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You see something in the real world and you think "Hey! How did they get that
effect?"
... You can remember back to a time when you thought
raytracing was a guy named Ray sitting at a desk tracing.
... You got all the jokes in Reboot's 3rd season.
... With every object you see, you wonder how you would create
that with a raytracer.
You talk to you girlfriend about nothing but raytracing, and your girlfriend
understands everything you say.
... your scene files are larger than the pictures they generate.
... you know the teapot bezier patches by heart.
... you have had the urge to recreate your house in POV-Ray. (!)
... you wake up to find you have already coded half you scene file in your
sleep.
If you look outside the window and ask yourself what the particle
density of the current sky is...
You read each posting to this thread.....
"
>You're watching Bay Watch on the telly, see Pamela A. walking by and
>shout out 'Great bump mapping !'
>...
>if you have ever seen her from the side, you would know that that was not
>bump mapping; that was displacement mapping. sheesh! :)
>
>...you wonder how many CSG operations she has had.
"
... you take a photo course just to learn how to get the lighting right.
... you read about an algorithm or datastructure and your first thought
is: "How can I use this to speed up raytracing?" (!)
You've convinced your boss that raytracing is really an integral part of your
job title. (and you really don't work in a position that requires it) "!"
...You stop working on a scene even before you render it because you
believe it is pointless to make an image if there's no hope of it
looking real.
...You want to cheat and look at nature's source code.
...You go back and re-learn all that stuff they taught you in
engineering school so that you can make more realistic objects.
...A load average above 4.00 means your actual work is only getting
25% of the CPU time. Score.
...You think using photoshop is cheating.
>As above, and the scene renders exactly the way you want, the *very*
>*first* *time*.
you can look at a POV script and tell how long it will take to render, to
the nearest 1/10th of a second.
you post to this thread :)
..You converted POV-Ray into an operating system; now you've got all the
system resources to do your renderings (I have thought about this for a long
time now).
..You wonder if the human eye uses ray-tracing, and at what it's frames per
second rate is?
.. You invented glasses that can be configured to use variable
resolution (eg. 320x240, 640x480, etc.), with POV-Ray style switches for
other effects (eg. anti-aliasing, radiosity, etc.)
* When you start making up "You know you have been raytracing too long"
jokes! :)
>.. you quinta boot your home PC to try most versions of POV.
>DOS, W95, WNT, OS/2 and Linux to date)
You can recite your high school Trig book from memory.
* You look at those triangular road signs which have a square
background.... and wonder why they didn't just alpha-channel them!
* You can write POV files in your sleep... and do!
> Another point of interest. I went and saw Lost world last weekend. Did
> anyone else notice the facets on the opening Universal globe? It was
> pretty poorly done.
>
>>...Now you know you have been raytracing too long. ;)
* Your friends are used to the fact that you will suddenly stop
walking in order to look at objects and figure out how to do
them as CSGs.
* The alarm clock goes off, and you try thinking:
object { SnoozeButton translate y*-0.25 }
... and then can't figure out why the alarm keeps ringing.
* You find yourself fascinated by things other people don't even
notice.
* You own _Toy Story_, have watched it at least two dozen times, and
know stupid trivia like the number of different tile textures they
used on the floor of the foyer in Sid's house, but you forget what
the plot is.
* You flame the creator of a humourous raytracing list for including
_Toy Story_ because it wasn't done using a raytracer.
* You ask your non-mathematically-inclined friends if they know the
formula for a Bezier patch, hoping that they actually might.
* Other people upgrade their computers so they can play Quake and
strangle themselves with Office 95. *You* upgrade so you can
render faster.
* You find yourself wishing you'd paid attention in math class to all
those formulae you thought you'd never have any use for in real
life.
* Even though you're anti-Micro$oft, you seriously consider putting a
Win95 partition on your hard drive just so you can use sPatch.
* You look at a wall with a jeweller's loupe in order to figure out
its pigment/normal/finish pattern. When you leave, other people
cluster around the spot to find out what you were looking at.
* Other people's Images directories contain N00D G1F$ downloaded from
the Net. Your Images directory contains raytraces that you upload
*to* the Net.
* Even though you've explained raytracing to them, your family
doesn't really understand what you're talking about, and they
wonder why you won't just admit you took those pictures with
a camera.
* People around you are astounded by the computer-animated tails they
put on babies in The X-Files. You complain that it looks fake
because they didn't bother to put in the tails' shadows.
* You spend 11 days on a makefile for a *strange* flavor of Unix, just
to 'do a POV benchmark'.
* You model something perfectly by hand, and then spend 3 weeks writing
a useless POV utility to do the exact same thing.
* Spend more than 10 render attempts to try and 'find' an object in your
scene file.
* Dream of real-time raytraced games and game engines.
* Remember when POV-Ray 1.0 was new, and POVCad was the only Windows
modeller around?
* You own (and USE) a micrometer for scaling objects to raytrace.
* You've ever thought or said out-loud, "I'll bet I can raytrace that!"
...You were ever dragged out of a theater for yelling "Cheap rasterized
graphics!!!" in the middle of Toy Story.
...You have ever freeze framed Toy Story.
...You cannot go anywhere without thinking at least 5 times: "I wonder how I
could render that..." "!"
...You have ever gotten in a flame war over various rendering softwares. "!"
...You have ever snuck out of your bedroom to moniter the progress of an
overnight render. "!"
...You have ever wondered at breakfast what the ior of syrup is. "!"
...Anyone has ever told you: "WOW!!! You make 3d images on your computer?!"
or something similar. "!"
...You rolled your eyes after you were asked that. "!"
...You have ever said "I don't need no steenking modellers!!!" "!"
...You have ever "Hard-Coded" a bezier patch.
... You install voice recognition software to use in your script editor
and a month later find yourself using a tape recorder to speak for
you because your voice is shot.
>This big, ugly 300 pound guy with a nasty look walks right
>up to you, and all you can say is:
>
>"You know, I did this neat bump map once that looks just
>like the zits on your face, with a color map that also
>resembles your blotchy skin. Amazing coincidence, huh?"
>1)The sun hurts your eyes.
>
>2)When people ask you, "What's up?", you reply "Y", and they say, "I was
just
>wondering", and you say, "well now you know". (Abbot and Costello at
SIGGRAPH?)
>
>3)If you are offended by #2, you've probably been using Moray too long.
>
>4)You tell your son or daughter they must go to community college so you
can
>afford to get a quad alpha because these scenes take too damn long to
render!
>
>5)You spent more time with your computer then you do your family.
>
>6)You have to buy a new computer to do your homework on because the other 5
are
>still rendering that cool finale of 'Godzilla meets the Julia
monster...with
>volumetric lights'.
>
>7) You're the only person in the world that doesn't think that dancing baby
>is cute.
>
>8)You actually read all the documentation that comes with programs.
>
>9)You hate games, but you buy Riven just to look at the pictures.
>
>10)Possible names for children:
>Ray
>Voxel
>Max
>Mandel
>Tracy
>Julia
>Vector
>Nurb
A co-worker nearly kills himself over losing an hour's
worth of work after a computer crash, and you just
calmly shrug your shoulders and say, "Is that all?"
You stop using a protractor to measure angles because
you can do it just by looking.
You know how far away a scene's light source is just
by looking at the shadows.
You can't look at any raytraced image without thinking
up ways on how to improve it.
You go to your shrink and, trembling heavily, discuss
your deep anxiety about if raytracing will ever produce truly
photographic-quality images before you die.
You seriously entertain thoughts about learning C
so you can improve POV-Ray without waiting for the
POV Team to do it.
You've gained twenty pounds sitting at the computer,
but can't tell because your beard covers your stomach.
You thought the infamous Book of Questions would have
deeper stuff in it, like 'If you could only use one
renderer, which would it be?', etc.
You can tell which programs were used to create an image.
You find yourself daydreaming for hours on end what it
would be like to go back in time and give Michealangelo
a decent raytracer.
You concentrate so hard on the effects watching 'Toy Story'
that you honestly don't have a clue as to what the story was about.
You loudly deride someone else's interpretation of a
raytraced scene, despite the fact that his wrists are
way thicker than your biceps.
Your spouse accidentally tripping over your PC's power
cord and interrupting your complex rendition seems to
be adequate grounds for divorce.
After learning that the warden will let you have a PC
in your jail cell, the prospect of a ten-year prison sentence
doesn't seem so bad. In fact, the years will go by pretty
quick, you say to yourself.
You can figure out how long an image will take to render
even before it starts.
You can no longer tell the difference between the
top raytracing book and the 'Raytracing for Dummies' book.
To you, they're both hopelessly uninformed.
After only twenty seconds, the average person has absolutely
no frigging idea what you're talking about.
You have to produce a report for your boss before noon,
but can't bear the thought of simply copying a plain pie chart
from Excel, so you get someone else to do it. Afterwards,
you totally disrupt the meeting by throwing up after
accidentally looking at the page with the pie chart in it.
You resign the fact that printing uses CMYK instead of RGB
to one of those tests God gave to Job; otherwise life
would be too painful to go on.
A lifelong friendship ends after a bitter dispute over
whether the Imperial attack on the rebel base on Hoth
would have looked better done with CG effects or not.
In the middle of a conversation about child behavior you suddenly proudly
blurt
out that you finished rendering the saucer section of the USS Enterprise,
thereby confusing everybody. ("!")
You can remember the 4 digit decimal equivelents to measurements down to 1
sixtyfourth of an inch. ("!")
You spend over an hour trying to figure out how to difference out that @$%#
shape. ("!")
You take a break from rendering by painting your ceiling black at 2 AM.
("!").
You can't look in any direction without wondering how to render it. "!"
You dream that you are rendering
You wake up and scream when reality hits you.
You call in sick in order to render.
You check the dictionary out of curiosity to see if the
word pov is there.
You spend hours setting up a slide show of all your
pov generated images, then invite friends, neighbors
and relatives over and no one will watch it with you.
Your ophthalmologist examines you for complaints of eye
strain and blurred vision and asks you why the words
Pov, #declare, #include, sphere, translate, rotate, texture,
and pigment are permanently burned into your retina.
or
he looks up at you with blurry eyes and tells you he has
had complaints from some of his other patients. Then
asks if you could recommend any good modeling software
or if you have any good source files he could have.
...You are compiling each response to this thread into a big text file. "!"
...you despise screensavers because they waste precious CPU cycles. (!)
...the first thing you do each morning is see if your job from the
previous night is progressing well/finished. (!)
...your idea of a complete computer is a fast CPU, lots of RAM, and a
means of running POVray. (!)
...you have ever let a single trace run for more than a month. (! -- 36 days)
...80s movies have the funniest special effects.
...you have ever put more than a thousand rendered frames of an animation
into one directory. (!)
...you have archived the above images onto a CD to avoid ever having
to re-render. (!)
You can't decide which one of your kids your
going to sell on the black market so you can
afford the plane ticket to the london PovRay
conference coming up.
You find yourself trying to hack your way
into one of the Cray super computers convinced
if you can get in you could prove real-time
raytracing was possible.
You personal correspondence to friends starts
out with #Dear Linda =
You are certain that if you see one more post
on c.g.r.r. from a newbie asking what the best
raytracing software available is your going to
go out and throttle the hell out of some one just
to get it out of your system.
You are Seriously bummed out because you didn't
get to be the one millionth customer at
povray.org.
You then say oh well only 1,000,001 more to go
how long can that take?
>...you buy model kits just to get measurements from and never actually
>build them. (!)
...you are reading this newsgroup to kill time while a trace runs.
You're sick of your slow-assed PII/400.
You look at a matrix transform and know instantly what it does.
You've made more than two posts to the 4:3 vs 16:9 thread for the
Movie Project.
As above, and the scene renders exactly the way you want, the *very*
*first* *time*.
Intel's R&D department limits you to two calls a day.
Your text editor has macro keys for each and every POV primitive.
Including the poly object and the julia fractal.
You picked the neighborhood you live in by the level of difficulty
you expect to have in modelling it.
...and you've absolutely, positively, been raytracing too long if:
- You use the office PC to embezzle funds but get arrested
because you notice it runs your 3D software faster than
your home machine, and you keep playing with it until the
cops come, all the while totally oblivious to the fact
that you could use the money to buy a faster computer.
- You lose your court case because you keep using your
lawyer's portable to render images, wiping out his
case notes to make room for pictures and meshes.
- The only thing your lawyer can do is deliver a rousing
but ultimately-doomed speech to the jury that "You can't
lock up my client because... he can model really cool stuff."
- You're in prison, the biggest inmate there wants to get
extra 'friendly', and you ask him, "Can I face the computer
so I can keep working on this picture? Thanks."
- They fry your best prison buddy in the chair and all
you can say is "Oh no, the power's fluctuating! My
PC is rebooting! No! NO!!!!"
- Your sentence is extended to life without parole because
you killed an inmate for interrupting a render.
It would be worse if, over your romantic candle-lit dinner for two, she
says, "Why are you crying?" to which you reply, "I've been trying for years
to make a POVray candle flicker like that! boo-hoo..."
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