Hi

On the Fox Family Channel cable network, there is a show called "Show me the
funny". They use a short animation of a football, a basketball, a baseball,
and a soccer ball being shredded in a kitchen blender to introduce humorous
sports film clips. It looks to me very much like this was done with POVray
and the object exploder include file. Does anyone know if it was?

Steven

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There is no way to say "oh look, that was rendered with 3d studio" or "please,
any dope can tell that was done with POV". It is highly unlikely that they would
use a freeware raytracer like POV, when they can afford the more expensive, more
functional packages like Max or Lightwave, or even SGIs.

--
Anthony L. Bennett
http://welcome.to/TonyB

Graphics rendered
by the Dreamachine.

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TonyB <ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet> wrote in message
news:377A75AC.8A8F69D5@panama.phoenix.net...
> There is no way to say "oh look, that was rendered with 3d studio" or
"please,
> any dope can tell that was done with POV".


<insert>

I didn't ask "can anyone look at this and tell me how it was done"

but thank you for so eloquenly and succinctly stating the obvious.
I asked : "does anyone know?"
<more below>

It is highly unlikely that they would
> use a freeware raytracer like POV, when they can afford the more
expensive, more
> functional packages like Max or Lightwave, or even SGIs.


<insert>
judging by posts at comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, there are some
people with e-mail adresses like @pixar.com and @sgi.com
using POV extensively. If you care to debate your position with them, you
might want to join one of the ongoing threads there.


thanks again Steven
<end comment>
> --
> Anthony L. Bennett
> http://welcome.to/TonyB
>
> Graphics rendered
> by the Dreamachine.
>
>

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Steven Durham wrote:

> <insert>
> judging by posts at comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, there are some
> people with e-mail adresses like @pixar.com and @sgi.com
> using POV extensively. If you care to debate your position with them, you
> might want to join one of the ongoing threads there.
> 
> thanks again Steven
> <end comment>

  As one of those people who was involved in the thread in question I would
like to point out you missed the point in that thread. Larry Gritz the
@pixar.com address you mention thinks Pov is a nice quaint little program
but is hardly worth a second glance for the type of work that they do.
Larry is also the author of the program BRMT and helps write a lot of the
software routines that Pixar uses in their productions. They would not
consider even for a moment using a program like Pov-Ray. It's capablilities
are far too limited and lack the modelling interface neccessare for their
modelling tasks. I think Larry gets bored sometimes and likes to play
with the kiddies minds on c.g.r.r. :)

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
news:377AA86A.F79E95CF@pacbell.net...
>
>
> Steven Durham wrote:
>
> > <insert>
> > judging by posts at comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, there are some
> > people with e-mail adresses like @pixar.com and @sgi.com
> > using POV extensively. If you care to debate your position with them,
you
> > might want to join one of the ongoing threads there.
> >
> > thanks again Steven
> > <end comment>
>
>   As one of those people who was involved in the thread in question I
would
> like to point out you missed the point in that thread. Larry Gritz the
> @pixar.com address you mention thinks Pov is a nice quaint little program
> but is hardly worth a second glance for the type of work that they do.
> Larry is also the author of the program BRMT and helps write a lot of the
> software routines that Pixar uses in their productions. They would not
> consider even for a moment using a program like Pov-Ray. It's
capablilities
> are far too limited and lack the modelling interface neccessare for their
> modelling tasks. I think Larry gets bored sometimes and likes to play
> with the kiddies minds on c.g.r.r. :)
>
> --
> Ken Tyler
>
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

OK, maybe I did miss the point of the thread in question, I bow to Mr.
Tylers far greater knowledge of the persons and processes involved.
However I am not talking about "Toy Story" or "Jurassic Park". Just a three
second clip, on a twenty or thirtieth ranked show on a secondary affiliate
of a third rate network. I don't know how well the analogy holds, but often
a proffessional carpenter will find a quaint little hammer a far more
effective solution to a particular problem than his expensive, and
complicated pneumatic nailer

Steven

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Steven Durham wrote:

> OK, maybe I did miss the point of the thread in question, I bow to Mr.
> Tylers far greater knowledge of the persons and processes involved.
> However I am not talking about "Toy Story" or "Jurassic Park". Just a three
> second clip, on a twenty or thirtieth ranked show on a secondary affiliate
> of a third rate network. I don't know how well the analogy holds, but often
> a proffessional carpenter will find a quaint little hammer a far more
> effective solution to a particular problem than his expensive, and
> complicated pneumatic nailer
> 
> Steven

  O.K. I finaly got a chance to catch the show you are refering to and there
is little doubt in my mind that they are not using povray for their animations.
In fact I doubt they are using any kind of raytracing package to produce them.
Most likely they are using a simple phong shading or scanline rendering system.
They are not of very high quality and quite likely made in a program much LIKE
lightwave or maybe 3ds max but not necessarily those packages.

  Pov could produce animations like that but they would look much better in
my opion :)

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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>   Pov could produce animations like that but they would look much better in
> my opion :)

That brings up a question I've wondered about lately. We have a guy
where I
work that just wangled himself a new SGI Octane with Maya, and has yet
to
even play with Maya to do any work for the TV station. I'd love to be
able
to generate some knock-your-socks-off stuff with POV to show him just
how
much money he wasted. However, I have no idea how to get a POV animation
onto
videotape with sufficient quality to demonstrate (which means,
basically, no
MPEG-1 compression).

Is anyone using POV to do broadcast TV animation? If so, how are you
getting
NTSC video out of the computer? How are you doing full 60-field
playback?

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Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote:
============

  Are you the actor?

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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>Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote:
>============
>
>  Are you the actor?



Tony Bennett
=============

Am I the singer? ;)

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Wow. I didn't know so many famous people were using POV-Ray.

Jon

TonyB <ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet> wrote in message
news:384fcbf4@news.povray.org...
> >Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote:
> >============
> >
> >  Are you the actor?
>
>
>
> Tony Bennett
> =============
>
> Am I the singer? ;)
>
>

Post a reply to this message

TonyB wrote:
> 
> >Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote:
> >============
> >
> >  Are you the actor?
> 
> Tony Bennett
> =============
> 
> Am I the singer? ;)

Elvis Presely
=============

Am I the King ?

-- 
Elvis

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Steve Martin wrote:
> 
> >   Pov could produce animations like that but they would look much better in
> > my opion :)
> 
> That brings up a question I've wondered about lately. We have a guy
> where I work that just wangled himself a new SGI Octane with Maya, and
> has yet to even play with Maya to do any work for the TV station. I'd
> love to be able to generate some knock-your-socks-off stuff with POV
> to show him just how much money he wasted. However, I have no idea how
> to get a POV animation onto videotape with sufficient quality to demonstrate
> (which means, basically, no MPEG-1 compression).
> 
> Is anyone using POV to do broadcast TV animation? If so, how are you
> getting NTSC video out of the computer? How are you doing full 60-field
> playback?

I know little on the subject but I suspect it will take a combination of
both hardware and software to do a good job of it. You can easily set up
POV-Ray to render the correct frame rate but what screen resolution to
use and how to get it out of the machine is not something I have worked
with. Interim storage space is an issue too. Let's say you use a screen
resolution of 640x480 at 60 frames per second output to .tga images.
That would be about 5.4 megs of images for each minute of video. As you
can see local storage space on your computer is going to be a serious
factor.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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>Elvis Presely
>=============
>
>Am I the King ?

I know that was you, Ken... ;) You are the King of Links, though. =)

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>   Are you the actor?

Nope, just a poor schmoe who likes to dinck with computers.

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Ken wrote:

> That would be about 5.4 megs of images for each minute of video. As you
> can see local storage space on your computer is going to be a serious
> factor.

er, um, 324 megs for each minute of video.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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> I know little on the subject but I suspect it will take a combination of
> both hardware and software to do a good job of it.

True, and I anticipate that it will take a video card that can generate
NTSC video rather than the RGB used in a typical SVGA monitor.

> You can easily set up
> POV-Ray to render the correct frame rate but what screen resolution to
> use and how to get it out of the machine is not something I have worked
> with.

I can handle that, too. I can get my hands on the specs for the
horizontal
and vertical pixel numbers for active video.

> Interim storage space is an issue too. Let's say you use a screen
> resolution of 640x480 at 60 frames per second output to .tga images.
> That would be about 5.4 megs of images for each minute of video.

Got two 1G partitions doing nothing, just waiting to be filled.

I guess my question really boils down to "what could I use to generate
a broadcast-quality movie from a bunch of TGAs?" I'm not happy at all
with the quality I get in my MPEG-1 movies using mpeg_encode from
Berkeley, especially since my system cannot keep up with the demand
of decoding 30 frames per second at 720 x 486. There's gotta be another
way.

BTW, Ken, thanks for the serious response. The name in my sig is my
real name, not an alias, but it prompted silly responses that
were no help at all from everyone but you.

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Steve Martin wrote:
> 
> > I know little on the subject but I suspect it will take a combination of
> > both hardware and software to do a good job of it.
> 
> True, and I anticipate that it will take a video card that can generate
> NTSC video rather than the RGB used in a typical SVGA monitor.

That is what I was thinking but alas I know so little on the subject.

> I guess my question really boils down to "what could I use to generate
> a broadcast-quality movie from a bunch of TGAs?" I'm not happy at all
> with the quality I get in my MPEG-1 movies using mpeg_encode from
> Berkeley, especially since my system cannot keep up with the demand
> of decoding 30 frames per second at 720 x 486. There's gotta be another
> way.

  You might try contacting Larry Gritz from Pixar either through e-mail or
target a question in the renderman group. I'm sure that with his affiliation
with Pixar he knows how they send digital output to a format that the movie
producers use for video productions.
 
> BTW, Ken, thanks for the serious response. The name in my sig is my
> real name, not an alias, but it prompted silly responses that
> were no help at all from everyone but you.

   Well my Elvis persona jumped on the bandwagon for a moment but I
got over that and felt a serious reply was needed in response to the
original question.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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It sounds cheap, but Avid Cinema Soft Pak, and a ATI All In Wonder Capture
card work great.  For digital recording it offers several CODECS and an
option to record out to a VCR and it's only $99 through PC Connections
(software only) ATI Card is more.  Try www.avidcinema.com for more info.

My reference is that I'm the Director of Multimedia Resources at a tech
college in NH, and I use it for our productions.

It's a full blown editor that you can import all frames or a finished clip.
Edit, wipes, and more and it's native format is .mov from quicktime, very
clear.  However it needs a capture card to even install.

Goodluck,

Dean (Future POVer)
Steve Martin <sma### [at] usitnet> wrote in message
news:384FB94C.FB7C87BE@usit.net...
> >   Pov could produce animations like that but they would look much better
in
> > my opion :)
>
> That brings up a question I've wondered about lately. We have a guy
> where I
> work that just wangled himself a new SGI Octane with Maya, and has yet
> to
> even play with Maya to do any work for the TV station. I'd love to be
> able
> to generate some knock-your-socks-off stuff with POV to show him just
> how
> much money he wasted. However, I have no idea how to get a POV animation
> onto
> videotape with sufficient quality to demonstrate (which means,
> basically, no
> MPEG-1 compression).
>
> Is anyone using POV to do broadcast TV animation? If so, how are you
> getting
> NTSC video out of the computer? How are you doing full 60-field
> playback?

Post a reply to this message