After so many of you have tried randomized landscape i of course also 
had to try some improvements - here are a few test renders.  In contrast 
to most of the other tests i have seen (which really look good BTW) i 
have made more closeup looks this time which poses additional problems 
(at low sun angles i regularly get completely shadowed images for example).

The difficulty of a truely random system (i.e. where you really render 
the image defined by a random number and not select one of the stream 
that looks best) is to restrict the parameter ranges to regions 
resulting in interesting images and at the same time not make all 
renders look the same.

Since this work seems rather boring to me i got the idea that one could 
have the computer automatically do this using standard optimization 
methods.  There are mainly two problems about this: 1) you need a lot of 
tests to find 'interesting regions in parameter space', especially in 
high dimensional problems like this (i currently have about 100 
parameters). 2) you have to measure the 'quality' of the resulting image 
somehow, preferably automatically of course which is quite impossible.

So my idea is to render a set of images (maybe 10-20, something like a 
reasonable population size for an evolution strategy) in small size 
every week and have a public voting on them and use this vote for the 
ranking.  Then maybe render the highest rated image in larger, generate 
the next step population and start again.

I have not yet worked this out compeletely but it could be an 
interesting thing to try out.

Christoph

-- 
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Last updated 01 May. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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