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is there any way to convert 3d studio max images into povray?
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Eitan Tal wrote:
>
> is there any way to convert 3d studio max images into povray?
See my links page -> 3D programs -> conversion programs
--
Ken Tyler
1100+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html
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Also just a hint from experience, you might want to re-scale the objects
before you convert them across to POV-Ray, depending on the WUS you have
used in MAX. That way you won't hit the major or minor number limits.
Also, for NURBS, remember to set up the Adaptive Scene Degradation for
design mode as you would for render mode so that when you export it exports
with the correct number of triangles, and not the Design Mode degraded
version.
Ken <tyl### [at] pacbell net> wrote in message
news:37EC0382.EE394C09@pacbell.net...
>
>
> Eitan Tal wrote:
> >
> > is there any way to convert 3d studio max images into povray?
>
> See my links page -> 3D programs -> conversion programs
>
> --
> Ken Tyler
> 1100+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
> http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html
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On Fri, 24 Sep 1999 23:46:27 +0200, Eitan Tal <eit### [at] netvisionnetil>
wrote:
>is there any way to convert 3d studio max images into povray?
On Mon, 12 Jul 1999 00:58:21 +0200, "Eitan Tal" <eit### [at] netvisionnetil>
wrote:
> [..]and then convert it into povray.
You have verified what many other people have discovered - that the
raytraced output of freeware POV-Ray can be superior to high-dollar
commercial software. Thank you for this revelation.
--
Alan
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> You have verified what many other people have discovered - that the
> raytraced output of freeware POV-Ray can be superior to high-dollar
> commercial software. Thank you for this revelation.
Not necessarily, but a huge sight faster ;) You've got to remember that
you're not just paying for a renderer with MAX, you're paying for an
animation system, IK, NURBS modeller, network renderer, full modelling
environment (spacewarps, grids, realtime zoom, real time
pan/roll/camera/shaded preview), real time render testing, video post
effects system, non-linear motion editor etc.
Being able to model something visually is worth everything to a professional
modeller, otherwise it just takes too much time!
The new MAX R3 I hate to say whips POV-Ray in rendering quality if used
right, MAX R2.5 is still about even with it I think (in the raytracing
section anyway, and MAX is a huge amount faster in the scanliner).
It's just a shame that POV-Ray can't do specific lighting or translucency or
I'd render to it all the time (the specific lighting is especially hard to
get around, I use it all the time now)
Also, the textures in MAX can far beat the textures in POV-Ray, having the
ability to control ambient, bump, diffuse, reflection, refraction,
displacement, shininess, ior, self-illumination etc all directly by ANY map
type (bitmap, precedural, multi-layer, real time capture etc) is great for
fine-tuning and making very detailed textures.
The real point in this is:
TIME... sure, someone could render an image just as good in POV-Ray as in
MAX, but it would take soooo much longer to design that image in POV-Ray
than it would in MAX, and time is of the essence with all professional
graphic artists. That's what you're paying for with MAX, ease of use and
power in modelling.
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>It's just a shame that POV-Ray can't do specific lighting or translucency
or
>I'd render to it all the time (the specific lighting is especially hard to
>get around, I use it all the time now)
What's "specific lighting"? And wasn't somebody working on a patch for
translucency?
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I read your post with interest, I must say. I am personally a poor student,
and cannot afford something like 3D-studio MAX. (My interest for
three-dimensional visualisation is mre based on the technical, too.)
Therefore, I have been using POV-ray for about four years and is quite happy
with it.
You are perfectly right when you say that you gain a lot by having 3dsmax,
but what is the gain compared to the price? In my opinion, POV-ray is *much*
download POV-ray?
And there is a subtle difference between 3DS and POV that is important: POV
is based on *models* of mathematical objects: A sphere *is* an exact sphere;
so is a cylinder, torus, and so forth. In polygon-based rendering systems
you only have *approximations* of the object. It's easy too observe a
polygon-based sphere, i.e. a polyhedron, as opposed to a ray-traced sphere
when you've seen it enough!
I agree that the texture definition in POV-ray is too simplistic. There are
several additions that I believe would not be a too big wish.
1. Additive/subtractive procedural textures. In the current release of
POV-ray we have the ability to combine textures in some simple ways. But
what if you coud use something like:
normal {
bumps*0.4 + ripples*0.6 - sin(crackle * 2*pi)
}
I would define this as the addition of bumps, ripples and the subtraction of
a sine, with argument taken from cracle. Is far as I know, the textures are
defined in 3-space, resulting in a single float value. Then this would not
be too difficult to implement.
By adding several ripples, for example:
ripples + abs(sin(ripples*2*pi))
would generate a heave weather storm ocean surface!
The procedural texture definition would of course also give meaning with
pigment, finish et.c.
2. User defined proceural surfaces. The user should be able to define
something like:
pigment {
use_procedural sin(y) * cos (x) + x*y*sin(z);
color_map {
...
}
}
(The syntax is merely illustrative.)
You take the 3-space coordinates of the surface point, and apply the
Many of the built-in textures could be rewritten:
onion = sqrt(x*x+y*y+z*z) mod 1.
wood = sqrt(x*x+y*y) mod 1
gradient = y mod 1
et.c.
About the rendering time, I am not sure. How long would it take to render
1.2 million spheres in 3ds? I've done it in POV-ray, and it takes about 2
minutes. Remember that each sphere should be an *exact* mathematical model.
In 3ds you would use perhaps twenty polygons for a small sphere. That
becomes a massive 24 million polygons, which naturally is much less
effective use of memory and rendering time. A sphere in POV-ray uses about
as much power from the computer, both in memory and rendering time, as a
polygon. This was just an example; I'm sure there are more.
Lance Birch skrev i meldingen <37f0cfd5@news.povray.org>...
>> You have verified what many other people have discovered - that the
>> raytraced output of freeware POV-Ray can be superior to high-dollar
>> commercial software. Thank you for this revelation.
>
>Not necessarily, but a huge sight faster ;) You've got to remember that
>you're not just paying for a renderer with MAX, you're paying for an
>animation system, IK, NURBS modeller, network renderer, full modelling
>environment (spacewarps, grids, realtime zoom, real time
>pan/roll/camera/shaded preview), real time render testing, video post
>effects system, non-linear motion editor etc.
>
>Being able to model something visually is worth everything to a
professional
>modeller, otherwise it just takes too much time!
>
>The new MAX R3 I hate to say whips POV-Ray in rendering quality if used
>right, MAX R2.5 is still about even with it I think (in the raytracing
>section anyway, and MAX is a huge amount faster in the scanliner).
>
>It's just a shame that POV-Ray can't do specific lighting or translucency
or
>I'd render to it all the time (the specific lighting is especially hard to
>get around, I use it all the time now)
>
>Also, the textures in MAX can far beat the textures in POV-Ray, having the
>ability to control ambient, bump, diffuse, reflection, refraction,
>displacement, shininess, ior, self-illumination etc all directly by ANY map
>type (bitmap, precedural, multi-layer, real time capture etc) is great for
>fine-tuning and making very detailed textures.
>
>The real point in this is:
>
>TIME... sure, someone could render an image just as good in POV-Ray as in
>MAX, but it would take soooo much longer to design that image in POV-Ray
>than it would in MAX, and time is of the essence with all professional
>graphic artists. That's what you're paying for with MAX, ease of use and
>power in modelling.
>
>
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Have you checked out the superpatch and its functions? I think you can do
what you want to do with textures using it.
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> What's "specific lighting"? And wasn't somebody working on a patch for
> translucency?
Specific lighting was discussed a while ago too but I'm not sure if anyone
did anything about it.
It allows you to say, light a sphere with a light that affects no other
objects, or, have a light that lights all object except some certain
objects. Or, also for example, it allows you to make the light ONLY affect
specular highlights or ONLY affect the diffuse highlights on an object.
Using that you can create some very detailed lighting sets. One usage that
I found a massive bonus was when I was designing and interface in 3D that
had a lot of little pipes and rings in it. I'd used a heap of little red
lights and set them to specifically affect onto the specular highlights of
only certain objects so that each little piped section could have a nice red
highlighted tinge to it, while all the other objects had a directional
ambient diffuse tinge.
Another REALLY useful feature of the modelling system is being able to pick
a light and align it by using normal to light alignment. You just select
the light and click on Normal Alignment and you then run the mouse over an
objects surface and it places the light so that the highlight is where your
mouse is on the object. Excellent for fine tuning.
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I can understand your point of view perfectly... but...
> You are perfectly right when you say that you gain a lot by having 3dsmax,
> but what is the gain compared to the price? In my opinion, POV-ray is
*much*
> download POV-ray?
OK, here's the deal. Can you imagine modelling and animated something like
Lost in Space intro sequences from the movie in POV-Ray? VERY time
consuming and I assure you it just wouldn't be worth even trying to get the
same quality.
Think of it this way, if you take something for free like POV-Ray, you end
up spending WAY too much time and you get results (in a time constraint)
that aren't as good as they should be. If you go for something high-end
like Maya or Softimage, you can get it done in time and with excellent
quality, but you end up paying WAY too much for the software and the
hardware to use it!
The middle is MAX, it runs on NT/95/98 and doesn't require the massive
processing power that Softimage and Maya do. Meanwhile, it lets you get the
job done very quickly.
Can you imagine paying for 10 artists to work around the clock doing an
intro sequence in POV-Ray, compared to paying 10 artists working normal
hours and getting the job done quicker with MAX? The cost of the software
becomes very marginal.
Also, MAX is designed specifically for people that need to get things done
FAST. Take for instance its video post system and its real time motion
bluring. The motion blur is the BEST I've seen from an NT/9x based
renderer, and not only that but it's lightning fast. Try to do that in
POV-Ray and you'll either have to make a special renderer or render the
image 20 times and average them out (which takes a long time!).
Also, the video post allows for extended capabilities of the renderer, like
adding glows, highlights, crossfades, merges, wipes, fades, lens flares,
depth blurring, texturing, non-linear editing of clips, etc etc to rendered
images. I can tell you from experience there is no way I could have done
that in POV-Ray.
Next, the modeller. The modeller would have to be the most powerful part of
MAX. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in real time, with a
shaded preview, and automatic real time rendering to a video system (like
Perception). This is invaluable. It also does real time media based
particles system rendering in the viewports!
The use of "Superpatch"-esque Spacewarps introduces further enhancements of
the system. Any object can be bent, contorted, twisted etc in any way, in
real time, and also animated. All sections of all settings in MAX can be
keyframed using normal keyframe input methods and setting or real time
capture devices (MIDI, motion capture etc).
I could go on and on and on about all this but I think you're getting the
point (I haven't even touched on character animation yet! aka, the Dancing
Baby).
> And there is a subtle difference between 3DS and POV that is important:
POV
> is based on *models* of mathematical objects: A sphere *is* an exact
sphere;
> so is a cylinder, torus, and so forth. In polygon-based rendering systems
I realise this, and that's the powerful part of POV-Ray, it's a TRUE
raytracer. However, polygon based systems have their advantages over
equation based systems too. For example, there are no real time previews,
there are no real time rendering methods, no real time warpages. And in
fact it's usually quite hard in POV-Ray (unless you're very good at the
Superpatch) to bend an object say, with an FFD (Free Form Deformation)
method. Polygon systems allow you to do things that just aren't possible
with equation based renderers.
Also things like (back to the modeller here) NURBS just aren't possible to
do in POV-Ray without another helper modeller. NURBS modelling is one of
the most powerful parts of MAX, along with its built in character animation
system (Character Studio, which is a combination of Physique and Biped).
Biped does all the motion work, which allows you to take any skelaton model
and animate it, and then fit it onto any mesh object (it will automatically
resize everything). Physique allows all the things such as tendon
stretches, muscle buldges etc to take place in real time through spline
"painting". An interesting part of Biped is being able to animate a mesh
person just by placing the imaginary footsteps on the ground. It works out
all the arm swinging, head tilting, running speeds etc for you.
> 2. User defined proceural surfaces. The user should be able to define
> something like:
>
> pigment {
> use_procedural sin(y) * cos (x) + x*y*sin(z);
> color_map {
> ...
> }
> }
Yes, I think that POV-Ray (while not trying to put it down here, it IS a
great renderer!) is lacking a little in the surfaces and texture side.
I like to be able to see how a texture will appear as I change values for
colour, maps, surface bump mapping etc etc in real time and then being able
to apply it just by dragging it off onto the object.
When it comes to procedural textures, I think that the Superpatch can do
this can't it? (by user defined equations I mean)
Anyway, off to render some stuff :)
But first, here is an image I did in MAX in about 30 minutes.
http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/lancebirch/thezone/max_crystal_ball.html
It uses specific lighting, volumetric object-contained fog, particle systems
with 6 gravity reactors (looks kewl when animated!!!), twisted loft objects,
raytraced reflections, video post glow and lens flare effects and I think
that's about it. Render time is about 2 minutes.
Althought the image isn't that great, it was the first image I made with
MAX, and I still like it :)
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