Invisible wrote:
> Au contrare... Ever heard of displacement mapping? This is nothing other
> than running a (simplistic) ray tracer as a pixel shader. Physically
> correct dynamic reflections are already possible via ray tracing
> (although you're still tracing stupid flat polygons rather than true
> geometry). There have been tech demos of full ray tracers running on
> standard GPU hardware.

Yes, as I have mentioned, I have seen them too, impressive, but not yet 
in a commercial way and I doubt with 100% POV-Ray features & 
capabilities. Never hear of displacement mapping. As you mention *some* 
raytracing is possible on *some* experimental GPUs; what I meant was a 
100% GPU implementation of POV-Ray giving at least 24fps at, lets say, 
1360x768 resolution.

> Thing is, ray tracing sometimes doesn't automatically make it look cool.
> If your model is a low-polygon mesh using low-resolution bitmap
> textures, it'll look crappy no matter what rendering technology you use.
> Even if you import a game map into POV-Ray, it'll still look lame,
> despite the superior rendering.

True, I have been seen improved models/textures in a open source game 
project (source code made open source by owners): www.hard-light.net, 
and the original models/textures needed some work to make it look sort 
of today standards.

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On 26/01/2012 04:41 PM, Saul Luizaga wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Au contrare... Ever heard of displacement mapping? This is nothing other
>> than running a (simplistic) ray tracer as a pixel shader. Physically
>> correct dynamic reflections are already possible via ray tracing
>> (although you're still tracing stupid flat polygons rather than true
>> geometry). There have been tech demos of full ray tracers running on
>> standard GPU hardware.
>
> Yes, as I have mentioned, I have seen them too, impressive, but not yet
> in a commercial way and I doubt with 100% POV-Ray features &
> capabilities.

I think the main thing that makes POV-Ray look so damned good is that it 
doesn't use polygon meshes (it uses real curved geometry), and it 
doesn't use bitmap textures (it uses procedural texturing), and it 
doesn't fake the lighting equation quite as poorly as most game engines. 
(Although it's no unbiased renderer.)

> Never hear of displacement mapping.

Apparently the correct term is "relief mapping", not displacement mapping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_mapping_%28computer_graphics%29

> As you mention *some*
> raytracing is possible on *some* experimental GPUs;

My point is, this is *not* experimental hardware. Relief mapping can be 
done in commercial hardware. Accurate reflections can be done on 
commercial hardware. These features are in commercial games, today.

> what I meant was a
> 100% GPU implementation of POV-Ray giving at least 24fps at, lets say,
> 1360x768 resolution.

You're never going to get a 100% GPU implementation of "POV-Ray". 
Because "POV-Ray" is a piece of code that runs on a CPU. What you 
/might/ be able to do some day is implement the same algorithms on a 
GPU. More likely, you could move "most" of the work to the GPU; things 
like parsing the scene data and so forth will always be on the CPU.

I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But 
nobody uses it, for whatever reason.) Ray tracing is certainly possible. 
Realistic real-time lighting is possible. The big thing that I haven't 
seen done is non-polygon geometry. I don't know if it's currently 
feasible to do that on a GPU. I don't see why not...

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Even with the improved game engine that had many features of modern game 
engine and with the help of driver-side GPU settings. Even now, the game 
doesn't use shadows at all, except for some mod intro ( and deves/moders 
use that into to bench mark new game engine features xD)and a dev told 
in in IRC that that intro will kill a ATI 6990 ( he owns 1).

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Invisible wrote:
> On 26/01/2012 04:41 PM, Saul Luizaga wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> Au contrare... Ever heard of displacement mapping? This is nothing other
>>> than running a (simplistic) ray tracer as a pixel shader. Physically
>>> correct dynamic reflections are already possible via ray tracing
>>> (although you're still tracing stupid flat polygons rather than true
>>> geometry). There have been tech demos of full ray tracers running on
>>> standard GPU hardware.
>>
>> Yes, as I have mentioned, I have seen them too, impressive, but not yet
>> in a commercial way and I doubt with 100% POV-Ray features &
>> capabilities.
>
> I think the main thing that makes POV-Ray look so damned good is that it
> doesn't use polygon meshes (it uses real curved geometry), and it
> doesn't use bitmap textures (it uses procedural texturing), and it
> doesn't fake the lighting equation quite as poorly as most game engines.
> (Although it's no unbiased renderer.)

I thought GPUs did some real curved geometry on simple primitives like 
spheres or cubes. not unbiased? how so? I thought POV-Ray accuracy came 
from accurate 64-bit floats raytracing.

>> Never hear of displacement mapping.
>
> Apparently the correct term is "relief mapping", not displacement mapping.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_mapping_%28computer_graphics%29
>
>> As you mention *some*
>> raytracing is possible on *some* experimental GPUs;
>
> My point is, this is *not* experimental hardware. Relief mapping can be
> done in commercial hardware. Accurate reflections can be done on
> commercial hardware. These features are in commercial games, today.

I understand. As an occasional gamer I have seen these features.

>> what I meant was a
>> 100% GPU implementation of POV-Ray giving at least 24fps at, lets say,
>> 1360x768 resolution.
>
> You're never going to get a 100% GPU implementation of "POV-Ray".
> Because "POV-Ray" is a piece of code that runs on a CPU. What you
> /might/ be able to do some day is implement the same algorithms on a
> GPU.

You are not getting the right perspective of my words: For "100% GPU 
implementation of POV-Ray" I meant "is implement the same algorithms on 
a GPU", I know a GPU can't run CPU code; otherwise I'd wrote: "100% CPU 
implementation of POV-Ray running on a GPU".

> More likely, you could move "most" of the work to the GPU; things
> like parsing the scene data and so forth will always be on the CPU.
>
> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.) Ray tracing is certainly possible.
> Realistic real-time lighting is possible. The big thing that I haven't
> seen done is non-polygon geometry. I don't know if it's currently
> feasible to do that on a GPU. I don't see why not...

Well I wouldn't know about much GPUs and their use, but if what you say 
is true I think GPUs now are powerful enough to start using more 
raytracing features to render, but I find it harder to calculate and 
render, more transistors more & power consumption, and calculating when 
an object gets hit but another or how it gets destroyed (for games) I 
think would be another task to overcome, because rounded triangle meshes 
I think are easier to manipulate and to fracture. But I am all for 
seeing a GPU version of POV-Ray solving these problems in an efficient 
way and giving us 24 fps.

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>> I think the main thing that makes POV-Ray look so damned good is that it
>> doesn't use polygon meshes (it uses real curved geometry), and it
>> doesn't use bitmap textures (it uses procedural texturing), and it
>> doesn't fake the lighting equation quite as poorly as most game engines.
>> (Although it's no unbiased renderer.)
>
> I thought GPUs did some real curved geometry on simple primitives like
> spheres or cubes.

I haven't seen it personally, but it ought to be possible.

> not unbiased? how so?

20 years ago, ray tracing was a big deal. Today, it seems that "unbiased 
rendering" is the next big thing. It's where you basically simulate 
*all* light paths, all at once. So no need for separate photon maps, 
radiosity tuning, etc. It's all automatic.

And slot as hell, by the way.

> I thought POV-Ray accuracy came from accurate 64-bit floats raytracing.

Numerical precision has little if anything to do with it. The accuracy 
comes from using more life-like equations, rather than the heavily 
simplified ones that go into most games to make them fast enough for 
real-time.

>> More likely, you could move "most" of the work to the GPU; things
>> like parsing the scene data and so forth will always be on the CPU.
>>
>> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
>> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.) Ray tracing is certainly possible.
>> Realistic real-time lighting is possible. The big thing that I haven't
>> seen done is non-polygon geometry. I don't know if it's currently
>> feasible to do that on a GPU. I don't see why not...
>
> Well I wouldn't know about much GPUs and their use, but if what you say
> is true I think GPUs now are powerful enough to start using more
> raytracing features to render, but I find it harder to calculate and
> render, more transistors more & power consumption, and calculating when
> an object gets hit but another or how it gets destroyed (for games) I
> think would be another task to overcome, because rounded triangle meshes
> I think are easier to manipulate and to fracture. But I am all for
> seeing a GPU version of POV-Ray solving these problems in an efficient
> way and giving us 24 fps.

We'll see what developers come up with, I guess...

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > not unbiased? how so?
>
> 20 years ago, ray tracing was a big deal. Today, it seems that "unbiased
> rendering" is the next big thing. It's where you basically simulate
> *all* light paths, all at once. So no need for separate photon maps,
> radiosity tuning, etc. It's all automatic.
>
> And slot as hell, by the way.

Now that you got a new pc, you should try out the latest blender builds with
cycles enabled and play with it a bit (like downloading some ready scenes,
choosing the cycles engine and hitting F12).  It's the new, unbiased
render-engine and is quite fast.  If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
should do just fine on yours.


> >> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
> >> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.)

It's not artist friendly, aside perhaps as a rough base (like having a palette
of procedural textures for painting bitmaps) or for purely natural terrain.  I'd
also add that it's certainly more costly to compute for games than static
bitmaps.

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> Now that you got a new pc, you should try out the latest blender builds with
> cycles enabled and play with it a bit (like downloading some ready scenes,
> choosing the cycles engine and hitting F12).  It's the new, unbiased
> render-engine and is quite fast.

Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it 
was just a modeller?

> If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
> if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
> should do just fine on yours.

nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?

>>>> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
>>>> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.)
>
> It's not artist friendly, aside perhaps as a rough base (like having a palette
> of procedural textures for painting bitmaps) or for purely natural terrain.  I'd
> also add that it's certainly more costly to compute for games than static
> bitmaps.

Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just 
point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the 
obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks 
blurry as hell.

POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean, 
unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's 
scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial 
transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice. 
It's probably not even all that expensive either.

Whether it's "artist friendly" depends on what your artists are expecting.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Now that you got a new pc, you should try out the latest blender builds with
> > cycles enabled and play with it a bit (like downloading some ready scenes,
> > choosing the cycles engine and hitting F12).  It's the new, unbiased
> > render-engine and is quite fast.
>
> Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it
> was just a modeller?

It's a complete graphical studio, it also got animation and rigging tools,
sculpting and painting, a video editor, physics, fluid and particle simulators
etc.

So yeah, for many years it featured the so called "Blender Internal" renderer,
which was a mixture of scanline and raytracing.  It also got a radiosity engine,
but it was to much trouble to get things quite working fine, both for artists
and coders, so they've opted now for a streamlined renderer coded from the
grounds up, that is unbiased and physics-based.

>
> > If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
> > if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
> > should do just fine on yours.
>
> nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?

I meant that it's CUDA-based.  Should work.

You can find blender builds with Cycles here:

http://graphicall.org/?keywords=cycles

Here's a nice test scene:

http://www.blendernation.com/2011/10/21/bedroom-blend-file-ready-to-be-used-for-cycles/


> Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just
> point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the
> obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks
> blurry as hell.

Oh, certainly a gigabyte-worth bitmap wouldn't look blurry, unless looking at it
through the microscope.


>
> POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean,
> unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's
> scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial
> transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice.
> It's probably not even all that expensive either.

No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
with noise or combining with other texture...

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>> Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it
>> was just a modeller?
>
> It's a complete graphical studio, it also got animation and rigging tools,
> sculpting and painting, a video editor, physics, fluid and particle simulators
> etc.

Well there you are then...

>>> If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
>>> if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
>>> should do just fine on yours.
>>
>> nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?
>
> I meant that it's CUDA-based.  Should work.

I believe the 200 series is supposed to be the first release to support 
CUDA. Having said that, I have repeatedly tried to make CUDA-enabled 
applications work, with no success. Perhaps it will work under Windows 
7, but it never worked with Windows XP...

> You can find blender builds with Cycles here:

Isn't it in the main build yet?

> Here's a nice test scene:

Nice scene is nice. But I shudder to think how many decades it would 
take on a twenty-PC render cluster...

>> Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just
>> point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the
>> obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks
>> blurry as hell.
>
> Oh, certainly a gigabyte-worth bitmap wouldn't look blurry, unless looking at it
> through the microscope.

I meant more that once you have a few hundred of them, it's many GB of data.

>> POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean,
>> unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's
>> scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial
>> transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice.
>> It's probably not even all that expensive either.
>
> No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
> with noise or combining with other texture...

This is not my experience.

If anything, it looks too uniform when viewed from too far away (and 
requires absurd amounts of AA to smooth out artefacts). From close up, 
it looks great! (Unless, again, you look at it from ridiculously close. 
In a game environment, you would of course optimise any textures to look 
good at the viewing distances you're actually using.)

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >>> If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
> >>> if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
> >>> should do just fine on yours.
> >>
> >> nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?
> >
> > I meant that it's CUDA-based.  Should work.
>
> I believe the 200 series is supposed to be the first release to support
> CUDA.

I don't think so.  It also works on older ones, but without many cores, the
speed improvements are kinda negligible.

> Having said that, I have repeatedly tried to make CUDA-enabled
> applications work, with no success. Perhaps it will work under Windows
> 7, but it never worked with Windows XP...
>
> > You can find blender builds with Cycles here:
>
> Isn't it in the main build yet?

I'm not actually sure, have not followed up latest developments.  But it's still
beta software that was announced about august last year.

> > Here's a nice test scene:
>
> Nice scene is nice. But I shudder to think how many decades it would
> take on a twenty-PC render cluster...

A few hours on your average PC.  Notice though that unbiased rendering
supposedly never halts:  it improves the image gradually, removing noise as it
goes.  However, you may set a condition for it to stop.  In the Scene tab to the
right on the default screen, under Integrator, you may choose a set number of
samples.  The default is 10, which is very low.  Above 1000 is best.  Of course,
it depends on the properties of materials and scene.  If you only got
diffuse/matte materials, even low numbers can get quite good results sooner.

Notice also that the viewport can also be rendered with Cycles rather than with
the default OpenGL rough sketch.  Just choose "Rendered" in "Viewport shading",
which is under the viewport with the picture of a white ball, just left to
"Object Mode".

> >> POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean,
> >> unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's
> >> scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial
> >> transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice.
> >> It's probably not even all that expensive either.
> >
> > No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
> > with noise or combining with other texture...
>
> This is not my experience.
>
> If anything, it looks too uniform when viewed from too far away (and
> requires absurd amounts of AA to smooth out artefacts). From close up,
> it looks great! (Unless, again, you look at it from ridiculously close.
> In a game environment, you would of course optimise any textures to look
> good at the viewing distances you're actually using.)

I see grain in the wood of my tabletop that I never saw in povray wood, even
good ones like the one in Warp's tips on realism... the difficult here is that
the grain follows the direction the pattern flows...

If you from far away, you only notice the typical wood pattern, but close
enough, you miss this thing.  And if you only intend to look from far away, no
problem with "blurriness" for bitmaps.

BTW, this is something that is visible in marble too:  looking close, you see
there's lots of tiny crystal facets shining through just bellow the surface and
you can't fake that with a mere texture.

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