Hi Tim,

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts
with me & the group!

I imagine your "main problem" (you mentioned below)
can be solved by simply making an intermediate program
which outputs a .POV input file - the "random" stuff can
then be hardcoded into the "POV" source, so there's no
need to work with complicated "rand()" formulas when
drawing stuff?

Anyhow - are you interested in having a go?  If you really
can't do "faces" - that's OK - so long as you can generate
"abstract" (or anything else) images which are sufficiently
distinct (given differing random input) that "Joe User" will
be able to choose one (out of 16 or so), and later remember
which one he chose - that's the essence of the system I'm
looking for.

As for rendering - the images will be presented to the user in
a grid (probably 16 at a time) - and will be small: postage-
stamp-sized, so I imagine a decent 3ghz pentium should be
able to draw these for moderate loads in near-real-time; and
if not, some kind of caching or pre-generation can easily be
worked out (or quality and image size could be reduced, or
more PCs thrown at the problem, or whatever...)

Chris.


"Tim Nikias v2.0" <tim### [at] gmxde> wrote in message
news:3f1ea8e6$1@news.povray.org...
> Well, it sounds like a fun thing to do, and it
> isn't than complicated really. To take a string,
> divide it into different parts, then use these
> as base for the rand()-Stream, that's not
> very difficult. Actually, I've done that for
> years. But it would involve POV-Ray
> as the raytracing engine.
>
> I see a problem in the precalculation of
> images. One could easily create tons of
> abstract images based on a random-stream.
> But generating images, like faces (though
> cartoonish like ones would probably be
> sufficient), isn't so easy to do. My main
> problem is that there would have to be a routine
> which will hand the string to the image-file.
>
> For example, I could easily create some scene
> which will take a certain file (like "keyword.inc")
> which has a string inside (with quotes at beginning
> and end, e.g. "thisisthekeyword") and render an
> image from that. I could even take the keyword,
> joggle it around and render a sequence of random
> images directly (if file I/O is supported so that I can
> keep an ever evolving random-number somewhere).
>
> Another problem lies in the speed of rendering
> with POV-Ray, which would mean that there'd
> be either waiting when loading the password-screen,
> or precalculation of images involved. You can
> email me for details if you like, but I can't make promises
> just yet.
>
> Regards,
> Tim
>
> -- 
> Tim Nikias v2.0
> Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
>
>
> > Nobody replied.
> >
> > Is anyone here interested?
> >
> >
>
>
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