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Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

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Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#11

Post by selfsimilar »

BubRoss wrote: post #7
selfsimilar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the quality of the render engine is much better with physical rendering, but I still love constructive solid geometry and the ideal of pure curves to define the scene geometry. All these meshes with their triangles! Whatever happened to using NURBS or metaballs or other non-polygonal modeling?

Polygons can be smoother and subdivided efficiently at render time without artifacts, which is how they are used now. Nurbs and other curved surface representations end up with huge problems pragmatically when it comes to tools, workflow, visualization, texture coordinates, keeping the surfaces together etc. The list is long. Polygons are very simple in all these areas and can be made smooth at render time so you get…

Pragmatically, I think the real issue is editor tooling. Polygons are much simpler to subdivide and edit and are perfect for real-time interaction, at least much better for high-complexity scenes. At render time, though, you need to use a bunch of extra tricks to get the right smoothing - bump/texture mapping, increased subdivision, etc. But some of these other models might actually decrease the scene complexity and increase quality if you could convert the model at render-time.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#12

Post by BubRoss »

TylerE wrote: post #8
BubRoss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polygons can be smoother and subdivided efficiently at render time without artifacts, which is how they are used now. Nurbs and other curved surface representations end up with huge problems pragmatically when it comes to tools, workflow, visualization, texture coordinates, keeping the surfaces together etc. The list is long. Polygons are very simple in all these areas and can be made smooth at render time so you get…

That’s the beauty of CSG though... it’s volumetric, not surface based

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, constructive solid geometry does not solve any of the problems I mentioned and would have to be treated specially to be raytraced (while being likely being much slower).

Converting it to polygons at a modeling or effects stage is workable but rendering it directly is unlikely to be widely valuable any more.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#13

Post by ginko »

erjiang wrote: post #3

Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…

Even in 2013 this wasn't really the state of the art anymore. LuxRender came out in 2008.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#14

Post by minxomat »

erjiang wrote: post #3

Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…

That's like saying Flatland (the movie) was representative of the animation tech at the time.

Remember that The Third and The Seventh was done by a single person in 2009, and is entirely modeled and rendered with tech available back then: https://vimeo.com/7809605

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#16

Post by TylerE »

beering wrote: post #10
TylerE wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rather unfair to POV-Ray. These are hardly representative of what it's capable of. Look through the old IRTC archives, for instance: http://ftp.irtc.org/stills/index.html People were doing stuff like this ( http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1999-04-30/13hystri.jpg ) in 1999.

Using this very nice POV-Ray render from Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Gl... It features a lot of effects (radiosity, HDR maps, etc.) which are added on top of its basic functionality. There's been a big shift in how rendering is approached, from the old way of adding a pile of special effects onto your original non-realistic renderer, to a newer way of simulating light as it ph…

> It features a lot of effects (radiosity, HDR maps, etc.) which are added on top of its basic functionality

Huh? POV-Ray has supported radiosity for literally decades, since sometime around 1995.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#17

Post by TylerE »

BubRoss wrote: post #12
TylerE wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the beauty of CSG though... it’s volumetric, not surface based

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, constructive solid geometry does not solve any of the problems I mentioned and would have to be treated specially to be raytraced (while being likely being much slower). Converting it to polygons at a modeling or effects stage is workable but rendering it directly is unlikely to be widely valuable any more.

There is no need to "subdivide" because the exact volume of the object can be calculated exactly to any arbitrary detail.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#18

Post by philsnow »

nikodunk wrote: post #2

I love POV ray so much. It's what originally got me into programming in the late 90s/early 2000s. Found out about it from a PlayStation 1 Magazine.

My interest in POVRay helped me in my high school math classes: I was really into making animations in POVRay and at the time I was in calculus and it really made parametric equations "click" for me.

Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)

#20

Post by ujeezy »

I got into POV-Ray in the late 90s when I wanted 3D graphics for my Geocities page. I was in over my head in every dimension (scripting, math, artistic ability), but it was incredibly rewarding, and the newsgroup gave me a very positive early impression of what a community can feel like on the internet.
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