Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:


> The snow looks good and the bird is a nice addition, but the summer looks
> much too dark in relation to the winter.  The light coming through the
> door is quite bright, so the scenery should be brighter too.  

Well, it's difficult.  To get the angle for the light, we're basically
looking into the sun, so we get lots of shadows on the grass, which darkens
that.  The other problem is that the dynamic ranges basically require that
the winter be brighter (white) than the summer (colored).  Of course, if you
take two photos, one winter and one summer, this will be the case as well.

All the same, I am planning on brightening up the grass.

> For some reason i could not view the movies, media player loaded them, but
> no viewable content.

Hmmm, odd.  Dunno how to fix it, though.

Geoff

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Just in case anyone here wants to see, I've animated the DiS (I know, I'be
cross-posted this to p.b.a as well.)

http://darwin.cwru.edu/~wedig/summer/summer2001.m1v

Be careful, it's 1.3 megs, but I think it's worth it.

So what do people think?  (and yeah, I know the grass needs fixed :/ )

Geoff

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I like the summerside more. Perhaps you should do "Door into Winter" as a
still. :-)
The animation flickers a lot. I've not done many animations myself but I
think it has to do with "jitter", which should be turned off. The
documentation should tell you what to do (I know there is a jitter-keyword
in area-lights - but there might be another one).
I find it interesting, that the winter-side looks darker as the summer when
looked from within the Summer and vice versa.
The winter-forest has to be on both sides because of your method? Otherwise
I would drop the one, which is to be seen at the end of the animation.

IMO you should work on the birds texture a bit ;-)

This is really a nice piece of work. The snow is very good now and the
overall conception is wonderful.

Marc-Hendrik

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Wow, this is even better than I was expecting it to be. The animation really
adds to the illusion.

I know you might just be trying to keep the file size down, but near the end
of the animation the camera seems to start spinning faster. After I watched
the animation a few times I got used to it, but it would be better (in my
opinion, anyway) to maintain a constant speed.

Regards,
Dave

"Geoff Wedig" <wed### [at] darwinepbicwruedu> wrote in message
news:3aa1141c@news.povray.org...
> Just in case anyone here wants to see, I've animated the DiS (I know, I'be
> cross-posted this to p.b.a as well.)
>
> http://darwin.cwru.edu/~wedig/summer/summer2001.m1v
>
> Be careful, it's 1.3 megs, but I think it's worth it.
>
> So what do people think?  (and yeah, I know the grass needs fixed :/ )
>
> Geoff

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In povray.binaries.animations Marc-Hendrik Bremer <Marc-Hendrik.Bremer@t-online.de>
wrote:

> I like the summerside more. Perhaps you should do "Door into Winter" as a
> still. :-)
> The animation flickers a lot. I've not done many animations myself but I
> think it has to do with "jitter", which should be turned off. 

No, it's not jitter, since that is turned off.  It's radiosity, which has
much the same effect from one frame to the next.  If I could do a radiosity
map, similar to the photon map, and use it for all frames, it would not only
speed rendering, but it would get rid of that.  Only other option is to turn
the radiosity settings way up to try to get convergence.

> I find it interesting, that the winter-side looks darker as the summer when
> looked from within the Summer and vice versa.
> The winter-forest has to be on both sides because of your method? Otherwise
> I would drop the one, which is to be seen at the end of the animation.

Actually no.  I could drop them from the end of the animation, or replace it
with something else without changing the forest at the beginning.  They're
completely independent.  But I wanted something there, so I kept it. ;)

> IMO you should work on the birds texture a bit ;-)

Yeah, it's quite simple, and most of the detail disappears when the
animation kicks in (in fact, detail is lost pretty badly when I mpg'd
things), making it look like a little red blob.

> This is really a nice piece of work. The snow is very good now and the
> overall conception is wonderful.

Thanks.  I've become fascinated with rendering things that Just-Cant-Be
lately.  I'm thinking of playing with this concept for the Fortress round,
but not sure what I'll do.

Geoff

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In povray.binaries.animations Dave Blandston <grasshoppah@earthlink.net> wrote:

> Wow, this is even better than I was expecting it to be. The animation really
> adds to the illusion.

Thanks.  I hoped it would.

> I know you might just be trying to keep the file size down, but near the end
> of the animation the camera seems to start spinning faster. After I watched
> the animation a few times I got used to it, but it would be better (in my
> opinion, anyway) to maintain a constant speed.

Yeah, and there's an unfortunate flicker there too passing by the tree. 
Mostly, it's due to the low frame rate (20 fps), and my own guesstimates on
how fast someone can turn around, plus the spline doing a fast in the
middle, slow at each end thing.  If I really want to do that, I need to
either focal blur it, or slow it down.  I'll probably slow it down and
rerender the last 2 seconds or so as 3-4 seconds.  Should clean that up.

Geoff

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Geoff Wedig schrieb in Nachricht <3aa1390e@news.povray.org>...
>It's radiosity, which has
>much the same effect from one frame to the next.  If I could do a radiosity
>map, similar to the photon map, and use it for all frames, it would not
only
>speed rendering, but it would get rid of that.  Only other option is to
turn
>the radiosity settings way up to try to get convergence.


Oh OK, didn't know that rad could have this effect too.
In a way that flicking is not even a bad thing. There were/are some
comic-animation's which had some flickering to. It might be a sign of low
quality there but it adds somehow to the life in the animation.

Marc-Hendrik

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In povray.binaries.animations Marc-Hendrik Bremer <Marc-Hendrik.Bremer@t-online.de>
wrote:


> Geoff Wedig schrieb in Nachricht <3aa1390e@news.povray.org>...
>>It's radiosity, which has
>>much the same effect from one frame to the next.  If I could do a radiosity
>>map, similar to the photon map, and use it for all frames, it would not
> only
>>speed rendering, but it would get rid of that.  Only other option is to
> turn
>>the radiosity settings way up to try to get convergence.


> Oh OK, didn't know that rad could have this effect too.
> In a way that flicking is not even a bad thing. There were/are some
> comic-animation's which had some flickering to. It might be a sign of low
> quality there but it adds somehow to the life in the animation.

Well, any random process is likely to have this effect.  POV radiosity isn't
'true' radiosity, it's a Monte-Carlo method.  It sends out random rays and
then averages.  If you send enough rays, the average will converge to the
right result, but what is 'enough' is a question.  Also, because pov uses a
method whereby some points that are close use similar radiosity values so it
doesn't have to calculate *every* point, then when the camera moves, we get
some strange artifacts.

Geoff

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"Geoff Wedig" <wed### [at] darwinepbicwruedu> wrote in message
news:3aa139a4@news.povray.org...
>
> Yeah, and there's an unfortunate flicker there too passing by the tree.

Noticed that.  Seems to skip a couple frames right between the vase and
tree, just another spline point would fix that I guess.
I've wanted to do something like this for a long time, I used to draw such
things some 25 years ago.  I really like what you have done with this.  The
grass works well I think, only a place near the doorway that apparently goes
from textured plane to modeled blades, otherwise it seemed right enough to
me.
Could always continue to build on this.

Bob H.

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In povray.binaries.animations Bob H. <omniverse0@msn.com> wrote:

> "Geoff Wedig" <wed### [at] darwinepbicwruedu> wrote in message
> news:3aa139a4@news.povray.org...
>>
>> Yeah, and there's an unfortunate flicker there too passing by the tree.

> Noticed that.  Seems to skip a couple frames right between the vase and
> tree, just another spline point would fix that I guess.
> I've wanted to do something like this for a long time, I used to draw such
> things some 25 years ago.  I really like what you have done with this.  The
> grass works well I think, only a place near the doorway that apparently goes
> from textured plane to modeled blades, otherwise it seemed right enough to
> me.
> Could always continue to build on this.

Well, I figured out why this worked incorrectly.  I copy/pasted an incorrect
time for key camera positions.  Unfortunately, fixing it requires
rerendering all the way back to around second 3 (of 10).  Ick.  Well,
luckily I've got a cluster of 30 processors to do it for me.  Should only
take a day or two....

I should probably fix the grass before I do so, though, huh?

Geoff

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