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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