Severi Salminen wrote:

> What do you mean "your bets are on"? Brute forcers give always better
> looking results. Nobody can claim anything else.

False.

Brute-force rendering may generate more *physically correct* renderings 
- but that does not necessarily correlate with "better looking" results. 
Anybody who's been doing 3D graphics for more than a few days will 
quickly figure that one out. ;-)

(E.g., how many Planet Earth renders have grossly exaggerated atmosphere 
glow because it looks nicer than the physically correct version?)

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Warp wrote:
>>  If you
>> simply want "3D-looking graphics" there are many a lot faster and better
>> options than PovRay.
> 
>   How many of them are for Linux? Of those, how many of them work without
> OpenGL?
> 
>   And if something takes 5 second to render instead of 1, big deal.

Blender? Maybe it requires OpenGL. But what is the problem with OpenGL?
And for web page buttos, GIMP might also be a good candidate.

>> You discard the realism but you get it fast. I'm
>> more interested in photorealism.
> 
>   A 3D button for a webpage doesn't need any more photorealism than what
> POV-Ray can offer in a 1 second render.

Ok, got me on that one :) Yes, rendering web page buttons with brute
force renderer is like killing a mosquito with a nuke. I don't know how
common it is to use POV for creating web page buttons, though...


Care to show what kind of buttons you mean?

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Severi Salminen wrote:

> Ok, got me on that one :) Yes, rendering web page buttons with brute
> force renderer is like killing a mosquito with a nuke. I don't know how
> common it is to use POV for creating web page buttons, though...

I've certainly come across people trying to do this more than a few 
times. [POV-Ray makes it so easy. It's so scriptable...]

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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I've seen some amazing renders of both Indigo and Luxrender (the main 
developer of Lux was an Indigo developer, or so I heard) with 
rendertimes ranging from 10 to 20 hours.  Both interiors and exteriors. 
  Of course, the specs of such machines are well above the current 
desktop standard -- I'm guessing they run in quad-cores from specialized 
architectural firms and the like.

Of course pov-ray and other renderers employing finite-step approaches 
to GI -- radiosity and photon mapping -- also render much faster in such 
machines.

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Invisible wrote:

> Brute-force rendering may generate more *physically correct* renderings
> - but that does not necessarily correlate with "better looking" results.
> Anybody who's been doing 3D graphics for more than a few days will
> quickly figure that one out. ;-)

You are correct: I was really talking about photorealistim. But I don't
think brute-force means you couldn't exaggerate things or create
effects. It just means that the results are more accurate looking. Of
course, if you want to have a large area light which casts sharp
shadows...or transparent objects that create full shadows. :) I wouldn't
consider that a big loss.

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47bc54c3$1@news.povray.org...
> I dunno, These types of renderers do have some interesting applications, I
> could see an architect using them to do a true physical light simulation
> on a building design, using various lighting schemes/time of day, etc..
> But for creating "photorealistic" rendered images, my bets are still on
> raytracers, they're not a physically accurate simulation, but they do a
> decent approximation.

Commercial unbiased renderers are now quite common for product design and
architecture visualisation. For a production house, it's just cheaper to add
a few CPUs (or to rent some time from a render farm) than to spend time
tweaking the GI.

Of course, the latest crop of raytracers/GI engines like Vray or FinalRender
do a fantastic job (speed + quality) but from my experience with
FinalRender - think POV-Ray on steroids - this comes with a hefty price =
dozens of abstract, often arcane parameters to speed up things and prevent
artifacts. Right now these renderers are quite perfect for most jobs
(particularly for animation where speed matters a lot) but in a few years
and some extra cores later, I can see the machines catching up with the
speed requirements of unbiased renderers. In fact, I just saw on TV a
animated commercial rendered with MaxwellRender, so the benefits of this
kind of engine are already there.

G.


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**********************
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- POV-Ray and Poser computer images
- Posters

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Me wants PoV-Ray on steroids

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Severi Salminen <sev### [at] notthissaunalahtifiinvalid> wrote:
> But what is the problem with OpenGL?

  ATI.

> And for web page buttos, GIMP might also be a good candidate.

  It would take me something like 5 minutes to make a good-looking 3D button
with POV-Ray. With the Gimp it would probably take me at least 1 hour, and
it still wouldn't look as good.

  POV-Ray is simply a great tool to create "3D'ish" images like those.
It's easy and fast.

> Ok, got me on that one :) Yes, rendering web page buttons with brute
> force renderer is like killing a mosquito with a nuke. I don't know how
> common it is to use POV for creating web page buttons, though...

  I use POV-Ray relatively often to create small images for different
things, for example at my payjob. It's great for making proof-of-concept
type small images (until the graphical designers make the final versions).

> Care to show what kind of buttons you mean?

  I don't have a concrete example right now.

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                                                          - Warp

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On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:39:24 -0500, delle wrote:

> LuxRender is a Free, Open Source and heavily modified GPL

Where do we find the source code?

I use openSUSE, you don't have packages for that distribution.

Thanks,

Jim

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Mike Raiford wrote:
>  But for creating "photorealistic" rendered images, my bets
> are still on raytracers

this is pure fanboyism.  Those images look far more photorealistic than 
most povray renders, despite their users not being geeks constantly 
tweaking a text file.

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