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Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

I didn't know that, I thought Aperture saved changes themselves, ie took a snapshot, and not just saved instructions for changes. Thanks.

I've heard Lightroom is good too though. I didn't realize they were including it with CS3.

Oops, I made a mistake. You're right Adobe's offering is Lightroom not Lighthouse. I don't know but I'd expect Lightroom to be bundled with the compleat CS suite. However for now at least I'll try GIMP, Blender and/or POV-Ray. I'd rather not have to pay the price for PS CS3 when it comes out.

There have been several sites that have shown the benefits of 64-bit vs. 32-bit on x86. Even a simple test rendering with povray can illustrate this (these are my results using the benchmark scene):

sempron 32-bit kernel, 32-bit povray, sse2, gcc 3.4
Time For Parse: 0 hours 0 minutes 3.0 seconds (3 seconds)
Time For Photon: 0 hours 0 minutes 53.0 seconds (53 seconds)
Time For Trace: 0 hours 33 minutes 45.0 seconds (2025 seconds)
Total Time: 0 hours 34 minutes 41.0 seconds (2081 seconds)

sempron 64-bit kernel, 32-bit povray, gcc 3.4
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 2 seconds (2 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 49 seconds (49 seconds)
Render Time: 0 hours 35 minutes 50 seconds (2150 seconds)
Total Time: 0 hours 36 minutes 41 seconds (2201 seconds)

sempron 64-bit kernel, 64-bit povray gcc 3.4
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 1 seconds (1 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 41 seconds (41 seconds)
Render Time: 0 hours 28 minutes 45 seconds (1725 seconds)
Total Time: 0 hours 29 minutes 27 seconds (1767 seconds)

Thanks for proving that you dont to crap in 3d you poser. (HA! I made a funny! you probably are one of those losers that use poser to get your human forms you 3rd rate hack!)

Nice to see some 12 year old kid here thinking he knows anything trying to Bullshit real pros and amaters in the industry.

I know that you have not created anything near the level of what is in the blender gallery, let alone what others in the "amateur" sector have done.

BTW mister know nothing. the difference between an amateur and a pro is selling ONE of your works. I created CG for a Tv commercial with blender that has aired on 8 channels in prime time. What is in your portfolio?

I origionally was treating you like an adult, but it's obvious you are a little kid trying to act big here.

go away little boy, this place is for adults to play.

By the way pissant. Here is something I did in 2001 when I was playing around with POVRAY, something that zero talent hacks like you dismiss right away.. It's far better than the best you created.

city-pov

I am pretty sure you could not create anything without your precious tools that do most of the work for you. I bet you live on using pre-existing objects and other peoples work.

See, the best invention really is neccesity. They should try to make a movie every year or two.

Why not offer a short-film contest, similar to the POV still-image rendering contests (see http://hof.povray.org/ )

(BTW, I think you are missing a "mother"........above.)

Grain of salt: I haven't touched VB in about 5 years and use a mix of C, Perl, and Python for my programming needs.

Someone above mentioned assembly ... there's a good book called "Programming from the Ground Up" by Jonathan Bartlett out there for people who want to go that route. Start with assember (i86) and work your way up through c and perl, all in one book.

VB was a great beginner's language (when it was version 1.0 and was clean and simple and fully documented in a couple of relatively thin manuals that came in the box). But now the beginner may be overwhelmed by the available functionality and the documentation is now hundreds of megabytes of text available electronically.

Of course the same thing can be said about Java 1.0, and early versions of pretty much every similar language. As people demand to be able to do everything in a programming system it will eventually be come almost unusably complex no matter how simple and clean the original design and the first version were.

If someone wants to be a Windows programmer, or especially a professional VB programmer, then they have to start somewhere and VB is probably a fine starting place for someone moving into the world of Windows programming.

If you're interested in programming in general with less of a "Windows GUI Apps" concentration then there are lots of (probably better) options.

One I like to recommend for kids to get them into the basics of programming is POV-Ray for Windows which provides a very nice little IDE for writing programs that produce beautiful pictures when run. You can give a kid a program that draws a shiny sphere floating over a checkered landscape and then show them how to code a loop to make it 100 randomly positioned spheres, etc. and leave them to experiment with making changes to the program and seeing how that affects the output. Way more interesting than your average "Hello World!" in a window.

It's free too

G.

You know what would be nice, the submitter including a sentance on what the software did.
Anyone with two brain cells to throw together can tell what is does. Let's look at the submission:
fluid dynamics simulation
inverse kinematics system
improved boolean tools
animation system
flive UV unwrapping LSCM
Modifier stack system
3d manipulators
full undo system
Obviously it is the IDE to a 3D Raytracer. (be it Yafray or any other compatible raytracer.)

Actually, it's just like POVRay, except that POVRay is better. Until Blender comes with a 'reveal codes' in Blender where we can freely script and edit our objects, it won't be as powerful even though Blender comes with more features. I've used Blender to make my wallpaper of a semi-transparent metallic puddle with a simple path, (with the ego-pleasing "Mine" in brazenly proud text floating above it,) and the effect is very very nice. My only gripe is that I wish I didn't have to use scripts to make a dozen copies of an object and rotate each one successively by a discrete amount like in this picture.

Blender is a great program. It's so good that they made Madagascar with Blender on a Linux system. (The Penguins in the movie are an inside joke to the different distros of Linux.)

With Blender, you have the power to make movies on your computer. Check it out.

Can anyone identify the artist and/or supply a pointer to the original image?

I'm interested in what ray tracer was used (POV-Ray?, what modeller (looks like maybe Blender?, and time and details about the rendering.

I also think the artist should get some credit.

People have been raytracing photorealistic scenes for many years now.
http://www.povray.org/
When I discovered it about 10 years ago, it had already been going for quite a while.
REALTIME rendering though... that's the trick! :p

(There was an impressive realtime raytracing card demoed a while ago, but the scenes were very visibly simplified to make it render in realtime. :( )

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible?

And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible?

And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time?

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)

But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.

Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm

Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723 that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

Productivity:

Graphics:

Media:

Internet:

Survival Kit:

Development:

But given the higher prestige and longer prep time of povcomp (irtc competitions are bi-monthly) it's not so surprising that the balance of the images have a more polished feel. On the other hand, some of the povcomp entries are recognisable versions of irtc entries. The Gilles Tran "Wet Bird", posted as an example of good tracing (yeah! It's my favourite ever raytraced image - see the link somewhere up above) was itself an irtc winner. Anyone inspired to look into POVRay by this story should take advantage of http://news.povray.org/ too. Lots of expertise available for mere politeness over there.

Here is a link to the documentation. The first section is a tutorial, the second is a reference for all of the povray features.

The language is very simple, yet includes programming language constructs like loops, variable assignment, and procedures (which can be recursive). Modelling by typing into a text file works suprising well for most things. I have two pieces of advice: 1) use graph paper for initial planning and 2) if you use the same number more than once, declare it as a variable rather than hardcoding it (it makes it easier to tweak the shape of complicated objects later).

Povray takes much longer than 24 hours to learn to use well, but you should be able to learn to program simple scenes with a camera, a light, and some geometry in a few hours.

http://www.povray.org/

A freeware (as in beer) raytracer with a long history and huge comunity of aficionados. It comes with a powerful and flexible scene description language in which you program your dreams.

I always thought that to be a very compelling reason to learn both to program and to have good math skill: to be able to draw your own photorealistic 3D graphics.

great tool.

some would mention csound for e-music composition too...

Render something: repeatable, high CPU usage test with visible (and interesting) progress.

Check this out. And if you like what you see and want to do some yourself, my very personal favorite tool: POV
This from 2001 blew the varous parts of my mind involved with detecting CGI artifacts away. Imagine what todays hardware can do...

Something like Povray or just plain old fractal generation and manipulation which can be done in about 40-50 lines of code - change the code show them the result - let them have a go.

I hope it does come about. Imagine, Povray quality GTA. Everything looks real, not like some simulation.

Of course the system requirements will make Doom 3 look simple. Multiple 64 bit processors, lots of memory. Lots of bandwidth inside the machine.

It would look nice though.

• http://www.povray.org/temp/1984macintro.mov

I use Gimp to do what most people do with Photoshop: General Image Manipulations.
I am not a Photographer or a full-time Graphics Designer (although I love hand-drawing and designing Logos)
What I don't like about Photoshop is not the software itself but the OS : modal windows.

Gimp (and most apps in Linux) - you have that freedom of floating dialog boxes instead of Modal-windows; so you can get under it.

The general averseness with Gimp is twofold:

1. People are way too accustomed to Photoshop and unlearning stuff is short of painful.
2. Gimp on Windows/Cygwin sucks sucks badly. And sadly that is Windows-users gain their first impressions of the software.

In Gimp if you are stuck - right click (navigate the menu from thereon to do almost anything).
Gimp is definitely better what it used to be (I abhored the 1.x versions), and not that sub-standard in comparison to Photoshop.
I don't deny however that Photoshop itself is an extremely professional state-of-the-art software and that in many fronts it still beats Gimp (as I keep hearing: CMYK / Pantone profiles).
But there is much more to Gimp than people are vaguely aware.

For me its refreshing and exciting the whole evolutionary (if not revolutionary) process. Sure many Linux-ported applications are still sub-par in contrast to Windows-only:

Photogenics, MainActor, QCad / LinuxCad

Some got the timing wrong and had to pull-out as Linux wasn't popular then: NetObjects Fusion for Linux and MusicMatch Jukebox.
Others were bullied by the Microsoft lobby: most notably games.
While others still support a Linux version to this date: Maya Complete and Mathematica (way too expensive I rather settle for the free Blender, Octave and Pov-Ray)

Which leads us to the Open Source:

The were have a vast library of resources just to cater for the Designer.
But sadly we got tired and old in learning new stuff.

I cannot comment on the world of Mac. Which should be more user-oriented than developer-oriented; a means to an end as you stated.

While Microsoft itself - is a damn pain in the arse. People are stucked with it for lock-in reasons including proprietory formats - that is how they bred so many software houses writing apps just for it.
Rebooting, desinfecting - recovering corrupted documents is a hassle any business and I could do without. And so .. I resist.

Use Mac / Use Linux / but using Microsoft = very unwise.

It was Marathon, an early Mac first-person shooter by Bungie, which first got me really interested in computers...especially when I discovered the tools for modifying the graphics and physics model, and for creating maps. I loved the idea of creating a virtual 3D environment.

Then I discovered POV-Ray (http://povray.org/), a photorealistic raytracing program with publicly available source code, and which uses a scripting language to generate the scenes. Getting an actual picture as feedback when you get a working program is far more encouraging than a simple blurb of text. By this time, I'd learned Pascal and C++, but the most complex projects I did were in POV-Ray. In the process, I learned a great deal of mathematics...the images I could generate provided motivation as well as an illustration of how things worked mathematically. It's a lot easier to learn the stuff when you have a practical need for it and can see how it works.

And perhaps best of all, when I decided the program was too limited, I was able to get into the actual source code and make my own changes and additions. I don't recommend doing this as an introduction for beginners, as the program is quite complex and has some rather messy code, but just generating images with the scripting language is a great way to start.

• CD Burner XP Pro
• Ultra VNC
• POV Ray
• Sygate Personal Firewall
• IconShop

By the way, how do you plan to take submissions in the future and filter out bunk submissions? It'd be nice to have a moderated system that could evolve some.

To reaffirm what the article said building linux clusters is very simple. In fact certain distributions such as bccd and cluster knoppix specifically for that. Although configuring clustering softwares such as pvm mpi lam mosix etc wouldn't be a problem, I prefer something which has almost everything build into one package thats why I like the above distros. In fact I built a cluster (using BCCD) at home and used it to render images built from povray. I used pvmpov for the rendering on a cluster part. Although there were only four machines the speed difference was evident. And above all making clusters is extremely cool and shows the paradigm shift towards parallel computing.

Kind of specialized, in that it is for POV-Ray, but IMP tries to acheive some of this.

http://www.povray.org/ POV-RAY can make art. kpovmodeler is (or was) included in kdegraphics to help with simple scenes. If you are a programmer, then you may like povray - which is basically like a programming language. I installed kdegraphics on my fedora core 3 laptop, but kpovmodeler wasn't installed :(. Either it was taken out of kdegraphics or fedora screwed up somehow. I didn't see any notice of its removal on the kde website - nor the kpovmodeler website.

Yeah, someone throw the POV-Ray benchmark at it and post results at the povray benchmark website

Yeah, someone throw the POV-Ray benchmark at it and post results at the povray benchmark website

Toxic Lucille Pane Sunflow R.I.S.E. RenderPark Radiance and of course. POV-Ray

• end-user license
• distribution license
• source license

• end-user license
• distribution license
• source license

• end-user license
• distribution license
• source license

Well, you're right, actually. For example, in 1993 there were already a slew of tools for POV-Ray. I should have said "10th anniversary of the official site", but didn't want to get too long-winded.

Actually, it's 18 years old. David buck originally developed DKBTrace in 1986 and I did the first PC port and called it POV-Ray in 1987. The website, povray.org is what is having the 10 year anniversary.

i'll tell ya what: POV-Ray. i'm a renderwhore.

Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.

Radiosity

Area Lights

Photons

-jim

Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.

Radiosity

Area Lights

Photons

-jim

Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.

Radiosity

Area Lights

Photons

-jim

Since 3.5 povray has supported radiosity which makes it possible to do really cool renderings. Lots of examples of radiosity in action be found here.

Rules on distribution found inside the license page, or here.

Basically, they require you to get permission to distribute it commercially, or even as a file posted on your webpage or P2P software, but you're free to give it out to your students, your peons, or your friends.

If you're going to discuss distribution terms, you might want to look at the distributor's license. It has a lot of legalese in it (and IANAL), but it looks like it has fairly lenient terms for inclusion into an open-source OS distribution.

The header of the license you linked points out that it is for end-users only, not distributors.

WHY ISN'T POV-RAY OPEN SOURCE ?

While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray[tm] source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray[tm] was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.

As people contributed code to POV-Ray[tm] over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray[tm] license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray[tm] will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.

WHY ISN'T POV-RAY OPEN SOURCE ?

While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray[tm] source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray[tm] was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.

As people contributed code to POV-Ray[tm] over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray[tm] license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray[tm] will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.

POV-Ray is not open source

POV-Ray is not free software. But it seems to be open source. At their web site there are links that seems to point at the source

Speaking of re-implementations, though, consider that the latest whiz-bang GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI can put together images of essentially the quality of those shown in the POV-RAY hall of fame in real-time. A great re-implementation would be a POV-Ray to OpenGL translator that uses vendor-specific extensions as necessary to let your video card handle the actual mathematics of rendering. If done well, it could also be applied to animation sequences instead of just static images, and the result would be a very fast, high-quality, low-cost rendering solution.

POV-Ray is not open source. The license forbids, among others, commercial distribution. In fact now that I read the 3.6 license, it seems to forbid distribution, PERIOD.

This seems to be an interesting contrast to this comment where someone (apparently a POV-Ray developer?) discusses plans to release POV-Ray under an open source license and explains why this is not currently possible:

"we can't reach many of the people who contributed the original code under the old license, so we don't have the right to just switch the license. We'll have to rewrite some pretty big chunks of code before we can think about a more open license. That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release."

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.

I wonder if that might be more accurately stated in the reverse: Definitely better than some of the pro stuff out there, but not nearly as usable for the rank amateurs among us.

It's actually far harder to use than simple point-click-and-drag solutions like 3dsmax or Maya, but the results can be just as good. Two of my favorite POV-Ray images:

'The Wet Bird'
'Chado'

I can't even imagine putting those images together using POV-Ray. Using 3dsmax, sure. But POV-Ray? Wow.

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.

I wonder if that might be more accurately stated in the reverse: Definitely better than some of the pro stuff out there, but not nearly as usable for the rank amateurs among us.

It's actually far harder to use than simple point-click-and-drag solutions like 3dsmax or Maya, but the results can be just as good. Two of my favorite POV-Ray images:

'The Wet Bird'
'Chado'

I can't even imagine putting those images together using POV-Ray. Using 3dsmax, sure. But POV-Ray? Wow.

As no-one else has mentioned it I'll be the first to point out that if you want to try raytracing for free on just about any platform you'll want POVRAY.

If all you have to do is render it, try povray It's excedingly easy to do what you describe in it. Also, I think there are povray -> blender converters, not sure though.