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GeForce3: Real-time RenderMan?
b0ris writes "This review of the NVIDIA GeForce3 at The Tech Report does a nice job explaining how the GF3 chip can create advanced graphics effects in real time. The author raises the prospect of having real-time Final Fantasy or Shrek-style animation on the desktop in a consumer graphics card. The examples from the GF3 he uses to back it up are almost convincing, even if it isn't quite there yet. Will render farms go the way of the dodo?" Well, I'm all for dreaming, but its gonna be a few years before the GeForce8 can do renderman in real time, but when we get there, Final Fantasy 21 is gonna rule.
Yes, they had a realtime luxo demo, but it was not even near the quality of the original. For one, the resolution is much lower. Pixar renders their frames at I believe at least 3000X3000 resolution to match that of 35mm film and at a color depth of something like 16 bits per channel. The Geforce demo was likely at maybe 1024X768 and 8 bits per channel. Also the GeForce demo was probably programmed using a lower quality shading model because of limitations of the GPU.
You forgot to compound Moore's Law computation. (forgetting for a second that it's application is questionable)
2->4->8->16->32->64->128
between 6 and 7 years until pixar (by your transistor requirements) quality rendering can happen in real time on a commodity card. Factor in the fact that most users are going to be rendering at computer screen resolutions & 5 years is still a safe bet.
No, its not time to unscrew your case, but it IS time for game and software companies to pay attention.
"Most of what we perceive to be "unrealistic" lies in the modelling of animation and movement -- physical dynamics and interactions such as collisions, deformations, effectsm natural pheonomena like wind, human locomotion, etc. -- it is sitll raw CPU speed here..." Actually, its not raw CPU power, anymore. Thats what a vertex shader is. A "shader" is a device that can give every pixel its own behaviour. Grass is a great example. Right now if a developer wanted to add grass, they would have to map every situation they wanted to be in the game. For instance, if they wanted the grass to be blowing in the wind, they would have to make an animation for that and add specific times for when that should happen. Let's say that a developer wanted to make the grass bend if stepped on. The developer would have to make an animation of the grass bedning down. Then they would have some command "IF Character on grass THEN play animation.avi". The problem with this is that if I step on the grass from the right side, and the animation was made of the grass bending to the right, then it would look stupid. If I step on a patch of grass, in real life the grass would bend the opposite way (the grass would not bend into me). A developer could add another animation, one for the grass bending one way and one for the grass bending another. But this would be time consuming and would still only work for two directions - what If I walked on the grass from the north or south side? Shaders fix this problem. They give the grass its own behaviour. The GPU's pixel shaders will determine what happened to the grass, and using the commands written by the developer (since they are programmable), will make the grass bend at the exact right angle. Pixels will no longer do what they have been assigned to do before hand by developers. They will have their own behaviour. They will react uniquely to every situation. This includes "deformations, the effects natural pheonomena like wind, human locomotion, etc." That is exactly what the vertex shaders are for, and it takes a load off the CPU.
> Will render farms go the way of the dodo?
When a video card has the power of a render farm, then people will simply make a render farm using those cards.
This will always be the case, until the rendering abilities of a card become indistinguishable from reality, and can render twice as fast.
All your race are belong to Gus.
Eh... so what if its off topic. It was related to the post that I was replying to. The poster had an email address at Big Idea productions. Hence the VegiTales. Its amazing how seriously people take slashdot. Relax
something clever
I believe that Luxo Jr. is about 20 years old, so Duff is still right. :)
[disclaimer against redundancy disclaimer]
It takes a LOT more than polygon-pushing power to make a realistic image. The Geforce 3 (and the OpenGL or D3D which drives it) cannot do motion blur (REAL distributed motion blur, not accumulation), accurate reflection or refraction, shaders of arbitrary complexity, or any scene management and geometry generation operations.
ATI gives out source code for its Radeon drivers. NVidia does not. NVidia's chips are 3 generations ahead of ATI.
Now 5 years after the hoopla, one screenshot of a 320x240 camelion that looks like a movie, and 500 layoffs later, let's all say it in unison, "who gives a fuck if NVidia doesn't release any source code!"
You are correct... In my haste of work and other things... I didn't really go through what I was meaning to say.
Most of what people think of for CG work is raytraced... this isn't always the case, nor is it what I was really going to talk about.
Real time raytrace isn't going to happen for a long time...
But... for animatioin, under Maya, it takes longer to go through all the math with the deformers and the skeleton solvers and all that than it does to display. So sometimes, you can only get 1 fps.
Games use a much different approach, where everything is approximated to some extent.
Its true that they have IK solvers and are more realistic than in the past, but the dependency is not like what you would have in some animated scene files. What happens for secondary effects, such as hair moving is all based upon the characters movements. This is not really forseen... and only few animators would want that level of control on a character under most situations.
I also agree with you on the direction for 3D cards and movie CG. It will get better and better. And rendertimes will still be the same, because artists always want to add more realism or quality. As speed goes up, so does complexity, but render times stays about the same. Thats what I call job security.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I agree.
I was typing faster than thinking... not rare for me.
Everything you state is correct.
What I was intending to say is that what the graphics card is doing is different than what renderfarm rendering is doing. I don't consider it really rendering unless its from some render package such as Maya, PRrenderman, Mental Ray or the like.
I have had to do some raytraced rendering before. I know the difference. My fingers must not of.
Thanks for pointing this out so others are not as confused as my fingers.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Not if you were using depthmap shadows and decent textures with high enough anti-aliasing.
For the image quality of a render, even from Maya, you will have to wait a while... or you are doing some really simple stuff.
The lighting that the GF3 does does not compare to what Maya renders. There are a couple levels of complexity in difference.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
People always mention this.
It would take a lot of development time and coopereation from the software companies to support low bandwith render systems.
The scene files that we are working with are 10s of MB, and they reference other files that are of similar sizes. You may pull accross 100MB of proprietary scene files (which means encrypted to the users) and then the system determines what to render. It may take 30+ minutes a frame, while either creating a scad of misc files or eating up memory (such as shadow map files, motion blur files...) and then assemble all of them to make a 2-3 mb image to upload.
The average user's home machine would only be a waste to studios. The bandwidth would kill us. Legal would kill us for letting proprietary data out. Your system would be smoked while rendering... or it would take a long long time.
All the transfer time of the scene files and the textures would take longer than the render.
We keep a nice fat backbone to the renderfarm for a reason. No sense in having 200+ procs waiting on data.
We do use software that allows us to use the users desktop, but this is over a LAN and not a WAN... and that makes a big difference.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Most of what we see with "realistic rendering" on desktop boxes is OpenGL / direct3d based. This isn't realy rendering, well... its not raytraced.
Its true that they are getting close and blurring the line between rendering and desktop 3D for all practical purposes there is a difference.
I just hope rendering never goes away... I need this job!
Another difference is that game movement is not near as complex as cinematic animation. Most game movement is pre-definded movements trigered by something. A lot of secondary animation and even some primary animation is done by a complicated set of equations. It all depends on the package, but sometimes with these solvers on, you might get 1 fps when viewing the animation. Until issues like that are fixed, you will not be able to generate stuff like that on the fly.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
-sigh-
The eye can detect above 120, depending on the person. My threshold is around 80 or so, anything above that adds little to the gameplay, other than the framerate is less likely to dip below what I notice.
What makes 24-30fps acceptable in film and TV is motion bluring. Search the archvies for the arguments, as I don't feel like getting into it again.
That's called marketing
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..he specifically talks about how Nvidia will repeat this allegation with every generation.
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Achieving Pixar-level animation in real-time has been an industry dream for years. With twice the performance of the GeForce 256 and per-pixel shading technology, the GeForce2 GTS is a major step toward achieving that goal.
-Jen-Hsun Huang, President of NVIDIA Corp.
Here is what Tom Duff from Pixar thinks about that:
These guys just have no idea what goes into `Pixar-level animation.' (That's not quite fair, their engineers do, they come and visit all the time. But their managers and marketing monkeys haven't a clue, or possibly just think that you don't.)
`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)
Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!
Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo. 384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!
At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns.
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But anyway, you don't really want a QED renderer. Imagine rendering a soap bubble. In order to get an accurate shifting-rainbow effect, you'd have to model extremely subtle air currents, and the thickness of the film in micrometers. It's far more efficent to take your usual surface and apply a time-varying texture to it, and tweak it until it looks accurately like a soap film.
The computation required to accurately render QED is absurd. Instead it would be better to have a class of objects in your renderer (diffractors, thin films, etc) that can simulate diffraction. But don't expect those to behave nicely when they interact with non-diffracting objects, the computing required would just be too huge. If you could do that, it's time to start coding The Matrix.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
You're kidding, right?
How often, in every day life, do you notice diffraction and interference? I never do. Consider also that the size of objects which cause diffraction are the same order of magnatude in size as the wavelength of light (i.e. 10^-7m). Which, BTW, is far smaller than you can see. Now imagine you're going to keep track of polygons/voxels 10^-7 in size, for a room that's 10m by 10m by 3m. That's 10*10*3/(10^-7)^3 =~ 3*10^23 voxels to keep track of. Forget it. There are far better ways to simulate diffraction, if you really wanted it.
What I have seen, that's really cool, are Relativistic ray tracing. Do that Nsuck^H^H^H^Hvidia!
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
1) They already have enough power to render the movies, that's why they're already out in theaters.
2) The people who MAKE movies are a different group of people than those who SHOW movies.
3) Seti@home has to do a ton of redundant work, because people turn seti@home off in the middle of a block and never turn it on again, kids download block then try to upload spoofed workfiles to crank their work completed stats, and other garbage that the Studios just wouldn't tolerate well.
Consider this: Would the Seti project buy a server farm to perform this work if they could afford it? Or do you think they'd go through all of this crap, simply because they enjoy dealing with crap more than doing science?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Dude. Both of those quotes are referring to the GeForce 2 GTS. The Tom Duff post to comp.graphics.rendering.renderman is over a year old. The review being posted is about the GeForce 3.
Yes, much of what Tom Duff said probably still holds true, but let's try to quote material that is actually referring to the subject at hand, mm'kay?
--
But then again, I could be wrong.
The reason why watching a film on a TV monitor vs watching a film in the theater is because that film is translated from 24fps to 30fps (usually by frame doubling, but I don't know the process well enough to describe it -- search the web. I've seen a good review of progressive scan DVD players that gave a good background to the whole film->video conversion process). And as far as films go, many theaters actually use projection cameras with shutters that open two or three times per frame, rather than once. It doesn't help the fact that there are still only 24 frames in a second, but it does make it seem a bit smoother (making it seem as if there are really 48 or 72 frames, though those are doubled or tripled).
Don't I know it! There's no real cutting-edge theaters out here (IMAX doesn't count, as that's not really cutting-edge), though one would expect at least something, what with being a big technology center. Oh well. I guess I'll continue to be happy watching movies at the Bella Botega or Cineplex Odeon (two eastside theaters with stadium seating). As far as better filming processes, the best I've heard of is 32fps. Of course, I'm assuming these get translated down for play in "normal" theaters, because to do otherwise would require a massive layout of cash by theater owners. And we all know that they don't make much money off of anything but the concessions :).
that's not the point. the point is that we can do the oldest stuff that pixar did (the lamps) in realtime now. Nobody thinks we can do shrek in realtime now. So that's a 10-year lag in prerender to realtime. The question is, will we be able to do shrek in realtime in another ten years?
The reason you think you've never seen photo-realistic CG is because when it's photo-realistic you can't tell that it's CG :) "Special effects" aren't the only computer graphics in movies nowadays; in a lot of movies nowadays the set that the movie is filmed on isn't actually what's seen in the movie - buildings are added (in a LOT of movies, many of which you wouldn't even think would have CG at all), people are added (for example, in the edited version of "Eyes Wide Shut", CG people were added to block out penetration and appease the US's puritan hangups. The problem was, the people were completely static and it was obvious that they weren't real), atmospheric effects are added, etc.
I don't remember what movie it was, but I read an article on the making of some movie (set in the 1800's, one of those cheesy romantic dramas, released about 2 years ago) and they showed the original filmed scene where you could see scaffolding, cameras, and lights. Then they showed the final result, which was a fully convincing 1800's-era scene. Most of the buildings and background people were created in 3D Studio MAX and rendered with Mental Ray, and you just can't tell. It was truly impressive. The buildings moved perfectly with the camera angle, the CG people walked and moved perfectly (there were no closeups of them, which removed the hardest part - facial modelling. The human eye is very good at picking up inconsistencies, especially in objects we observe every day, such as human facial emotions. It was very impressive nonetheless).
Of course, convincing facial modelling isn't impossible - look at this picture by Asier Hernaez Laviña, which was modelled and rendered in 3D Studio MAX. Not video, but it's an amazing technical achievement and is almost indistinguishable from a photograph.
--
The BeOS GeForce driver doesn't even support hardware 3D yet...
--
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Seeing some of the discussions about being able to render FF8 in real time using the 3D models is a bit silly. A movie is not like a game. These GeForce cards are designed more for doing 'unpredictable' realtime motion. A movie is all predetermined motion. For example a movie could be compressed into the 'visible surface meshes' and textures required to render the scenes. The model database would only be required to generate meshes that could later be rendered in realtime. Two different things IMHO
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
>>he is wrong about 99% of movies being
>>rendered with renderman.
actually i'm not. Other than Antz/Shrek from PDI (which have their own in house renderer), i'd say 95% (conservative estimate) of the feature quality CGI put out is done with PRMan.
Mental ray - yeah i'd been used for a few things (e.g. Flubber) when you absolutely HAVE to use raytracing. But other than that, no way. It can't swallow the type of scenes that PRMan can handle, the memory requirements are FAR too high, and it's motion blur is weak at best in comparision. There have been plenty of post houses that have tried to use it, but once you start to throw large scenes at it that require quality anti-aliasing, motion blur, and HUGE geometry databases it just falls apart. MR3.0 will tackle *some* of these problems, but the fact that it's a raytracer gives it some inherent limitations of what it can handle.
And this isn't from somebody who hates mental ray --- i worked on it at Softimage for 3+ years. It's a good renderer, but it's no PRMan.
>>The shader language can raytrace.
Correct. and PRMan returns BLACK whenever you call trace. Therefor PRMan doesn't raytrace - ever.
You can hook it up to another renderer (e.g. BMRT, RenderDotC) to handle the trace() calls, but that raises it's own issues.
Sarcasm mode on:
Will computers continue to get faster? Will we someday have lightbulbs in every room of the house? Will everyone who wants one be able to afford an automobile one day?
Well, it'll be a few years before we're able to play color video games on our personal computers, but when we do the arcade games will really rock!!
Sarcasm mode off:
Really? What kind of sensless 'wow-computers-are-getting-faster' is this? The article actually makes sense and is interesting. It explains how computers are getting faster. It's the silly, so-called 'editoralizing' that stoopid.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No, I actually own a copy. I don't use it for more than playing, but I got a student edition so it wasn't too expensive. I saw the 6.5 upgrade but didn't realize what new features were in the package. I guess I'll be upgrading when I get some time... :)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I have a copy of Lightwave 3D and it supports OpenGL for realtime previews of animations. It uses its own internal renderer (or screamernet) to do the final rendering, but loading a scene in layout and hitting the realtime preview looks pretty neat on a GF2. I'd really like to see if some of the additional textures and lighting capabilities will be supported in LW6 in the future...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Actually, you are both right. The textures are critical for the look, but many of the best effects use motion capture (look at FF) because non-mocap motion is too damn difficult to get right on things we "know".
By "things we know" I mean human motion and things that we see every day and notice subconciously. Dinosaurs and spaceships are easy to fake since most people only see those in the movies -- and that is Hollywood motion, not reality anyway.
If you notice, it isn't that uncommon to see a rendered STILL that is indistinguishable from reality. However, rendered MOTION is still a bitch.
-chill
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Raytracing is only necessary in reflection and refraction -- which can be faked pretty damn good now.
Other shading methods (radiosity for proper lighting) are used elsewhere.
Real-time rendering CAN be achieved by using the proper methods and not just throwing the entire ball of wax at any scene.
The idea is SMART rendering: Z-culling (so you only render pixels that affect the scene); polygon reduction (so you don't bother with a 10,000 poly item that is so far away in the frame it is a single pixel); variable mapping (using environmental maps for reflections when appropriate (like fly-thrus where there are only "background" objects).
Think Hollywood set -- build (and shoot) only what the camera will see, nothing else.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm sure the GeForce8 will knock my socks off, but I'll be damned if I'll be able to find space for the cooling unit. A garage might be able to handle it...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Well, I'm all for dreaming, but its gonna be a few years before the GeForce8 can do renderman in real time, but when we get there, Final Fantasy 21 is gonna rule.
My dream is that GeForce8 can make it unnecessary to discuss the quality of the game in the same sentence we discuss the quality of the graphics. For years now, we have seen one product after another try to top the preceding generation in terms of delivering beauty and graphic heat -- and yet it has been a long time since games have really done, IMHO, a great job of delivering fun.
This is not to say that twitch isn't fun -- or that pretty isn't interesting. Its just to say that I'm not sure that more more photorealism equates to great gaming.
Actually, the biggest problem with 60Hz is the fact you get a low frequency beat with the light output from 60Hz flourescent or incandescent lights. I've noticed that moving from Austrlia (50Hz lighting) to the USA (60Hz lighting) that a 60Hz refresh is a LOT worse here than in Australia.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
This is completely false. Nyquist doesn't apply to a synchronous transfer.
The electron gun scan rate is CONTROLLED by the video card, so the frame rate coming out of the card is constant. The RAMDAC accesses memory at a constant rate, determined entirely by this refresh rate. Frames are generated into the back buffer and flipped into the front buffer once the entire frame is generated.
Nothing is actually "sampled" in the chain from frame generation to displaying the image (unless we want to talk about pixels rather than frames).
This means you need 30fps generated by the card to get 30fps displayed on the screen - not the 120fps you are suggesting!!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
It seems to me a little ironic that someone attacking a misuse of the word "ironic" is really just paraphrasing some article he read after the release Alanis Morrisette's song.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Disclaimer: I work for DotC.
RenderDotC doesn't raytrace either. You might be thinking of Mirage-3D, the author of which, the great Timm Dapper, also works for DotC.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The eye can't even detect anything above 30 FPS or so.
The cake is a pie
Cells in the retina have a recovery time of ~30 milliseconds. Do the math.
(If "80 FPS" seems choppy to you, it is because this is an average. The framerate only has to dip below 30 or so for a hundred milliseconds or so to be detectable.)
Here's a link from google
The cake is a pie
Okay... just one small thing... rain on your wedding day is ironic... considering it's supposed to be good luck...
> But I think we're still a ways off from being able to do away with the repetitive textures that dominate roads or brick walls in videogames.
Exactly. Why? Because we use textures as a form of compression. Computers just don't enough memory and bandwidth to allocate an unique texture for EVERY surface. (Light maps push this boundry though, as can be noted in Quake with it's light map cache.)
The reason textures even "work" to begin with, is that from a distance, a surface looks pretty much "flat". But at the microscopic level (atoms) the "surface" is extremely hilly. In the real world, *ALL* those micro details ADD UP when that object is light. And that is why the textures in any game stand out like a sore thumb. It's not the "textures" themselves that are the problem. It's the surface roughness and lighting that we are CRUDELY approximating (for real-time rendering.) Bringing this back on topic, thats why off-line rendering farms can look SO much better and realistic. They have the time to do all the expensive math calcs needed for realistic lighting (i.e. ray-tracing)
> It didn't appear flat, but rather bumpy
That's why bump-mapping is so badly needed in today's games. It fakes the atomic "roughness" of a surface.
I'll dig up a link to that Quake 1 client (with source) that added bump-mapping later today. The cool part was that you could adjust the level of bumpiness. A textured brick with a little bit of bump-mapping looked WAY better and started to look like a real brick (with indents.)
>> . Pixar renders their frames at a color depth of something like 16 bits per channel.
> The fill rate on the Geforce series is reasonably high. The color depth is 32 bits
For the GeForce, 32 bits per pixel is only 8-bits per channel, and can leave bad banding and mach artifacts with overlays.
16 bits per channel is 64 bits per pixel (ARGB). Unfortunately it will be a while before consumer cards even start thinking of supporting it.
The GeForce 3 demo at MacWorld was Luxo junior rendered in real time, so Pixar quality animation is possible, for a sufficiently early value of Pixar...
I personally loved the older ones. Although the one considered the best of the series never got an american release, The real FF III, the Japanese one. Play that one and you'll understand.
:)
Yeah, one of my housemates brought a copy of FF II back from his house. I went nuts on it for like 6 hours, saved the game, quit - next day, gone. Play the start again for maybe an hour, save, quit, gone again. Game is fried. Too bad, the first few hours were a lot of fun...
(I don't see what the problem is with DBZ-style hair, but then again I do spend about 2 hours a day watching it).
Here, even the most advanced renderer won't help much if you're talking about real-time interactive stuff -- it is sitll raw CPU speed here...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The theory goes: The fact that none of the situations described in the song are ironic, is itself ironic. :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Source
Some of the stuff the GeForce3 can do is great, but let's calm down. Move along...nothing to see here...
-brennan
Its a 10? minute long realtime rendered video.
www.theproduct.de
It's really amazing, and it would seem that what they were describing in the article is already here, but maybe im not quite clear on what they meant.
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
You are somewhat correct, but not quite there. Since modern 3D games are more complex, the game may lag a little now and then and therefore we experience more skipping in motion than in simple 2D platform games. But this is not the whole truth (as in: why do Amiga and TV consoles fasciliate "perfect motion"?).
;-)
;-)
Searching for "human eye framerate" on Google provided this link. A very good point raised here is that the screen is turned on and off many times a second. This makes us much more perceptible to refresh rates above 30 Hz. Especially on TVs and monitor pictures with higher intensities, where white colour is the brightest. If you don't believe me, adjust your monitor refresh rate to 60 Hz and notice the difference. Compared to 100 Hz, I notice the blinking extremely well. Hell, I even notice it a little when switching from 100 Hz to 85 Hz. However, if you use a lower refresh rate, your "eyes" adjust after a while. Especially using darker colours on the screen makes it easier. This might be a synchronisation problem, and that we start synchronizing with the lower refresh rate after a while. However, we DO notice extremely well when comparing, and working on a lower refresh rate may give you more headaches!
Notice the difference between refresh rate and framerate. IMHO refresh rate has everything with how "smooth" motion you can have. With lower refresh rates, it's much easier to create completely "smooth" scrolling (we perceive the motion as continuous), but we might notice the blinking of the screen. This is why games on TV can look PERFECTLY smooth, but "horrible" on a high Hz monitor. The more Hz you have, the higher STABLE framerate you need to get the same effect. So if you want more smooth motion in games, I recommend learning to play at a lower monitor refresh rate. Really! Your head may throb, but it's smoooth
All in all, I think of the problem as in two parts:
A) A synchronisation problem between refresh rate and framerate. (Which is really the same as your conclusion) Sometimes, a frame can take longer than a refresh and people will notice.
B) A synchronisation problem between the eye and the refresh rate of the monitor and it's intensity (remember colours are frequency too!) Remember that the human eye isn't built for watching rapidly blinking objects.
They don't pay me, so I won't clarify much more than this.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
1) Tom Duff sounds on the money with regards to the technical misconceptions...but an even bigger ever elusive problem: 2) "Pixar-level" animation in the end is not about polygon count, it's about COUNTLESS man-hours spent modelling, lighting, and animating....no card can ever replace that.
You are wrong. The shader language can raytrace.
Using BMRT together with PRMan, it can ray trace, and many people use it. Like in Hollow Man, for instance.
Here is a gallery, which includes Hollow Man. The call looks like this :
color trace (point from, vector dir)
Traces a ray from position from in the direction of vector dir. The return value is the incoming light from that direction.
Source
Education is the silver bullet.
What's so frightening about terminating a program?
Education is the silver bullet.
BMRT Raytracing Howto
You people are amazing. You don't even bother to look at my link, and you tell me I'm wrong.
Education is the silver bullet.
If I'm in Word, and I add an Excel spreadsheet to it - and then I print it - is that Word printing a spreadsheet? By my definition, yes - by your definition, no.
By my definition, Word can use Excel as a spreadsheet renderer. By your definition, apparently, just because Excel is not built in to Word, it means that Word is incapable of printing spreadsheets.
They're telling me, "There's no way for Word to print a spreadsheet," and I'm saying they're wrong. You're also saying I'm wrong. But I'm not, I'm right - and the page I pointed to shows how it can be done. It's not easy, and there are problems, but it can be done. The actual facts are on my side.
Your definition might be more technically correct (since "we don't say that program 1 is performing the specific task"), but mine is certainly more useful. Since my point was that program 1 is able to perform a specific task, by commincating with another program. Many programs are incapable of communicating with other programs in such a manner, and that makes PRMan pretty cool, in my book.
By the way, it's "English," not "english."
Education is the silver bullet.
After executing your commands, I am left with the following statement from you :
prman can't do radiosity via an SL trace without BMRT.
Now, I will apply the English language suggestion for good writing, "Don't never use double negatives," after which, your statement becomes :
prman can do radiosity via an SL trace with BMRT.
This is shockingly like my original statment :
PRMAN CAN RAYTRACE USING BMRT AS A TRACER.
And I guess I agree with myself. So, then I can only laugh, when I read your insulting statement :
If you still think that's prman doing raytracing then I suggest you take a remedial english class.
Because I just proved that you "think that's prman doing raytracing"! So, why exactly did you need to insult me twice in your post, in order to agree with me?
Education is the silver bullet.
Thanks - having the last word is kind of fun.
You might consider getting some help for that persecution complex.
If this is a back-handed apology, I accept. If it's merely another insult, you might want to consider taking some agression management classes. I think it's somewhat childish of you to move an argument of fact into a namecalling bout, suggesting that I don't live in the real world, don't know how to use the English language, and now that I need therapy, and have a "widdle head."
Semantic debates are sometimes enthralling, because you can twist words to make facts lie - but they don't really further understanding. Your definitions of "program" and "call" are well stated, and I believe I understand them, but I don't believe that they reall help you.
Word can call Excel to do spreadsheets, but that doesn't make it a spreadsheet program. PRman can call BMRT to do raytracing, but that doesn't make it a raytracing program. Eudora can call PGP to do encryption, but that doesn't make it an encryption program. The JVM can call methods in a class file to give you the long-distance phone calling capabilities in DialPad, but that doesn't make the JVM a long-distance phone calling program. Quake III : Team Arena can call jpeg library functions to load jpeg images, but that doesn't make it a jpeg image loading program. Internet Explorer can call Hotmail to send email, but that doesn't make Internet Explorer an email program. PRMan can call the shader language to do shading, but that doesn't make it a shading program.
Utility is an interesting thing. I can use a butter knife to turn screws, and I will agree with you that my ability to use a butter knife in that manner doesn't somehow turn it into a "screwdriver," in the traditional sense. But, if your definition of a screwdriver is merely that it is an implement with which one may turn a screw, it becomes a pretty hazy line. If you ask me for a screwdriver, and I hand you a butter knife, I'll laugh at myself, right along with you. It's silly, it's not what you asked for, but it'll do the job. You have to agree that if a demolitions expert is trying to defuse a nuclear bomb without his tools, the clock says 26 seconds, and he asks me for a screwdriver, if I hand him a butter knife - I've saved the day!
Most effects houses have a hard time staying in the black, and most use PRMan. If an effects house is down to the wire, and their client demands that a certain effect needs to look more real, and the only way to pull it off is by having PRMan call BMRT to do raytracing, they'd rather use my definitions of "program" and "call" than yours.
I love your last paragraph - I think you should use it, then next time you're on Jerry Springer.
Education is the silver bullet.
Um, are you on crack? Square has made no such decision. The Final Fantasy franchise is way to profitable to axe. Where did you hear this? I'd be interested to know your source. Or were you just assuming XI would be the last one due to the fact that it would be online? Sakaguchi has stated in interviews, if I'm not mistaken, that future FFs will not neccessarily be online, implying that there will be more after XI. I see no reason for Square to cut off the largest, healthiest branch of their game development.
Just had a brainfart, could PC users dole out some of their unused processor cycles (ala SETI) to contribute to the renderfarm. In exchange, you could get a theater discount when it hits the silkscreen?
-jc
I think I remember that one. . . was that the one where the mysterious hero with a strange but endearing flaw falls in love with the beautiful dark-hair woman? Then he has to save the planet from powerful foo bent on world destruction, with only the help of his rag-tag band of loyal but querky friends?
no, wait, I think that was FFXVI, nevermind.
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no comment
They sell it here: Pricewatch
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Stores around here are kinda slow as well. But, pricewatch always has the new stuff as soon as it comes out. You have to pay for shippig ans all that, but if you want the latest, there you are.
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I'm using Win2K SP1, and the driver for the GEForce 3 works quite well. All the graphics features work. The chameleon demo is indeed impressive. Considering that NVidia just started shipping the Win2K driver, I'm quite impressed.
I have more fans in my systems than most users go for. Nothing is overclocked. GeForce 3 boards have heat sinks on the RAM and a fan on the graphics chip. This board is pushing the limits of what's possible with current semiconductor technology. Power and cooling should be sized accordingly. Just shoving this into some low-end PC with a minimal power supply and fan may not work.
I thought I was also pretty clear about the fact that I'm a newbie at this, and the fact that I wasn't talking about the exact process Pixar uses. (Note the various "I assume"s, etc.) Whether they use a scanline renderer or not makes no difference whatsoever to what I was saying. My point remains, and I think all but the nitpickers saw it. In fact you saw it too, since your last couple of sentences are exactly what I was talking about.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
However, I'd say we ARE about advanced enough to do crap like this in realtime... ;) (No goat links, I swear!!)
However, there is some hope... I remember reading in a great book about 3D games (Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming) that raytrace-quality realtime games would be (according to the author's math) about 20 years away. Interestingly, that's exactly what the Pixar guy predicted, and that book was printed in 1996. My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume ;). So to me, this suggests that ~20 years from when the book was published, we will be able to have realtime raytracing of 1996 quality. Still not too shabby. BUT. There are gazillions of optimizations you can make in realtime games that you can't make in raytracing. Here's how I see it: We can improve the algorithms a few powers of ten, efficiency-wise. (Don't say we can't, you'd be very wrong.) We can speed up our processors a few powers of ten. I think we're getting there faster than these guys are suggesting, just as long as we don't aim for the moving target of Today's Pixar Production$. (As he points out, there will never be a day when the realtime graphics are as good as the prerendered ones, simply because the big companies have the cash to throw at it to make it look better.) Anyawy. Sorry this was so long. Great stuff ahead, though. :)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
It is slightly ironic that the same people who one day were saying digital art is still art are the next day saying that animation on the level of a movie that took thousands of man-hours to create can be generated by a computer. Thus stripping away the art value of the movie (or at least the animation in the movie).
It does piss me off when people misuse words, especially words that are very nuanced and clever. But there you go. People are stupid.
BTW, good examples.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Not only that, but it's not like "slow" renderers are going to be standing still while nVidia advances their technology. There is a heckuva lot of room for advancement before we can generate photorealistic images of any arbitrary environment. Wake me up when there's a GeForce that can do stuff like this in real-time (and don't forget the motion blur!), and then we can compare state of the art again.
Somehow I think that paying $5000 for a video game might be a bit of an exageration.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Yes I know this, obviously I was talking about Photorealistic Renderman, the implementation of the renderman standard and the renderer that pixar uses. So when he said, My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume ;). I was making a correction.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Sure there is incredible potential in the geforce 3 and programmable stuff like it, but computer graphics in movies has too many extra things going on for it to be done in hardware realistically. If there was specialized hardware for all the nuances like raytacing, inverse kinematics, procedural textures, volumetrics, radiosity, etc. then maybe in could be done in realtime, but I don't think we're going to be there any time soon. Rendering is very slow because for the most part it can't take advantage of special hardware because the quality just isn't there. Anti-aliasing, motion blur, and good depth of field take time as do physics simulations, heavy subdivisions, and complex shaders. It's coming, but not for at least 4 more years, and that can only happen with the high end rendering tools like renderman and mental ray being written to take advantage of a specific card which isn't going to happen unless there are standards in place.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Renderman doesn't do radiosity. Different techniques are used other than raytracing for realtime games and probably will continue to be for some time.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
what harmful side effects?
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Imagine how cool it would be if they actually had stable drivers!
At the rate NVidia's been going, they'll have stable GeForce3 drivers around the time the GeForce4 comes out. Don't hold your breath.
NO CARRIER
This will allow the next-generation Final Fantasy games to have back the nonlinear gameplay that made the earlier games in the series (the SNES games at least) so extremely good.
Because whats wrong with todays FMV (IMO) is how it is impossible to vary them! You just can't make a new FMV for every combination of characters and so on... But with this technique the cut-scenes can be changed to suit that spesific game, the changes can be change of characters/weather/landscape and so on...
Real time cutscenes versus FMV is a lot like a comparision of speech, read by actors, and speech from an engine which just requires text input. The latter allowing the oral replics of the characters to change a bit every time you play the game, and doesn't take up that much space. It's just up to game-developers...
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Greets, Øyvind Berg ~ ËlaC|n
__ elacin
After all, that orange tree would have taken years to grow.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Look at the sun through your eyelashes.
MY EYES, GOD DAMN YOU...!
I never liked FF. Big Dragonball style hair, people riding these weird chickens... silly big swords... that's all I ever saw. Well, a friend of mine was playing FF8 and his character had to dress up like a woman to go do something. I guess that's more interesting than a big chicken. I'd rather watch Record of Lodoss War or some other old classic.
The FF movie looks nothing like the video games I have seen, thank goodness. I hope the characters in the movie aren't breeding those giant chicken things...
- Someone Confused by the FF Hype
I was under the assumption that any graphics chip renders in real time. It's just that the newer chips can do it a whole lot faster, and with better detail.
If all a chip does is determine where the objects are(what object is in front of what), and apply the textures and from there, create the frame, isn't that rendering in real time?
I just dream of a time where the graphics chips can display the rendered frames in realtime, and they look real. Real-looking people/textures/whatever.
When I can look into a monitor(or whatever) and see an object, I want it to look real. That's what I'm waiting for. Till then, I'll keep dreaming(and spending massive amounts of money that I don't have on the latest and greatest computer gizmos).
"10,000 spoons when all you want is a knife", how is that ironic? It would only be ironic if later you discovered that a spoon would have done just as well for say, opening a can of paint.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Actually, BMRT's author (Larry Gritz) has long since left Pixar to start his own company with several other folks. They're going to be releasing yet another implementation of Renderman Real Soon Now. Larry has stated several times in comp.graphics.rendering.renderman that BMRT will continue to be free (in the sense of free beer) for the forseeable future, but efforts will concentrate mostly on development of the new renderer.
Fat fingered the subject...
PRMAN CAN RAYTRACE USING BMRT AS A TRACER
On my planet, "Earth", when program 1 calls program 2 to do a specific task, we don't say that program 1 is performing the specific task.
BTW, I did read the link you provided, long before this thread came up. I read it again just to be sure. The HOWTO very carefully refers to two separate renderers. At no point is it even implied that prman is doing raytracing. It clearly states that you must rewrite trace() as a DSO shadeop which calls BMRT to throw some rays around. It even talks about the disadvantage of having to keep the scene geometry in memory for two different renderers.
If you still think that's prman doing raytracing then I suggest you take a remedial english class.
If you read the RenderMan Interface Spec. (V 3.2) the entry for trace() reads as follows:
So, you can call trace() in prman, but it's not going to do you any good.
That said, it is possible to write a ray tracer in the shading language! This has been done, in fact, by an insane person named Katsuaki Hiramitsu. This shader, however, does not use the trace() call. The trick lies in actually defining the objects you're going to do ray tracing on in the shader along with your own version of trace(), which is, by necessity, intimately bound to the type of object you've defined.
So, saying the shading language can ray trace is like saying you can keep yourself alive for a while by eating selected portions of your own body. It's possible, but certainly pessimal.
As cited in Advanced Renderman(Apodaca and Gritz), Blinn's Law says the following: "An artist is willing to wait a fixed amount of time for an image to render, and that faster hardware simply results in more complex images that take the same amount of time to render"(511).
Thus, even if you could do the scenes that were done in A Bugs Life in real time(holding in mind that the entire world of a bugs life was one big scene), Pixar would simply be rendering much larger, more complex scenes.
Another example- a gamer, much like an artist, is only willing to wait a certain amount of time for a given frame of their game to load(around 1/30th of a second per frame). While hardware grows at astronomical rates, games simply become more complex(eg Wolfenstein->Doom->Quake I->Quake 3) and take the same amount of time on the new hardware. Nobody is going to go to the store and buy Wolfenstein just so that they can run it at 100,000 frames/second on their advanced hardware. So even if somehow games were to achieve Photorealistic Renderman levels of rendering quality in real time(again, holding in mind that many times its the artist, rather than the canvas that makes anything look realistic) they would just get more complex and run at the same speed as Wolfenstein did on your old 386.
While its spiffy that someday you'd be able to look at ABL style scene in real time, its not some wonderful limit that is slowly being reached, but simply the normal progression of technology.
Alex Magidow
I still play Ms. Pac Man, but I hardly ever play games from just five years ago.
Graphics are cool and all, but they're essentially just pornographic. Not in the sexual sense, but pretty graphics just sit there vacuously to amuse your eyes. As has been said long and loud, game developers should strive to focus at least as much on gameplay as they do on making their graphics cutting edge. Give the user an elegant interface, something fun to interact with, something new, and something challenging.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Remember Freedom is slavery, war is piece, and Ignorance is strength!
Now I need to stop goofing around here on the slashdot insoc-msdn party news and go back to work studying the 11th edition of NewSpeak by MSN expedia. I keep hearing people here on slashdot speaking in oldspeak.
You people all need to learn how to excell(smart tag link to Microsoft office homepage)on what you do to learn and explore (smart tag link to internet explorer site)your newspeak party langauge. With free(link to how free you are with hailstorm/.net)enterprise and innovation to lead the market, great Microsoft can actively access(link to ms access)all the information we need. We need an active innovatorto actively explore, and actively leadthe market, and they ask that we all support the revoluton by your activation subscription.
See that wasn't hard. You need to all speak newsspeak and only use these adjectives innovation, lead, explore, access, active, word, excell. This will make thought crime impossible. less is better. For something double-pluss-un-innovative like linux you should not use the word bad or sucks. You all are required to use the following words above with the -un extension. If something is really innovative you need to put doublepluss innovative or really bad its doubleplus uninovative. Everything non Big brother is just plus uninnovative. So remember its not GNU-linux but doubleplussuninnovative gnu/linux. Now lets here you all respect big brother now and after my newspeak lesson I will play some video games and render linus doing a double-plus-un-innovative things to scare people so that Bill Gates can actively explore my record so that I can be considered loyal member who doesn't doublethink.
http://saveie6.com/
It's bad enough they aren't planning to release Final Fantasy 9 for the computer, what chance do we have of getting to 21?
Anyways, I agree with the marketing trend of "flashy graphics" over "gaming value and playability" and it sucks...I miss the days of FF1, FF2, and FF3...now _that's_ gaming.
Magius_AR
why don't they just give up and start numbering them by year, like sports games?
The main problem with the GeForce 3 is that nVidia hasn't been pushing it enough into the home market. I mean, the specs sound yummy, but there isn't enough supply. Nobody sells it here :(
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Stop Facism NOW!
Did anyone else make it to page 17 for the discussion on quincunx?
According to the author, "It describes the pattern of dots found on a five-sided die", but actually this is the pattern seen when you look at an eight-sided die just right. In any case, there are no regular polyhedra with five sides.
K45.
This signature has eleven vowels.
Anyone who would be excited over Final Fantasy 21 needs their head checked. The series started to blow when it came to the CDROM. I personally think they should have stopped with Final Fantasy VI, but they finally made a name for themselves when it came to the Playstation. It's too bad they had to dumb the game down for the masses.
Check out the 7th Heaven demo from scene.org.
Or maybe they will announce Blender supporting actual usable file formats.
More likely, however, is that Malda is hungry for a new, graphics-fancy game to play on his "[im]pluasibly deniable" Windows machine, not realizing that Tribes 2 is available for Linux.
Actually using vertex buffers and onboard textures the AGP bus would not need to touch most of that stuff from one frame to the next. Of course you'd need a video card with a gig+ of RAM.
It seems to me that we will never get to the point of realistic rendering in games because by the time one reaches pixar-level animation, there is so much art and detail going on before the rendering stage.
If we do get game companies trying to produce games with "realistically rendered" graphics, won't they need budgets of 100 million for each game to develop all of the data (detail, world, etc.) that the hardware will operate on? Then we'll be walking into the software store laying down $5,000 for a game instead of $50.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Read his post. Things like soap films, oil spills, feathers and hair are all pretty common, and are all affected by diffraction and interference. It would be nice to handle them with the QED renderer, as opposed to figuring out tricks on the case-by-case basis to get them to work right.
>|<*:=
What's really strikes me as "ironic" is when a non-American denigrates American English when in fact, properly spoken American English is the least changed and most conservative version of the English language.
Seriously, I think you're barking at a fantom here (it's not a real expression but so what), and besides, aren't the people who make the games 3d artists as much as those who make big-screen cartoons? The only thing that's suggested in the article is that in some point, we could see graphics in the quality of those movies, but in real-time. Nothing to do with creativity or talent. Period (god i love being annoying).
"This review of the NVIDIA GeForce3 at The Tech Report does a nice job explaining how the GF3 chip can create advanced graphics effects in real time. The author raises the prospect of having real-time Final Fantasy or Shrek-style animation on the desktop in a consumer graphics card. The examples from the GF3 he uses to back it up are almost convincing, even if it isn't quite there yet. Will render farms go the way of the dodo?"
It's clear that he was talking about raw computing/rendering power, nothing to do with talent.
Pixar doesn't raytrace. They are very clear about the fact that their renderer is a scanline renderer. I don't know if they use radiosity or not, but whether or not they do doesn't say anything about whether they ray trace, since from what I've seen, much radiosity is done as a preprocessing step and stored in the light value fields of each vertice. This means that if nothing in a room changes position, you can keep rerendering a moving camera without repeating the radiosity step. This is usefull for more realistic lighting in games. Prerender as much radiosity as possible, then just use cheap tricks for shadows and lighting for the moving characters.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
I don't work at Pixar, so I can't say what they actually do, but I do know their software somewhat (used to be bundled with Nextstep before Apple bought Next). Their software supports defining everything in a scene once and using one file for the whole scene, than moving the objects in the scene. For meshs that change (think all the characters), I don't know if there is a good way to define their mesh once, or if you need their mesh redefine in each frame (which is to say, I don't remeber if it is possible to have a Shader move the vertices for skeltal animation). However, that doesn't mean that Pixar doesn't use one file for one frame. It just means that their software doesn't require it.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Avid style editing was always on the desktop. That was the whole point of Desktops.
You probably already did this, but if not, get the directors commentary DVD of El Mariachi. It is extremely fascinating. I usually watch more than a few scenes of a director's commentary, but this was so jam packed that I watched the entire films commentary.
To save money, Robert Rodriguez would use watch ever he could of a take. So, if I ran down a ramp and threw a guitar at a balcony and missed, well he decides that is where a cut in the final edit will be. So he moves the camera and the has someone off screen through the guitar case over, and he cuts between the two just before it was obvious that my throwing the guitar case would have missed.
Also, Robert Rodriguez never made a film print of El Mariachi. He had it transfered to video and edited it there. He then sent the video around with the idea that whoever bought it could pay to have an actual film edit done, since getting a print made would have cost nearly as much as the entire movie itself.
Finally, on a seperate note, while Spy Kids was a bit to cheerful and child oriented at times, it still was a rather amusing movie, and time reasonably well spent. I'm sure that all the parents who took their kids were extremely happy that for once it was something they could rather enjoy also.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Morrisette is Canadian I believe.
Dont you think its Ironic that the song is called Ironic and doesnt contain any Irony. Perhaps thats the whole point?
generic
Most of this stuff can continue to use Newtonian optics. Even Bragg diffraction, now that I think about it. So you're right that degenerate modelling will do us for quite some time, and most of the canon.
But the first person who wants to model proper rainbows, sun-dogs, or coatings...
The really hard part about QED isn't the iterations. It's defining the integration regime in the first place. I haven't looked in a couple of years, but I bet even the best Feynman diagram tools still can't work without heuristic input.
--Blair
"Luxo, Jr. always wanted to grow up to be an electron microscope."
Damn cool, but it's not QED yet.
It's all based on waves (classical theory). And it seems to be a surface phenomenon only, and dependent only on the geometric surface description.
Real QED would include interactions of photons with the subatomic particles of the atoms within the body of the material.
Diffraction and thin-foil effects are too-simple examples, with classical analogues. Phase-conjugate mirrors or simulacral holograms; now there you have to have QED.
This isn't to take away from Stam's work. It's gorgeous. The idea of walking into a bar with a double-barrelled shotgun and blowing away the pseudo-retro Wurlitzer with the wave-rendered CDs rotating on top, wave-rendered shards of CD spinning through space...
The idea of finding a secret because of its slight change in lustre vs its surroundings when the overhead lights dim and an accent spotlight becomes dominant...
The idea of being able to tell painted plastic from painted metal and painted wood, or black dirt from gunpowder and incinerated-demon charcoal...
Someone get nVidia on the horn.
--Blair
Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.
--Blair
I was being facetious with the title.
I was quoting an American pop song "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette. The lyrics go like this: "An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day / It's a black fly in your chardonnay / It's a death row pardon two minutes too late / Isn't it ironic... don't you think"
English pundits were all over the song for again perverting the meaning of "irony" into meaning "unlucky," as you say. Why "again"? Because the first, real definition is nothing more than this: saying what you don't mean.
The first perversion, the American popularization of irony, is nicely summarized by the American Heritage Dictionary:
Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence "In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence "Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market," where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
The article didn't imply what I objected to, but I thoguht b0ris (the poster and summarizer) did.
I think it's a little ironic that today we talk about bringing Shrek and Final Fantasy to the desktop when just yesterday a slew of 4's and 5's affirmed that, beneath raw power, there is art in computer graphics.
Believe me, there is a lot of artistic skill that goes into making animation like that, from storyboarding to complicated modeling and animating to directorial talent and writing ability.
Just because Avid-style editing has been brought to the desktop, doesn't mean what you see on iFilm is as good as what you see in theaters. Most of the time it isn't. It's all about the talent, not the tools.
Case in point: Robert Rodriguez, who scraped together only $7,000 to become one of Hollywood's hot young directors. For those who don't know about him, his latest film was the hit Spy Kids.
yeah it's incredible that we have programmable pixel shaders (among other things), and it won't be very long until you see movie-quality gfx in games.
remember what games looked like 5 years ago? back then one of the best-selling games (Duke Nukem 3D) still used sprites for enemies. and today? Quake 3 Arena looks mighty fine, but it's been out since 1999. have you seen the games being created for the GF3 now? take a look at AquaNox, Unreal 2, or DOOM 3 (only decent site i could find)...
*ahem* quality isn't there? GF3 does have pretty good Full Screen Anti-Aliasing, motion blur (i don't care how good it looks, i hate it in my games), good depth field they're working on i imagine (looks good to me), physics (heard of Halo?) heavy subdivisions i don't know, and complex shaders... um, yeah, pixel shaders, and programmable... models cast shadows on themeselves, and they're pretty accurate etc... we already have that stuff man.
but anyway. PC aside, take a look at Final Fantasy X. it IS in real-time, on the PS2. you can find some previews of it at ps2.ign.com and some other places as well.
but, yeah, pre-rendered movies and such will always look better than real-time, because of processing power, like you said. but real-time gfx arn't as far behind as you think.
No one can put you down without your full cooperation.
Go to the article on Slashdot Back Online and read the post "I went Outside!!!! (Score:4, Funny)".
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Capt' Trips
grep >= ! == $your
They really use a different scene description file for each frame of a film? Hmmm
The problem is that even if we can have 100k polys per frame, it's going to suck to see your marines run straight to gunfire, or just stand and watch while their friends get slaughtered because their fuzzy logic is too fuzzy to realize they could help. Those bastards are always out of the reaction range, even if it's just a few meters away. Frankly, AI has been too long neglected. I know AI can be pain in the ass to program, but I'd like someone to make a licensable AI engine, just like with GFX engines these days...
--- Hajotkaa siihen, kapitalistit!
After playing FF IX and finding it revolting (after the 2nd disc it got BAD, FAST). I have decided that only FF IV (FF II american) for the Super NES is worth playing, and that doesn't even use 3D graphics! People are getting to carried away with all this 3D stuff to actually stop and realize that games are about having fun playing them and not just a bunch of flashy graphics... I say story and character development first, flashy graphics last. Oh yeah, and I love Moxie. --J
It's obvious by now that not even you believe what you post. If you truly believed it were dying you wouldn't bother posting this all the time. What would be the point? But you seem to be trying to will it to happen.
"That lags real time by a factor of 800,000"
..
Well, this should be quite embarrassing for Pixar guys because for all that money spend and incredible amount of hardware used, Pixar stuff does not look 800,000 times better no matter how you cut it.
Nvidia products offer much better value for the money
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
But then again anything with the Final Fantasy name will always kick ass. Or so we all hope.
I am not sure about real time rendering for flicks like shrek and final fantasy. But real time rendering for stuff that is less detailed is definitely here. I've worked with Maya quite a bit, and I remember hating the way I had to wait ages for it to render my movies ( 8 hours meant that I would leave it to render over night). Now what I was working on was not cutting edge and my use of lighting and textures was quite simple. I'm pretty sure that the GeForce 3 would render something like that in real time with no problems at all. Real time rendering is here and I'm happy that I wont have to wait a day before I can see the result of my work. This means a massive improvement in productivity and ease of use.. atleast for me.
- Tempestdata
i'm going to assume that you never played any of th FF series then. the older ones were incredible. I personally loved the older ones. Although the one considered the best of the series never got an american release, The real FF III, the Japanese one. Play that one and you'll understand.
sig this
I'm slightly less than pleased with the fluff-happy "Final Fantasy 21 is gonna rule" comment...
::Sigh::
Because Hironobu Sakaguchi's storylines fall to the wayside...
I curse the day PC gamers were given Final Fantasy.
- colin