Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:

> The first floor of my walk-around-inside castle. Took roughly a day to 
> render this at 1280x1024 with AA +Q9, primarily because all the lights 
> are turned on.

Ouch. Maybe light groups would help?

Lutz-Peter

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:403ccf0c$1@news.povray.org...

There is an additional meaning to "light group" which will speed up your
render tremendously even with all the lights on. See here:
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/173/

Excellent project by the way. I'm looking forward to the walkthrough
animation.

 -Shay

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:403cedc2$1@news.povray.org...
|
| I.e., it's not obvious to me how to implement the lights in the
| kitchen (top left), north hall, and west hall, where the west hall
| can see the kitchen, the kitchen can see the west hall and north
| hall, and the north  hall can see the kitchen but not the west
| hall, using only light groups.

You can list the same light source in different light groups. The "west
hall" group could contain the west hall and kitchen lights. The
"kitchen" group could contain the kitchen, west hall, and north hall
lights, or, better, only those west and north hall lights which are
visible from the kitchen.


| I'd have to spend some time thinking about whether I could even do
| such a thing with the current sophistication of the macro language,
| and whether it's worth the "coding" hit to save the render time.

This will convince you. Render this code (better do it at a small
resolution) and then render it a second time with the light_group lines
uncommented.

#local S1 = seed(123);
#default { pigment { rgb 1 } }
#local C1 = 0; #while ( C1 < 1000 )
//  light_group {
    light_source { <rand(S1), rand(S1), rand(S1)> }
    sphere { <rand(S1)-.5, rand(S1)-.5, rand(S1)+1>, .01 }
//  }
#local C1 = C1 + 1; #end

 -Shay

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Cute!

However, I have one comment, one that's more related to
the historical nature of castles. The walls are way too thin.
Old world castles have 6 to 20 feet thick walls. This, of
course, is simple due to the limitation of the materials they
used: stones and some kind of mortar.

Consider:

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~brie/Ireland/Blarney/castle_wall.jpg

as an example...

Best,

    S.

--
Steven Pigeon, Ph. D.
pig### [at] iroumontrealca
"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:403bf00a@news.povray.org...
> The first floor of my walk-around-inside castle. Took roughly a day to
> render this at 1280x1024 with AA +Q9, primarily because all the lights
> are turned on.
>
> I have the whole walk-around bit. Now I need to add the other stairs,
> the other floors, the outdoors, and the macros to do cameras on stairs,
> and then add some nice items like vases on the tables, and so on. Maybe
> some people, if I can find an easy way to get some midieval people I can
> use. :-)
>
> --
> Darren New, San Diego CA USA (PST)
>    I am in geocentric orbit, supported by
>    a quantum photon exchange drive....
>


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

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"Steven Pigeon" <pig### [at] iroumontrealca> wrote in message
news:403e746d$1@news.povray.org...

> Consider:
>
> http://www.csh.rit.edu/~brie/Ireland/Blarney/castle_wall.jpg

You must have an old picture because, certainly by now, with centuries of
people kissing the stone, there must be a thriving colony of bacteria on
there :-)

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:403d0d63$1@news.povray.org...
|
| I'm also not sure how much it would speed up the rendering compared
| to just basically commenting out the lights in rooms I can't see.

If you are willing to do this for every frame of an animation, then
light_groups will not help.

| That is,
| after all, the eventual effect of light groups, right?

If you are rendering only one room at a time, then yes. If you are
rendering several lighted areas at once, like in the posted picture,
then light groups will have the effect of commenting out lights for each
ray rather than each frame.

|
| One renders like 30,000 pps and the other at 400,000pps or
| something,

Extrapolate those numbers to a day long render and it's certainly a
noticeable difference.

 -Shay

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Darren New wrote:
> Shay wrote:
> 
>> If you are willing to do this for every frame of an animation, then
>> light_groups will not help.
> 
> 
> The source is macro-generated. I have a batch file that generates 
> world.pov with the lights for a particular set of cameras, renders them, 
> then regenerates with a different set of lights and rerenders, and etc. 
> So, yeah, I do it for every frame. :-) Of course, that means I can't 
> really easily use the file-queuing feature of povray under windows, so I 
> can generate the batch files, but running them keeps povray appearing 
> and disappearing on the screen. Any interfaceless version of povray for 
> windows? Or is there a command-line switch I missed? Right now I just 
> call pvengine.exe /render blah.pov /exit lots of times, and it's mildly 
> annoying, UI-wise, when I'm trying to work. :-)
you could use "start /min /wait pvengine.exe [...]" for your batchfile, 
this way povray would be started minimized, but i don't know if it 
wouldn't get focus anyway...
bye,
	Marc

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