I'm working on my first entry that's going to actually make it to the
contest, and was wondering how long most people spend on their entries to
get everything just perfect..  I ask, because so far, I've sunk a half-dozen
four hour plane flights into my entry, and ever mounting hours in late
evenings and early mornings stolen to work on the entry..

I'm guessing, hours spent is a function of "how much before the deadline you
started", but beyond that..  When are you insanely behind the effort-curve
that the rest of the field is playing on?

And, if "number of hours spent" is a bogus question, how about an
approximate guess on how much time is spent doing the scene, vs. time spent
getting the details exactly right..

Looking forward to the contest.

--
Doug Grim
dgr### [at] acmorg

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My entries typically have somewhere between 120-200 hours in them when
submitted.  Alot of my hours are in tweaking parts of the scene, hence my
code will generally have on/off switches for various features in the render.
For the final render, all the switches are "off" so that all the objects are
included.

As you build a scene, the more features or specialized things you do, your
render time goes up as well.  When sitting working on features, you don't
want to wait for 4 hours before you tweak again.

Another technique is using a test file and rendering an object till it is
complete then adding it into the main picture and placing it in the scene.
You can rack up many hours creating several objects and within a few
minutes, place them exactly where you want them in the scene.

Regards,
Robert J Becraft
aka cas### [at] aolcom

Doug Grim <dgr### [at] acmorg> wrote in message news:39f13169@news.povray.org...
> I'm working on my first entry that's going to actually make it to the
> contest, and was wondering how long most people spend on their entries to
> get everything just perfect..  I ask, because so far, I've sunk a
half-dozen
> four hour plane flights into my entry, and ever mounting hours in late
> evenings and early mornings stolen to work on the entry..
>
> I'm guessing, hours spent is a function of "how much before the deadline
you
> started", but beyond that..  When are you insanely behind the effort-curve
> that the rest of the field is playing on?
>
> And, if "number of hours spent" is a bogus question, how about an
> approximate guess on how much time is spent doing the scene, vs. time
spent
> getting the details exactly right..
>
> Looking forward to the contest.
>
> --
> Doug Grim
> dgr### [at] acmorg
>
>

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Robert J Becraft <cas### [at] aolcom> wrote:
> My entries typically have somewhere between 120-200 hours in them when
> submitted.  Alot of my hours are in tweaking parts of the scene, hence my
> code will generally have on/off switches for various features in the render.
> For the final render, all the switches are "off" so that all the objects are
> included.

I'm probably around here too, maybe slightly more time, but then I don't
have the built up libraries of useful objects that I can steal from (not
that Robert does, but many people do).

> Another technique is using a test file and rendering an object till it is
> complete then adding it into the main picture and placing it in the scene.
> You can rack up many hours creating several objects and within a few
> minutes, place them exactly where you want them in the scene.

I created a viewer that takes any object, scales and translates it, then
places it with the 10 views (6 surfaces of the box + 4 angle views) all at
once.  I do almost all of my designing using the viewer, so I can get an
idea of what the object looks like all the way around.  It sped up the
development of the smaller objects (I tend to over-detail) immensely.

Gepff

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