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I keep asking myself that question.
I could not code my way out of a wet paper bag. I remember Warp giving
up trying to explain that using GOTO is a bad idea. I am sure he was
right but…
Photorealism: maybe but I am not very good with textures and I am more
interested in animations than still images. The render times would be
horrendous. So that is out.
Visualising data: Yes but Excel is quick and good and you only need to
use functions mostly. Not programming.
Looking at other people’s work: Definitely, at least I have an
appreciation of what lies behind the making of them.
So what brought this on? Drugs actually, I woke up early at 4 am and as
I am going into town today. To stop falling asleep I took one of my
remaining Modafinil tablets that I was prescribed for jet lag, a few
years ago. It is known as a “smart drug” a cognitive enhancer. I would
never use it for that if I were studying. I find it too easy to get
distracted. I was watching a video on very large numbers when it went on
to TREE(3). So I googled it and spent an hour following the links within
links in Wikipedia so I could try and understand what was being talked
about.
Since we seem to have lost our mascot I thought I would stand in for
Andrew, for a while.
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 04/03/2017 09:19 AM, Stephen wrote:
> Since we seem to have lost our mascot I thought I would stand in for
> Andrew, for a while.
I don't think it's just Andrew we've lost... This place is like a ghost
town now, sadly.
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On 3/4/2017 1:19 AM, Stephen wrote:
>
> So what brought this on? Drugs actually, I woke up early at 4 am and as
> I am going into town today. To stop falling asleep I took one of my
> remaining Modafinil tablets that I was prescribed for jet lag, a few
> years ago. It is known as a “smart drug” a cognitive enhancer. I would
> never use it for that if I were studying. I find it too easy to get
> distracted. I was watching a video on very large numbers when it went on
> to TREE(3). So I googled it and spent an hour following the links within
> links in Wikipedia so I could try and understand what was being talked
> about.
If you have some math background, I really like this paper describing
some of the set theory proofs behind the TREE function:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~jean/kruskal.pdf
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On 3/7/2017 6:07 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 04/03/2017 09:19 AM, Stephen wrote:
>
>> Since we seem to have lost our mascot I thought I would stand in for
>> Andrew, for a while.
>
> I don't think it's just Andrew we've lost... This place is like a ghost
> town now, sadly.
You're not kidding. Remember that PovCon in London?
Well thee and me are the only ones left. :-(
Ochone, ochone.
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 3/7/2017 6:16 PM, Kevin Wampler wrote:
> On 3/4/2017 1:19 AM, Stephen wrote:
>>
>> So what brought this on? Drugs actually, I woke up early at 4 am and as
>> I am going into town today. To stop falling asleep I took one of my
>> remaining Modafinil tablets that I was prescribed for jet lag, a few
>> years ago. It is known as a “smart drug” a cognitive enhancer. I would
>> never use it for that if I were studying. I find it too easy to get
>> distracted. I was watching a video on very large numbers when it went on
>> to TREE(3). So I googled it and spent an hour following the links within
>> links in Wikipedia so I could try and understand what was being talked
>> about.
>
> If you have some math background, I really like this paper describing
> some of the set theory proofs behind the TREE function:
> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~jean/kruskal.pdf
>
I do but only as some tends to zero. ;)
But thanks for the thought. And if you can't hit it with a shifting
spanner. I can't use it. :(
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 07/03/2017 07:08 PM, Stephen wrote:
> On 3/7/2017 6:07 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> I don't think it's just Andrew we've lost... This place is like a ghost
>> town now, sadly.
>
> You're not kidding. Remember that PovCon in London?
> Well thee and me are the only ones left. :-(
I guess POV-Ray is pretty much a dying technology at this point. I have
no idea what the cool kids are using these days; probably some
GPU-accelerated polygon renderer with global light transport.
It's a shame there isn't something modern that has a scene description
language like the SDL. But then again, if you actually have the talent
to model stuff, what do you need SDL for?
(I guess it's a bit like how nobody uses MetaFont. For all its technical
excellence, the kind of people who have the graphic design skills to
design typefaces don't want to be programmers; they want to be graphic
designers!)
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> I guess POV-Ray is pretty much a dying technology at this point. I have
> no idea what the cool kids are using these days; probably some
> GPU-accelerated polygon renderer with global light transport.
I used to use POV a lot for rendering CAD models that I had generated
elsewhere. Now we bought software called "KeyShot" at work, the ease and
speed that you can create photorealistic renders and animations is
insane. I can create a 2 minute animation of various parts going
together in an assembly in the same time it would take me to get a still
image set up (camera angles, materials, lighting etc) in POV.
> It's a shame there isn't something modern that has a scene description
> language like the SDL. But then again, if you actually have the talent
> to model stuff, what do you need SDL for?
And if you have the talent to program, why use SDL? Recently I've been
writing a C#/OpenGL Mandelbulb animation renderer. It runs about 30 fps
(which lets you fly around in realtime to setup the image), but I
average 100 frames together and write that out for high quality
anti-aliased and focal-blurred frames. Eventually I want to come up with
some method of recording the path you fly through with the mouse
control, then do some processing on the path (eg to smooth it out and
add correct focal distance) and then use that path to record frames for
a high quality animation. All with approx 0% CPU usage, so I could be
running POV at the same time :-)
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On 09/03/2017 09:57 AM, scott wrote:
>> I guess POV-Ray is pretty much a dying technology at this point. I have
>> no idea what the cool kids are using these days; probably some
>> GPU-accelerated polygon renderer with global light transport.
>
> I used to use POV a lot for rendering CAD models that I had generated
> elsewhere. Now we bought software called "KeyShot" at work, the ease and
> speed that you can create photorealistic renders and animations is
> insane.
Yeah, I suspect anything GPU-powered is going to out-strip POV-Ray by
many orders of magnitude. Indeed, there are WebGL demos that do stuff
*in a web browser* that would take months to render in POV-Ray! (Trouble
is, as I discovered, rendering an entire scene as a single monolithic
shader doesn't scale beyond a few objects.)
>> It's a shame there isn't something modern that has a scene description
>> language like the SDL. But then again, if you actually have the talent
>> to model stuff, what do you need SDL for?
>
> And if you have the talent to program, why use SDL? Recently I've been
> writing a C#/OpenGL Mandelbulb animation renderer.
I have literally no idea how you would even *begin* to do something like
that.
I used to assume that a 3D card takes a model and then renders it. Then
I started reading some of the OpenGL spec, and realised that actually,
the 3D card does *almost nothing*. It merely knows how to draw
texture-mapped polygons really, *really* fast. If you want shadows,
reflection, refraction, scattering... tough. You can't have it. (Or
rather, you *can*... if you spend many, many months programming it all.)
The OpenGL API is huge, complex, and mostly undocumented. It's also
extremely imperative. And you can't debug it. (I did see a while back a
rather amusing page listing 35 different ways to accidentally render a
completely black image...)
That said, I do wonder if there's a way to do physically-correct depth
of field rendering using only polygon graphics. Like, if you could
render multiple images from different angles and sum them... It would be
far too slow for realtime, but I think you could do it.
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> That said, I do wonder if there's a way to do physically-correct depth
> of field rendering using only polygon graphics. Like, if you could
> render multiple images from different angles and sum them... It would be
> far too slow for realtime, but I think you could do it.
Fourier depth of field?
I hear it's all the rage ;)
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>> I used to use POV a lot for rendering CAD models that I had generated
>> elsewhere. Now we bought software called "KeyShot" at work, the ease and
>> speed that you can create photorealistic renders and animations is
>> insane.
>
> Yeah, I suspect anything GPU-powered is going to out-strip POV-Ray by
> many orders of magnitude. Indeed, there are WebGL demos that do stuff
> *in a web browser* that would take months to render in POV-Ray! (Trouble
> is, as I discovered, rendering an entire scene as a single monolithic
> shader doesn't scale beyond a few objects.)
KeyShot doesn't use the GPU, it is CPU based. But I assume it is
massively optimised for triangle-mesh rendering - it converts the CAD
models to meshes (at your requested accuracy level) when you import
them. The main point is that anyone in my team can pick up how to use
that software pretty much intuitively, imagine giving someone POV and a
copy of slp2pov for the first time and asking them to produce a
photo-realistic animation!
> The OpenGL API is huge, complex, and mostly undocumented. It's also
> extremely imperative. And you can't debug it. (I did see a while back a
> rather amusing page listing 35 different ways to accidentally render a
> completely black image...)
The only bit of OpenGL I use is to draw two big triangles that cover the
screen. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do that online and it's
relatively simple. All the clever stuff is done in the shader used for
those two triangles.
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