Michael Hunter <int### [at] onenet> wrote:
> My draft of the rule would not permit a photograph or paint program images
> because these are 2D in nature not generated by 3D rendering.

  The problem is: At which point does a 3D rendering simply become part of
a 2D image composition, to the point that it's not a "rendered 3D image"
anymore?

  Consider two absolute extremes:

1) The submitted image is an original, completely unaltered direct result
from running povray, taking the PNG it produced and submitting it.

2) A 3D renderer was used to render a logo image which is then used in a
Photoshop creation, as a very small logo in one corner of the image, not
even as a part of the composition but as a "signature". Other than the
small logo, everything else has been created directly with Photoshop, with
no 3D rendering whatsoever involved.

  Clearly case #1 is acceptable as a "3D rendered image" and case #2 isn't.
However, where is the line between the two?

  To complicate things even further, consider a third extreme:

3) An image is fully created with pure 2D techniques using Photoshop, and
then this image is used as an image map in a rendering software, which
simply "renders" the image to a file and that's it. *Technically* speaking
the resulting PNG is a pure, unaltered result of a 3D rendering software.
However, it has basically nothing to do with 3D rendering.

  This raises a couple of questions:

- How much post-processing of the rendered image in a non-3D software is
allowed, and why?

- How much 3D modeling is required for an image to be considered a "3D
rendered image", rather than simply abusing a rendering software as a
post-processor for a 2D image?

  As a completely personal opinion, I think *any* kind of post-processing
of the rendered image is cheating, or at least can be used for cheating.

  For example, the old IRTC allowed resizing the rendered image as a post-
processing step. Some people abused this allowance to cheat and get a much
higher-quality antialiasing than what the renderer was able to produce all
by itself (by rendering a very large image and then using a 2D software to
scale it down by averaging pixels, resulting in high-quality antialiasing,
which was *not* the product of the renderer).

  Another allowance of the old IRTC was that it was allowed to change the
gamma, brightness and contrast of the image. I assume that the original
idea was simply that if you had your computer rendering for 2 weeks and
afterwards you noticed that oops, the image is too dark after all, you can
brighten it up a bit. And again, some people abused this to produce visual
effects not achievable with the rendering software itself, by enchancing
certain types of lighting, etc.

  Why do I consider this "cheating"? Because this is a *rendering* compo,
not a generic computer graphics compo. Since this is a rendering compo,
I want to see the direct products of rendering software, not the products
of an image manipulation software like Photoshop. If I want to see images
created with Photoshop, I can google for "photoshop contest" or similar
and get plenty of results. I don't think we need another one of those.

  This principle would of course allow extreme #3 to be submitted. However,
it's then up to the judges to vote it down because there was no real 3D
modelling involved.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message