On  25 Jun 2012 08:27:12, Invisible wrote:
> What, that's a problem somehow?

I shouldn't be surprised by your quirks by now, but it still happens now and
then... :p

>> yeah, now put povray to directly simulate the curved surfaces of a woman's body.
>>
>> You may use parametric surfaces if writing the right isosurface function is
>> proving too much of a challenge.

> Drawing such a thing is equally impossible with POV-Ray or with a mesh
> renderer, so it's not a useful comparison. (Although, maybe if I had
> infinite point-cloud dartah... :-P )

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=1036380

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=829134

Should I also point out several of the Poser meshes people have been posting in
povray images for years?  Or game and movie meshes?

Hint:  they are not scans of human models.  People have been sculpting digitally
for quite some time now in software like Z-Brush and then generate from that a
less dense polygon mesh with normal mapped details.

> Saying that, you might be able to model something acceptable with blobs.

Not really.  And this:

http://tc-rtc.co.uk/imagenewdisplay/stills/389/Lilli_Marlene.html

truly shows povray's age... it would be terribly unnaceptable as a scene in a
game today, let alone in the upcoming generation of game hardware... seems like
those perfect curves don't make for quality renders...


>> Truth be told, a cornell box today doesn't take even a minute in povray...

> Funny you should say that. I spent yesterday trying to set up an
> animation of a Cornell box, and it appears that to get stable lighting,
> I'm going to have to crank the radiosity settings up to the point where
> it takes about 30 minutes per frame...

Then you're doing it wrong.  Radiosity is there to provide only smooth indirect
lighting effects, not extra shadows or something.  If it's getting too long and
still displaying lots of lame splotches, you're not using it like it was meant
to be used...

>> Scenes like that may take several hours on CPU, just like raytraced scenes in
>> the old days.

> There's a /reason/ POV-Ray does all this complicated radiosity trickery
> rather than just directly simulating the whole thing. It's to make it
> render in less than a decade. ;-) The trick, it seems, is to use the GPU
> to make it faster.

It doesn't take a decade, never did.  It takes hours or days like you were used
to, but produces on CPUs today far better results than what was possible with
povray back then.  That's not even accounting for GPUs, which can bring it down
to minutes or barely more than an hour.


>> the glow most likely is just a post-processing 2D effect.

> Can you actually do that? I mean, automatically figure out all the parts
> of the image which are bright enough to need glow?

Yes, it's a trivial 2D effect in most 2D graphical editing software.  Luxrender
comes with a few such filters.


> You didn't notice that the table is hexagonal??

oh, now that you bring it up, I see it.  Yeah, the guy evidently overlooked it,
but if it wasn't for the contrast with the bright light outside, it wouldn't be
noticeable anyway.  Hey, keeping geometry as simple as possible always helps
with render times.  I wonder how tesselation in nextgen game hardware will help
that...

Other than that, you don't note any edges on the smooth chairs and table curved
legs...


> A day is a /long/ time to wait while debugging your code to see if it
> works correctly. o_O

that's the beauty with progressive rendering:  you don't need to wait 8 hours
for the first few rows of the image to be ready and after 36 hours notice the
last few rows show horrid splotches near the table legs:  you get a rouch noisy
preview early on that already shows where every shadow is and all colors
right...

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