Slashdot Mirror
The Future Of 3D
tlb writes: "I found an article regarding the future of 3D at Beachside Tech. The article discussed 3D is movies and the internet as well as video games. It seems interactive 3D objects are becoming more popular for web use. There's also some history in it, and some info on technologies from Nvidia."
Seconded. Dull info, amateur/sloppy writing.
Take this example:
This July, Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within was released. With it, came the most glorious 3D CG in history. <snip> The level of detail is unsurpassed to all previous movies. At least for now it is.
Leaving aside the gorgeous grammar ("unsurpassed to"?), then quite apart from anything else, if FF's 3D CGI surpasses all previous movies, then it always will. If a wonderful new 3D CGI movie is released that surpasses FF, then it won't be a "previous movie", will it?
Aside from such scrappy writing, he also missed out TNT/TNT2 chipsets in his 'history' of nVidia's products. TNT was a massive improvement in fill-rate - the first time you could really run a game at 1024x768 and higher without huge slowdowns.
And all that "I still remember when Nvidia was the new kid on the block" - wow, he can remember a whole few years..? He can't actually remember enough to tell us why the Riva was not as good as 3dfx - just some vague comment that the 3dfx looked better. The Riva was a pretty buggy part - it had horrible seaming problems. nVidia introduced the TNT to developers as "an apology from us for how bad the Riva was".
When I got to the end of the article, I was left wondering why the hell it got onto the front page of slashdot - basically all the article said was:
"3D is the coolest! And it's going to get cooler! Have you seen the Sharper Image site? Hot dog! I'm gonna get me some nVidia lovin'!"
Harsh but fair, methinks.
Tim
I suppose the same could be said of a painter.
Seriously, the more I see about photo realism the more I wonder how much more effective it would be to just edit real photographs taken by a decent photographer.
Effective for what purpose? I'm a photographer, but I realize the merits of other art forms. Often, editing an existing photograph won't give you the results you want to achieve. 3D modeling gives you the opportunity to create your own worlds, independent of what you're able to capture with any kind of camera.
3D modeling and other forms of computer art are just other media artists can use to create. And in the world of art, having more media available never hurt anyone.
I'm all for photo realism in animation, but for stills it seems like a waste of perfectly good film.
I'm not sure what this means. Do you have a better cause that this perfectly good film could be used for? I suppose it could be given to "decent photographers" to shoot images to be subsequently photoshopped to make "photo-realistic" stills. Which would be great, because then you'd have computer artists having to work their ideas around the images they're given from the photographer (whom they probably don't even talk to) rather than being allowed to create images from scratch if they want.
Not that photoshopped photographs are necessarily bad, by any means. But to say that all computer-rendered stills should have been done as some collaboration between a decent photographer and a photoshop artist is simply naive, from an artist's perspective.
Oh, and by the way, I must agree with the posts that named this among the most pointless of articles slashdot has ever linked to.