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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)

#91

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

anthk wrote: post #77
holoduke wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, I played Genesys games in 1999 on K5-166 or something like that.

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

#94

Post by BubRoss »

dahart wrote: post #88
BubRoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original thread was about nurbs not being used anymore over polygons. Displacement doesn't change the equation between polygons and nurbs of course because they both go in as high level primitives. Hair is a its own thing of course. I know you know this, but I think a lot of people missed the original point.

You keep saying “polygons”. Are you talking about subdivision surfaces? Films don’t model in “polygons”. Subdivision surfaces are a curved surface representation, not “polygons”. Some people still use NURBS too.

> Films don’t model in “polygons”

I can promise you they do. They are treated as the same thing. Everyone uses polygons knowing they will be smoothed/subdivided/declared as subdivision surfaces. Sharp edges, cusps and bevels are typically made by creating more subdivisions in the actual model instead of using extra subdiv data on the geometry, though pixar might be the exception.

> Some people still use NURBS too.

I think this is very rare. Maybe blue sky never transitioned away.

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

#95

Post by CyberDildonics »

TylerE wrote: post #65
CyberDildonics wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that make it easier to work with?

You can do things like take shape A and then subtract shape B from it and all works, no matter how complex the intersection.

That is what it is, but how does it make any of the other parts of 3D easier? How would deforming it be easier than surface geometry for instance?

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

#96

Post by mcphage »

joefourier wrote: post #79
holoduke wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

> 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…

Now almost everyone does that. That’s the difference.

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

#97

Post by mcphage »

anthk wrote: post #24
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…

http://hof.povray.org/mouille.html Year 2000. You don't know a lot, and I guess you didn't have a look on the PovRay's hall of fame.

I love Gilles Tran’s work. I haven’t seen anything he’s created in years, I wonder what he’s done since the Book of Beginnings (http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en&section=ldc)

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

#98

Post by berkut »

dahart wrote: post #88
BubRoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original thread was about nurbs not being used anymore over polygons. Displacement doesn't change the equation between polygons and nurbs of course because they both go in as high level primitives. Hair is a its own thing of course. I know you know this, but I think a lot of people missed the original point.

You keep saying “polygons”. Are you talking about subdivision surfaces? Films don’t model in “polygons”. Subdivision surfaces are a curved surface representation, not “polygons”. Some people still use NURBS too.

Subdivision surfaces end up as curved surfaces when rendered, i.e. an approximation of the limit surface, but the modellers most definitely do model them as polygons in the DCC apps.

Some of the studios still don't even bother with crease weights and still "double-stop" ends with extra vertices/faces to create hard edges.

My original point was that it is possible to render subdivision surfaces without dicing down to micropolygon (i.e. you approximate the limit surface with Gregory Patches or something), but only if you don't have displacement: as soon as you need displacement, you pretty much need to dice down to micropolygons, and in this scenario, the geometry representation can be extremely expensive in memory with large scenes.

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

#99

Post by klodolph »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #90
elihu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ran exactly the same code on a modern machine I'd say that's a pretty reasonable guess. You'd get a big speedup just by going from single-threaded to multi-threaded execution. Probably the biggest boost would be to use modern methods. It's possible to do path tracing at interactive frame-rates on modern hardware; some of the optimizations can include not doing very many samples per pixel but to rely on denoisi…

I doubt you'll get any speedup from multi-threaded execution, unless it is also multi-core.

It’s hard to find processors these days that aren’t multi-core. I can’t remember the last time I saw a single-core computer.

(Or are you talking about the difference between “multi-threaded execution” and “multi-core execution”? That wouldn’t make sense. Threads are how you execute code on multiple cores.)

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