I've finally decided to redesign my old site, haven't touched it in over 2
years, and upload many of my new images. I decided to go with a Pov inspired
interface, at least with the front page. Please take a look and tell me what
you think, you need the Flash plugin. There isn't anything there beyond the
front page for now.

http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm

Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white one
took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
anyone explain this huge discrepancy? I've used rather high radiosity
settings, but both images use the same settings.

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Attachments:
Download 'front page ON.JPG' (38 KB) Download 'front page OFF.JPG' (33 KB)

Preview of image 'front page ON.JPG'

Preview of image 'front page OFF.JPG'

"Thomas Lake" <tla### [at] homecom> wrote in message
news:3b64ff3e@news.povray.org...
> I've finally decided to redesign my old site, haven't touched it in over 2
> years, and upload many of my new images. I decided to go with a Pov
inspired
> interface, at least with the front page. Please take a look and tell me
what
> you think, you need the Flash plugin. There isn't anything there beyond
the
> front page for now.
>
> http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm
>
> Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white one
> took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
> anyone explain this huge discrepancy? I've used rather high radiosity
> settings, but both images use the same settings.

Here is the old front page I replaced. I have a hard time deciding if what I
have now is a genuine improvement or not. I designed the ant creature in
this old page from a 3d studio tutorial so the new page has the advantage of
being all my creation:-)

http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/old.htm

Post a reply to this message

Thomas Lake wrote:
>
> http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm

The active images move a pixel or two to the left. Only the gallery hot
spot stays put.

> Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white one
> took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
> anyone explain this huge discrepancy?

! It must be the reflecting and refracting objects as someone pointed out
a couple of days ago.


_____________
Kari Kivisalo

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"Kari Kivisalo" <kki### [at] pphtvfi> wrote in message
news:3B6512AF.44DD75E8@pp.htv.fi...
> Thomas Lake wrote:
> >
> > http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm
>
> The active images move a pixel or two to the left. Only the gallery hot
> spot stays put.

Yes I know about this and I plan to fix it. Flash can be very annoying when
positioning objects, the actual position objects end up in seem to be a few
pixels off of where you placed them.

Post a reply to this message

Kari Kivisalo wrote:
> 
> > Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white one
> > took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
> > anyone explain this huge discrepancy?
> 
> ! It must be the reflecting and refracting objects as someone pointed out
> a couple of days ago.
> 

Furthermore the additional text objects will slow down things a bit too.

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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text objects are excedingly slow

looks good on the site however, 'tutorials' seems to make the wall behind it
bulge.....


--
Rick

Kitty5 WebDesign - http://Kitty5.com
Hi-Impact database driven web site design & e-commerce
TEL : +44 (01625) 266358 - FAX : +44 (01625) 611913 - ICQ : 15776037
POV-Ray News & Resources - http://Povray.co.uk

PGP Public Key
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x231E1CEA

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"Rick [Kitty5]" <ric### [at] kitty5com> wrote in message
news:3b65546a@news.povray.org...
> text objects are excedingly slow
>
> looks good on the site however, 'tutorials' seems to make the wall behind
it
> bulge.....

Yes I know of this, it can be very hard to precisely position objects in
Flash. I'll fix it in the final page.

Post a reply to this message

<snip>

> Furthermore the additional text objects will slow down things a bit too.


Yes I've noticed that text objects are very slow, why is that? I guess I
could improve the speed by importing text meshes from Rhino, amazing that
complex meshes would actually be faster than native text objects. I noticed
that the slowdown was uniform, that is it did not slow down significantly
while rendering the text objects but was even slow while rendering the
blanks white spaces, could this be the result of the ior,rad problem?

Post a reply to this message

Looks great, apart from the flash glitches already mentioned..
But I belive a first-time visitor will find it difficult to navigate,
especilly the tutorials and the scribblings will be a bit hard to find.
If I was to make it more easy, I would've made a small animation where the
"buttons" blends over from colored to non-colored.
Another thing I noticed, if you move your cursor away before the animation
is ended, the "button" will stay colored, did you intend to have it like
that?

-Peter

Post a reply to this message

> Looks great, apart from the flash glitches already mentioned..
> But I belive a first-time visitor will find it difficult to navigate,

I was a bit worried about that.

> especilly the tutorials and the scribblings will be a bit hard to find.
> If I was to make it more easy, I would've made a small animation where the
> "buttons" blends over from colored to non-colored.

Good idea. I'll think of implimenting something like this.

> Another thing I noticed, if you move your cursor away before the animation
> is ended, the "button" will stay colored, did you intend to have it like
> that?

Well not really but it's the best I could come up with, I spent many hours
trying to think of ways of stopping that but this is the best I could do.

Post a reply to this message

well, if you wanted to ditch flash....

you could cut up the image into many peices  (maybe you have to do this for
flash anyway), then have a few javascript functions to load the alternate
images for mouse overs, and then you could also specify the OnMouseExit or
whatever the actual handler name is, in order to get the image to "reset"
properly.

I agree that the navigation would be difficult for people new to the site.
there are no obvious visual cues for what the user should do, or that they
should in fact do anything at all.

>
> Well not really but it's the best I could come up with, I spent many hours
> trying to think of ways of stopping that but this is the best I could do.
>
>

Post a reply to this message

> you could cut up the image into many peices  (maybe you have to do this
for
> flash anyway), then have a few javascript functions to load the alternate
> images for mouse overs, and then you could also specify the OnMouseExit or
> whatever the actual handler name is, in order to get the image to "reset"
> properly.

I actually tried this first but the problem is that the table I end up
having to create to handle all of the images is crazily complex.


> I agree that the navigation would be difficult for people new to the site.
> there are no obvious visual cues for what the user should do, or that they
> should in fact do anything at all.

I think I have some ideas that will make it easier on the new user.

Post a reply to this message

Thomas Lake wrote:
> 
> Yes I've noticed that text objects are very slow, why is that? I guess I
> could improve the speed by importing text meshes from Rhino, amazing that
> complex meshes would actually be faster than native text objects.

Sure they are and no matter how detailed the mesh is, the text object is
more precise.  Of course you usually don't need that high accuracy.

> I noticed
> that the slowdown was uniform, that is it did not slow down significantly
> while rendering the text objects but was even slow while rendering the
> blanks white spaces, could this be the result of the ior,rad problem?

With both radiosity and reflection/refraction, the speed of rendering an
object is also influenced by the environment.  This should be fairly
obvious since the purpose of radiosity is calculating the effect of the
different objects in the scene on lighting.  

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

Post a reply to this message

cool, keep us updated. i've made a user interface with pov as well, but
until i get the entire site working, i'm not gonna share it :)


> I think I have some ideas that will make it easier on the new user.
>
>
>

Post a reply to this message

Could you please post the web address?  I lost the original post, and I
would like to check it out.  Thanx.

John


"Peter Hertel" <NOS### [at] hertelno> wrote in message
news:3b65f757@news.povray.org...
> Looks great, apart from the flash glitches already mentioned..
> But I belive a first-time visitor will find it difficult to navigate,
> especilly the tutorials and the scribblings will be a bit hard to find.
> If I was to make it more easy, I would've made a small animation where the
> "buttons" blends over from colored to non-colored.
> Another thing I noticed, if you move your cursor away before the animation
> is ended, the "button" will stay colored, did you intend to have it like
> that?
>
> -Peter
>
>

Post a reply to this message

> cool, keep us updated. i've made a user interface with pov as well, but
> until i get the entire site working, i'm not gonna share it :)

So am I :-)
I belive I've made two or three half-designs which I haven't used, hope the
new one will survive :-)

Post a reply to this message

Here you go..
http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm
How can you "loose" a post?

> Could you please post the web address?  I lost the original post, and I
> would like to check it out.  Thanx.
>
> John

Post a reply to this message

> How can you "loose" a post?

In Outlook Express there is a setting somewhere where you can set how long
the reader keeps old messages, if you don't turn this feature off, old
messages get deleted after a number of days.

Post a reply to this message

I get this really narly blank page. (No, I don't care for flash at all). 
Perhaps a non-flash imagemapped version would be just as effective?

Yann

Thomas Lake wrote:

> I've finally decided to redesign my old site, haven't touched it in over 2
> years, and upload many of my new images. I decided to go with a Pov
> inspired interface, at least with the front page. Please take a look and
> tell me what you think, you need the Flash plugin. There isn't anything
> there beyond the front page for now.
> 
> http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm
> 
> Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white one
> took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
> anyone explain this huge discrepancy? I've used rather high radiosity
> settings, but both images use the same settings.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Post a reply to this message

> I get this really narly blank page.

That's intended, I like to go for a artistic minamilest design when building
web pages.

>(No, I don't care for flash at all).

I know some people don't, why not for you? It's true that there are a lot of
poorly implimented flash sites out there with nothing but cheesy animations
and sounds and no content. But a well executed flash site can take your
breath away, take a look at this one:

http://www.gabocorp.com/bumper.4/

Have your speakers on!

> Perhaps a non-flash imagemapped version would be just as effective?

Perhaps when I have everything finished I will do that. But so far the flash
version is comming along nicely for me so it might be a while before I get
the non flash one up. The whole site will not be in flash.

> Yann
>
> Thomas Lake wrote:
>
> > I've finally decided to redesign my old site, haven't touched it in over
2
> > years, and upload many of my new images. I decided to go with a Pov
> > inspired interface, at least with the front page. Please take a look and
> > tell me what you think, you need the Flash plugin. There isn't anything
> > there beyond the front page for now.
> >
> > http://www.geocities.com/~thomaslake/test.htm
> >
> > Below are the two images I rendered for this. The pure black and white
one
> > took about 5 min to render and the colour one took over 2 1/2 days, can
> > anyone explain this huge discrepancy? I've used rather high radiosity
> > settings, but both images use the same settings.

Post a reply to this message

Thomas Lake wrote:
> 
> http://www.gabocorp.com/bumper.4/
> 
> Have your speakers on!

I get:

You currently don't have the flash 5 plug-in installed.
Because our design work is primarily done using this plug-in, it is
required to view this site. 
Please download it from Macromedia by clicking here.
Once you have it installed, please reload this page.


I'm quite reluctant to listen to stuff like this anymore rather than
just completely ignoring the page.  Maybe this site is worth getting the
plugin, but I hate getting plugins, and _most_ sites that require them
aren't worth getting them.  Flash probably is not too bad of one, but a
lot of "plugins" install more than just the plugin, spew their data all
over your system so you can't completely get rid of them, have no
uninstaller, are horribly bloated, and/or keep trying to put themselves
in start-up (cough cough RealPlayer cough CometCursor cough cough). 
That's why mp3.com is a POS site, they try to make you use RealPlayer...

Well, I decided to get the plugin and check, despite my better
judgement.  What is it about Flash that it invariably has crappy sound? 
I found some "quality" option in the right-click menu, that helped a
little.

-- 
David Fontaine  <dav### [at] faricynet>  ICQ 55354965
My raytracing gallery:  http://davidf.faricy.net/

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"David Fontaine" <dav### [at] faricynet> wrote in message
news:3B6988A7.708F6B09@faricy.net...
> Thomas Lake wrote:
> >
> > http://www.gabocorp.com/bumper.4/
> >
> > Have your speakers on!
>
> I get:
>
> You currently don't have the flash 5 plug-in installed.
> Because our design work is primarily done using this plug-in, it is
> required to view this site.
> Please download it from Macromedia by clicking here.
> Once you have it installed, please reload this page.

What version browser are you using? Most of the 4.0 ver browsers already
have Flash preinstalled. Anyway since you, and others, seem to hate flash so
much I guess I'll have to put an alternat version up soon:-(

> I'm quite reluctant to listen to stuff like this anymore rather than
> just completely ignoring the page.  Maybe this site is worth getting the
> plugin, but I hate getting plugins, and _most_ sites that require them
> aren't worth getting them.  Flash probably is not too bad of one, but a
> lot of "plugins" install more than just the plugin, spew their data all
> over your system so you can't completely get rid of them, have no
> uninstaller, are horribly bloated, and/or keep trying to put themselves
> in start-up (cough cough RealPlayer cough CometCursor cough cough).
> That's why mp3.com is a POS site, they try to make you use RealPlayer...

True, at least for many plugins especially Real Player, but flash is nothing
like that at all.

> Well, I decided to get the plugin and check, despite my better
> judgement.  What is it about Flash that it invariably has crappy sound?
> I found some "quality" option in the right-click menu, that helped a
> little.
>
> --
> David Fontaine  <dav### [at] faricynet>  ICQ 55354965
> My raytracing gallery:  http://davidf.faricy.net/

Post a reply to this message

Thomas Lake wrote:
> 
> What version browser are you using? Most of the 4.0 ver browsers already
> have Flash preinstalled. Anyway since you, and others, seem to hate flash so
> much I guess I'll have to put an alternat version up soon:-(

NN 4.75.  I had flash 4, but I needed 5...
Flash is okay...  No CometCursor though, or your site shall be banished
from the heap, POPped into nothingness never to return!  Mwuhahahaha!!!


> True, at least for many plugins especially Real Player, but flash is nothing
> like that at all.

It ain't so bad. (cough cough QuickTime)

-- 
David Fontaine  <dav### [at] faricynet>  ICQ 55354965
My raytracing gallery:  http://davidf.faricy.net/

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> What version browser are you using? Most of the 4.0 ver browsers already
> have Flash preinstalled. Anyway since you, and others, seem to hate flash
so
> much I guess I'll have to put an alternat version up soon:-(

I like the flash version.. Why not just put up the colored image with an
image map, as an alternative to flash? That shouldn't take too long..
-Peter

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"Peter Hertel" <NOS### [at] hertelno> wrote in message
news:3b6dbe90@news.povray.org...
> > What version browser are you using? Most of the 4.0 ver browsers already
> > have Flash preinstalled. Anyway since you, and others, seem to hate
flash
> so
> > much I guess I'll have to put an alternat version up soon:-(
>
> I like the flash version..

Thanks

>Why not just put up the colored image with an
> image map, as an alternative to flash? That shouldn't take too long..
> -Peter

I'm going to do something just like that.

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