This is a bit off-topic but I really love POV-Ray and I think it is a fun fact people reading this thread might like:
POV-Ray was actually run in space by none less than Mark Shuttleworth when he was on the ISS in 2002.
Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#72My lord, had no idea POV-ray was still around. POV-Ray and Fractint inspired years of asembley graphics programming when I was a teenager...
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#73Earlier 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?
You can have physically based rendering with those non-triangle primitives too!
You can have, there is just no renderer that supports it, or is there?
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It isn't just tooling. > At render time, though, you need to use a bunch of extra tricks to get the right smoothing Nurbs or any smooth geometry needs to be subdivided too. You can set levels, max size of polygons, smoothness constraints subdivide based on the pixel size from the camera projection or any combination. In practice this is not a problem for polygons or nurbs. > - bump/texture mapping, This is orthogonal…
> Polygonal geometry, even subdivided, is typically not a big part of memory or time in rendering in all but the most pathological cases. 4k would still mean that one polygon per pixel would be 8 million polygons, which is going to pale in comparison to texture data typically.
Erm, at VFX level at least, that's not really true: once you have hero geometry that needs displacement (not just bump/normal mapping), you effectively have to dice down to micropoly level for everything in the camera frustum. And with path tracing (what everyone's using these days, at least in VFX), geometry caching/paging is too expensive to be used in practice with incoherent rays bouncing everywhere. Disney's Hyperion renderer does do that, but it spends a considerable amount of time sorting ray batches, and it was built to do exactly that.
Image textures, on the other hand, can be paged fairly well, and generally in shade-on-hit pathtracers (all of the commercial ones), this works reasonably well with a fairly limited texture cache size (~8 -> 16 GB). Mipmapped textures are used, so for most non-camera rays that haven't hit tight specular BSDFs not much texture data is actually needed.
Once things like hair/fur curves come into the picture, generally geometry takes up even more memory.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't just tooling. > At render time, though, you need to use a bunch of extra tricks to get the right smoothing Nurbs or any smooth geometry needs to be subdivided too. You can set levels, max size of polygons, smoothness constraints subdivide based on the pixel size from the camera projection or any combination. In practice this is not a problem for polygons or nurbs. > - bump/texture mapping, This is orthogonal…
3delight also traces SDS and nurbs analitycally. In offline renderers geometry data constitutes to most of memory usage. Texture RAM usage is kept under a few GB by use of page-based cache.
Now try it with displacement :)
Agree in general about geometry memory though: in high-end VFX, displacement is pretty much always used, so you have to dice down to micropoly for hero assets (unless they're far away or out of frustum).
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From 30Mhz and 5 1/4 floppies to ~450/600 MHZ a bunch of GB in 1999. From rare instances of people accessing their local BBS at 9600 Baud to accessing a worldwide communications network as a matter of course, often at broadband speed. The past 20 years really have been rather dull in comparison.
When you are inside a time or period not a lot of change is felt, but once you look back you can see incredible changes. You mention that last 20 years are dull. I think that the last 10 years are the era of smart phone revolution. A pretty big thing. Certainly belongs in the top 50 most impactful inventions and adoptations in human history. In 200 years from now the late 00s will be seen as the start of global conne…
Not so much. PocketPC's were on par on the 1st iPhone/Android phones with similar 3D gaming/multimedia capabilities, albeit as much as expensive and not as usable.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I'm tired of these kids saying PovRay coudn't do shit as if PovRay had in 1997 the same capabilities of an Irix machine from 1987. They couldn't even be more wrong with that. I remember seeing photoreallistic images made with PovRay in 1997 you coudn't even do with a GPU today in real time. Kids today have a lot of ignorance on the 90's technologies, guess why they confuse the 80's and the 90's a lot thanks to t…
You are right, but the same can be said between 85 and 95. The evolution of realtime 3d graphics was insane. From some low FPS 3d line engines to full blown textured 3d engines.
90-96 is big enough. From the NES/Genesis/286 to the Pentium MMX and the multimedia PC playing MPEG videos and games like Quake. In some PC's you could even emulate the Genesis under DOS, and a year later, the NeoGeo fully, which was "the big thing" in the early 90's. A huge step in six years.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
POV-Ray was my introduction to programming, before actual programming. Graph paper and a lot of trial and error. My longest render was 50 hours for a single 640x480 image, with caustics and area lighting. 50 hours of a Pentium 100 MHz buzzing near my bed.
How long would it take now on a modern machine? :) 5 , 10min?
Pentiums weren’t that old. It would depend a lot on gpu rather than cpu.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From 30Mhz and 5 1/4 floppies to ~450/600 MHZ a bunch of GB in 1999. From rare instances of people accessing their local BBS at 9600 Baud to accessing a worldwide communications network as a matter of course, often at broadband speed. The past 20 years really have been rather dull in comparison.
When you are inside a time or period not a lot of change is felt, but once you look back you can see incredible changes. You mention that last 20 years are dull. I think that the last 10 years are the era of smart phone revolution. A pretty big thing. Certainly belongs in the top 50 most impactful inventions and adoptations in human history. In 200 years from now the late 00s will be seen as the start of global conne…
I haven't felt a lot of incredible changes in the last ten years. In 2010 I had an iPhone 4, and I don't think there is a major qualitative difference between it and the latest smartphones. The computing performance may have improved since, but apart from loading increasingly bloated websites faster and allowing for higher-quality photographs, I haven't felt any major changes.
Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can watch videos in 4K and the internet connection is faster, and although computer graphics have indeed improved, it is nothing like the leap from 1990 to 2000.
The only new exciting development is virtual reality, which is unfortunately still fairly niche.
There is a larger difference from 2000 to 2020, but you could do a version of the above in 2000, only in a more inconvenient and expensive manner than today, while they would be largely impossible in 1980.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long would it take now on a modern machine? :) 5 , 10min?
Pentiums weren’t that old. It would depend a lot on gpu rather than cpu.
POVray doesn’t use gpu. It is embarrassingly parallel though. I would expect say a 2000x speedup over a Penguin 1 though. Say, 40x the raw clock x 2-3x more per cycle x 12-16 cores