povray could do comparatively without getting
>>> boiled down by unbiased techniques?!
>>>
>> Those unbiased techniques are what allows them to appear so fast. The
>> video appears to be getting 10fps tops, and between 2 and 4 the rest of
>> the time. Yes, unbiased rendering is slower to achieve the same image as
>> a biased renderer, however you can stop it much sooner and get a full
>> resolution picture. That picture just has more noise.
>>
>> Your question comes out as if you were asking "Could you imagine what
>> povray could do by using unbiased techniques for single sample speed
>> increases without being unbiased?" I think the quickest answer would be
>> "Not really, but set the max depth to 1 and lets see what the pictures
>> look like."
> 
> No, my question is merely like:  "hey, I can render scenes in povray in seconds
> rather than dozens of minutes.  And truly complex ones in a few hours rather
> than days."

You will still have the general increase in power, so if you need a 30 
time increase, just wait 7.5 years.

> I'm not impressed with that demo's noisy 4fps display.  I'm impressed to see
> scenes with full light transport phenomena set that usually take 1 hour to
> denoise being noise-free in a couple of minutes.
> 
> This is the future:  tapping all that hidden power that was being ignored so far
> because we insist on using a lame-O chip geared at word processing to do math
> operations.

That remark merely shows that you don't know anything about the history 
and design of computers, or choose to ignore that.

Anyway, the best we can hope for is a continuation of POV along the 
lines that we are currently following. Hopefully there will be an 
offspring (possibly GPU based) that will be able to parse POV scenes and 
generate a preview of less quality but in much smaller time. When that 
will get to the same quality as the main development line they might be 
merged. The main problem is that there is not enough man-power to do 
this. You have indicated that you don't have the skills. I might have 
some, but I don't have the time. Most people here fall in either one of 
these categories. So we just have to hope that someone comes along with 
a coincidence of time and skills.

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