I was working with looking at the effect of doing a difference with text
characters, and lighting them, and that sort of thing, so I did this
commissioning plaque for kicks and giggles while I experimented.  For
some reason, this is an incredibly complex object -- it took sixteen
hours to render!  I think it's because of the incised nature of the
letters -- it had to figure out shadows and so forth on each of them,
and even so, the crossbars of many of the letters disappeared.

I think I'll wait until 3.5 comes out, before trying this particular
project again... I'm just not 
good enough at eyeballing centering, and the lines of text really need
to be centered.  I also think that next time, I'll use more than one
light source, and perhaps radiosity as well.

Anyone have any other suggestions for improving it?  How 'bout a
suggestion for a better texture for tarnished brass?

-- 
Dawn McKnight      | "Who cares what the hipbone's connected to? I'm in Neurology!"
McK### [at] maccom   |					-- Justine Devlin, M.D.

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Attachments:
Download 'tucson.jpg' (20 KB)

Preview of image 'tucson.jpg'

That looks great, but you should really add some media
if you want to slow it down a bit:-)

If you want a larger render like 800x600 send the pov
file over and any non standard includes and I'll give
it a wirl over here.

-- 
Cheers
Steve              email mailto:ste### [at] zeroppsuklinuxnet

%HAV-A-NICEDAY Error not enough coffee  0 pps. 

web http://www.zeropps.uklinux.net/

or  http://start.at/zero-pps

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Dawn McKnight wrote in message <3A207A37.77E480C6@mac.com>...
>
>For
>some reason, this is an incredibly complex object -- it took sixteen
>hours to render

Text objects are slow, and CSG differences are slow.  You've got a scene
that uses both, so of course it is going to be slow.

--
Mark

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Mark Wagner wrote:
> 
> Text objects are slow, and CSG differences are slow.  You've got a scene
> that uses both, so of course it is going to be slow.
> 

You could try an object pattern normal to speed things up a bit, of course
this would be less realistic.

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
Homepage: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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"Dawn McKnight" <mck### [at] maccom> wrote in message
news:3A207A37.77E480C6@mac.com...
<snip>
> I think I'll wait until 3.5 comes out, before trying this particular
> project again... I'm just not
> good enough at eyeballing centering, and the lines of text really need
> to be centered.

Dunno if you are aware of this, but in megaPOV you can center text
automatically.

Andy Cocker


---------------------------------------------------------------
www.mariner9.net

..... for my music and graphics.
---------------------------------------------------------------
'I spilled spot remover on my dog. He's gone now. '
'I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time."
So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance. '

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Did you consider using a (hi-res) heightfield?

If next time you add more light sources keep in mind that that will dramatically
slow down rendering speed, especially if they cast shadows.

Remco

Dawn McKnight wrote:
> 
> I was working with looking at the effect of doing a difference with text
> characters, and lighting them, and that sort of thing, so I did this
> commissioning plaque for kicks and giggles while I experimented.  For
> some reason, this is an incredibly complex object -- it took sixteen
> hours to render!  I think it's because of the incised nature of the
> letters -- it had to figure out shadows and so forth on each of them,
> and even so, the crossbars of many of the letters disappeared.
> 
> I think I'll wait until 3.5 comes out, before trying this particular
> project again... I'm just not
> good enough at eyeballing centering, and the lines of text really need
> to be centered.  I also think that next time, I'll use more than one
> light source, and perhaps radiosity as well.
> 
> Anyone have any other suggestions for improving it?  How 'bout a
> suggestion for a better texture for tarnished brass?
> 
> --
> Dawn McKnight      | "Who cares what the hipbone's connected to? I'm in Neurology!"
> McK### [at] maccom   |                                    -- Justine Devlin, M.D.
> 
>   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  [Image]

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Hi Dawn,

Here are a couple of ways in which you could speed up the render
time...

The first is to create the text as a heightfield. Use something like
paint shop pro to write black text on to a white background with a bit
of antialiasing. It would be quite quick to render and would also
allow you to slightly bevel the characters.

I have also found that if you put a bounding box arround the main
area, it will greatly improve the render time. AFAIK, Pov does auto
bounding for most objects, but doesn't work very well with CSG
difference. In a recent submission to the IRTC, I reduced the render
time by a factor of 10 when I used a bounded_by statement on mt text
CSG difference.

Hope these are useful!

Cheers,
Ian Shumsky
http://www.outerarm.demon.co.uk/graphics/graphics.html

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http://iftcommand.com/excelsior/about.html

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