Blender Adds Raytracing

tsarkon reports the SECRET SLASHDOT FLOWCHART by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:43 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Top secret Slashdot document flowchart recreated for your viewing pleasure. This was taken with a micro camera like in the mission impossible movie, but I was dangling over a wet heap of smelly socks and unwashed bodies and they had just passed out from eating frozen pizza, they can't afford the real stuff. I took this picture and digitized it. I narrowly escaped this ordeal and am still mixing Chlorine Bleach and Battery Acid to produce Chlorine gas to get the smell of the Slashdot hovel out of my nose. Unwashed clothing, greasy matter hair, fart saturated furniture at every turn. Open cases of crappy K6 based white-box china-hardware strewn about, half ass 4 wire extra cheesy barely twisted CAT3 wire being used as CAT5 because "it works fine" 400 distributions of Linux lying around messily unboxed and documentation strewn about. The smell of feces was in the air, along with rotting food and marinating sweat from the foul underarms of the Slashdot team. Upon obtaining this evidence I now know more about things are done around here. It is a very interesting process that outlines the depravity of the programming here. DOCUMENT_DISTRIBUTION: _____________TOP_SECRET___:_(GROUP_SLSH-1) _____________EYES_ONLY____:_(HARD_COPY_ONLY) _____________NEED_TO_KNOW_:_(DIRECT_DEV) _____________DESTROY_INACTIVE_COPIES SLASHTEAM_FEATURE_PLANNING_FLOW_CHART _________________START ___________________V +-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+ |Ha_s_the_feature_been_implemented_before|_yes_ |__on_Kuro5hin_or_another_weblog_site?__|_____| +-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+&nbsp_;__ __| ___________________|__________________________| ___________________no_________________________V ___________________V__________________________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+__________| ____|Was_the_feature_implemented_or|______yes_| ____|_suggested_by_a_known_Troll?__|__________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+__________| ___________________|__________________________V ___________________no_________________________| ___________________V__________________________| __+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________|___ _______________ __|_Have_hundreds_of_users_suggested_|____yes_|___ ___/___________\ __|the_feature_to_CmdrTaco_via_email?|________+-_- -> __+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________^___ ___\___________/_________| ___________________|__________________________no__ _________________________| ___________________no_________________________|___ _________________________^ ___________________V__________________________^___ _________________________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+_______+-_--_- -_--_--_---+_____________| ____|Will_the_feature_make_Slashdot|__yes_\|Can_ja mie_or_krow|_____________| ____|___even_more_like_a_game?_____|______/|_hack_ it_for_me?_|_____________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+_______+-_--_- -_--_--_---+_____________| ___________________|______________________________ ____|____________________| ___________________no_____________________________ ___yes___________________| ___________________V______________________________ ____v____________________| ___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______/__THI S_FEATURE_IS_PERFECT_\___| ___|Can_CmdrTaco_use_his_limited_Perl|_yes\/__FOR_ SLASHDOT._IM_SO_GLAD__\__| ___|____knowledge_to_kludge_it_in?___|____/\___I_T HOUGHT_OF_IT!!!_TIME__/__| ___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______\____F OR_SAILOR_MOON!______/___| ___________________|______________________________ _________________________^ _____________

Re:tsarkon reports the SECRET SLASHDOT FLOWCHART by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:48 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Top secret Slashdot document flowchart recreated for your viewing pleasure. This was taken with a micro camera like in the mission impossible movie, but I was dangling over a wet heap of smelly socks and unwashed bodies and they had just passed out from eating frozen pizza, they can't afford the real stuff. I took this picture and digitized it. I narrowly escaped this ordeal and am still mixing Chlorine Bleach and Battery Acid to produce Chlorine gas to get the smell of the Slashdot hovel out of my nose. Unwashed clothing, greasy matter hair, fart saturated furniture at every turn. Open cases of crappy K6 based white-box china-hardware strewn about, half ass 4 wire extra cheesy barely twisted CAT3 wire being used as CAT5 because "it works fine" 400 distributions of Linux lying around messily unboxed and documentation strewn about. The smell of feces was in the air, along with rotting food and marinating sweat from the foul underarms of the Slashdot team. Upon obtaining this evidence I now know more about things are done around here. It is a very interesting process that outlines the depravity of the programming here. DOCUMENT_DISTRIBUTION: _____________TOP_SECRET___:_(GROUP_SLSH-1) _____________EYES_ONLY____:_(HARD_COPY_ONLY) _____________NEED_TO_KNOW_:_(DIRECT_DEV) _____________DESTROY_INACTIVE_COPIES SLASHTEAM_FEATURE_PLANNING_FLOW_CHART _________________START ___________________V +-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+ |Ha_s_the_feature_been_implemented_before|_yes_ |__on_Kuro5hin_or_another_weblog_site?__|_____| +-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+_;___| ___________________|__________________________| ___________________no_________________________V ___________________V__________________________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+__________| ____|Was_the_feature_implemented_or|______yes_| ____|_suggested_by_a_known_Troll?__|__________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+__________| ___________________|__________________________V ___________________no_________________________| ___________________V__________________________| __+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________|___ _______________ __|_Have_hundreds_of_users_suggested_|____yes_|___ ___/___________\ __|the_feature_to_CmdrTaco_via_email?|________+-_- ->|_WON'T_SCALE_|_-_--_--+ __+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________^___ ___\___________/_________| ___________________|__________________________no__ _________________________| ___________________no_________________________|___ _________________________^ ___________________V__________________________^___ _________________________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+_______+-_--_- -_--_--_---+_____________| ____|Will_the_feature_make_Slashdot|__yes_\|Can_ja mie_or_krow|_____________| ____|___even_more_like_a_game?_____|______/|_hack_ it_for_me?_|_____________| ____+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+_______+-_--_- -_--_--_---+_____________| ___________________|______________________________ ____|____________________| ___________________no_____________________________ ___yes___________________| ___________________V______________________________ ____v____________________| ___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______/__THI S_FEATURE_IS_PERFECT_\___| ___|Can_CmdrTaco_use_his_limited_Perl|_yes\/__FOR_ SLASHDOT._IM_SO_GLAD__\__| ___|____knowledge_to_kludge_it_in?___|____/\___I_T HOUGHT_OF_IT!!!_TIME__/__| ___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______\____F OR_SAILOR_MOON!______/___| ___________________|______________________________ _________________________^ _______________

Bingo! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:43 · Score: -1, Offtopic

AC adds fp!

Re:Bingo! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:45 · Score: -1, Offtopic

you do indeed fail it

Cool by ldexter · 2003-12-13 00:45 · Score: -1, Troll

This is cool. Test.

--
Hello world!

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down with zionism by cmdr_shithead · 2003-12-13 00:47 · Score: -1

death to Israel!

Much easier way... by shfted! · 2003-12-13 00:47 · Score: 3, Funny

There's a much easier way to Ray-trace that involves very little processing time: just shoot Ray in the street and the cops will come trace him with chalk.

--
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.

Re:Much easier way... by Querty · 2003-12-13 00:48 · Score: 1

That is sooo..... corny :-/
Re:Much easier way... by smittyoneeach · 2003-12-13 01:05 · Score: 1

Truly. Some joke about giving up the rayt race years ago, and having retired to pursue the sublime goal of implementing a web server in SAS would have been funnier.

--
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Re:Much easier way... by originalTMAN · 2003-12-13 01:14 · Score: 3, Funny

nah, but it is pretty coronery.
Re:Much easier way... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:46 · Score: -1, Offtopic

MANILAMANIAC YOU'RE CRAZY TO BE HERE Sauna city, three shirt and shower days Diesel lungged by quaintly painted jeepneys Senses assaulted Blaring street cacophonopia Horns a-plenty Graceful golden limbs with canker sores Merely breathing, you and me Umihi1 Hee hee hee ho ho An English city visually But what you hear's not what you see O o2, no no 'Cept on Tagalog bawal3-ed walls Vendor stalls And possibly some student halls So? YOU CAN LEAVE ANYTIME Airline offices abound Package tours to the Motherland Ancestors never saw Compete with twice weekly trips to Ho Chi Minh City Or maybe an extortionist will help you on your way The vendor hordes of Santa Cruz4 Goods tricely bundled Flee yet another attempt at civic beautification Urchins of Ermita5 scamper to the cry of "Bagansa"6 Traffic bends around the bulging sidewalk Where burnt out squatters camp A beggar lad, all limbs lopped A victim of some vengeance? Takes your coin with stabs Calesa7 and cronycrat limoed in luxury Trespass the jeepney jungle Policemen play cops and robbers with themselves Growing GNP's and poverties Insurgencies, illiteracies And common ordinary everyday disease Aircon economy, peso astronomy for some And the poor used to live fairly well BUT YOU STAY 50's, 60's jukebox timewarp Little kids dance to the imported nostalgia Nights ending with the lonley cry of "Balut"8 Paco Park, omnifarious oasis Noosed by rumbling roads Its giant wounded acacias Rotting and regenerating North cemeteries' mausoleum madness Disneyland of death Were the living housed half as well South Pacific seaside shanties Periodically removed Embrace the Embassy9 OR COME AGAIN IF YOU CAN'T

Blender is getting mature by g_braad · 2003-12-13 00:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

Hopefully they add even more usable features to it, like a decent shader... and a better user interface. I still prefer Maya for my overall work, but if Blender is evolving in this same pace. It is perhaps someday possible to switch to a cheaper solution

--
F/OSS & IT Consultant

Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:34 · Score: 0

Mature?

Ok, so where is the "undo" function? There are not many functions more basic and necessary than that one :)
Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:40 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Father
A bearded man
A pedophile of sorts
Put his hand
Inside my jocky shorts
I have the right to say "no"
Everyone agrees
But tell me Father
Is it so
That I can't say "Please"?
Re:Blender is getting mature by Exiler · 2003-12-13 01:42 · Score: 4, Informative

In 2.3.

Actually there's been an undo feature for a long while, it was just clunky and unwielding before...

--
Banaaaana!
Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:12 · Score: 0

How is this insightful? Seriously the moderation system at slashdot is totally whacked (yeah, it's another AC post that the Slashdot people can correlate with my real account, so I'll see some random -1 mods there -- yeah we're all well aware you take retribution like that) -- shit like this isn't even remotely interesting or insightful -- it's a blatant karma whore. In fact, the cheesiest, most kludged up 10 line AI program could do a better job of replying quickly to a story with some worthless tripe, knowing that moderators are eager littles bunnies looking to blow their load on some post that has some semblance of not being a troll. Pathetic.
Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 04:47 · Score: 0

Maybe because in comparison to your puling and all the other bitching, someone found it interesting.
Here's an idea: say something interesting yourself, or leave. Now get the fuck down off of my obstacle.
Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 05:19 · Score: 0

Downloaded 2.31 but I can't find any undo. The user-manual doesn't work.

Last time I read something about blender and undo they suggested that ones should save all the time and load in again if something get messed up! I hope thats not what you mean?
Re:Blender is getting mature by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 07:26 · Score: 0

Hey dinkwad -- the point is that (your) karma whore post isn't even remotely interesting or insightful -- it's fucking BLATHER. "Yeah, that's good that they added it. I use XYZ". There is nothing interesting, insightful, or even beyond posting diarrhea about that post, but it's early in the post list so it gets moderated up. I don't give a shit if you have a problem with it, but the blatant truth is that Slashdot moderation is absolutely horribly broken. Trolls have proven that countless times by posting some blathering bullshit, saying absolutely nothing, or absolutely nothing that's actually correct to anyone who actually RTFA, and it shoots up to +5.

Slashdot's moderation is the mindless will of a bunch of fucking retards
Re:Blender is getting mature by LuxFX · 2003-12-13 08:58 · Score: 1

speaking of a decent shader --

What has happened to BMRT (Blue Moon Render Toolbox, I believe is the full name)? It looks like not only has development stopped, but all trace of it has vanished. What gives?

Let's pull a "Blender" and make sure it gets OSed!

--
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Re:Blender is getting mature by LSD-25 · 2003-12-13 11:26 · Score: 2, Informative

The founders of Exluna were accused by Pixar, their former employer, of misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement and patent infringement. Exluna was able to settle the lawsuit by ending BMRT.
The Demise of BMRT & entropy

Here's a list of RenderMan-compliant renderers. Some of them, like AQSIS, are open source.
Re:Blender is getting mature by LuxFX · 2003-12-13 12:50 · Score: 1

*sniff* I didn't know. That is very sad.....

--
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Re:Blender is getting mature by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:21 · Score: 1

Oren-Nayar, Blinn, Phong, and Toon shaders were added to Blender in version 2.28. There was a massive UI overhaul for version 2.30 (read the release notes at blender3d.org) and work is still continuing on this front. There is also work going on to integrate yafray (a global illumination renderer, under fierce and rapid development) seamlessly into Blender, too.

Cheers

Hah... by The-Bus · 2003-12-13 00:49 · Score: 5, Funny

"raytracing is almost usable"

Well, at least we've got someone that is being truthful about their software's feature set... A bit too refreshing, if you ask me.

--

Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

Re:Hah... by SpaceRook · 2003-12-13 01:54 · Score: 1

Ray tracing is nice for quick-and-dirty demos. Not everyone can run a resource-intensive program like Maya. I remember we used PovRAY a lot in my computer graphics class. Also, weren't Wolfenstein and Doom based on Ray Tracing?
Re:Hah... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:01 · Score: 0

Wolf and Doom were Raycasting, not Raytracing. Conceptually a little similar, I guess, but in Wolf and Doom, the rays stopped after the first hit - they didn't reflect, refract or transmit through the material and hit more things, and in the wolf raycast, the raycaset was essentially 2D, used to pick entire columns out from a texture.

An actual raytracer is still the only way to go for really realistic scenes - pixel shaders with rasteriser (like raycasting in 3D) can make relatively beleivable scenes - until you see a real raytraced animation. THEN you'll be able once again able to tell when a scene in a movie is CGI. Until they start raytracing more.
Re:Hah... by Lars+T. · 2003-12-13 02:04 · Score: 2, Informative

Nope, you mean ray casting (apart from POV-Ray). Look here.

--
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Re:Hah... by Shinobi · 2003-12-13 03:36 · Score: 1

Actually, both raycasting and raytracing draw the path from the object to the "camera"

Also, radiosity with good reflection/refraction/diffraction routines and shaders is the most realistic method so far.
Re:Hah... by Waffle+Iron · 2003-12-13 04:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

Wolf and Doom were Raycasting, not Raytracing. Conceptually a little similar, I guess, but in Wolf and Doom, the rays stopped after the first hit - they didn't reflect, refract or transmit through the material and hit more things, and in the wolf raycast, the raycaset was essentially 2D, used to pick entire columns out from a texture.
It was also essentially 2D (often called "2-1/2D") in Doom. They used some major trickery to make it look like you had real 3D. However, the tricks greatly constrained the map topology that could be used. For example, there are no "bridges" anywhere in doom; there is always exactly one ceiling and one floor at any point in the map. IIRC, there were no slopes either, only steps.
The fact that you could play the entire game and never notice these limitations goes to show just how skilled the map artists were.
Re:Hah... by DetectiveThorn · 2003-12-13 04:38 · Score: 1

Having talked with Ton R. a fair amount, I'm sure he was speaking of raytracing in general, and not specifically about Blender's Raytacer. That said there are several points to be made about this thread: 1) Yes, Raytracing is usable, if you want to make a still, or a 10 second animation. But in general, raytracing is not used in production environments because of the CPU cost. (Pixar only just added selective raytracing on "Finding Nemo"). Blender is an animation package, not a still image renderer, so it tends to favor speed. The fact that CPUs are 40x faster is just now making selective raytrace a viable option for people with out a 1000 CPU render farm. 2) The Raytracing in Blender is selective. Reflections and shadows can be raytraced. Everything else is z-buffered shading with shadow buffers. Again favoring speed. 3) This raytrace HAS NOT seen a release yet. It exists only in CVS for testing (and the "before and after images" have one serious flaw that has already been found and fixed). So this whole discussion is a bit premature.

--
Go ahead /. me. http://www.soylent-
Re:Hah... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 14:01 · Score: 0

Moderators? This guy knows what he's talking about (as opposed to the 99% of other Slashdot readers).
Re:Hah... by G-funk · 2003-12-13 14:55 · Score: 1

Man, it's nearly 2004... Doom source has been available for just a little while now. Doom did not use raycasting. It used bsp trees and some speicalised texture rendering... It's a lot easier to texture a polygon when you know it's going to be standing straight up and it's always gonna be a rectangle. Floors polygons weren't sorted at all, just drawn on a sector-by sector basis after the walls were transformed.

--
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Re:Hah... by Art+Tatum · 2003-12-13 17:56 · Score: 1

Not only all of that, but in the spirit of UNIX ("Do one thing well"), I think raytracing should remain separate. Pov-Ray was pretty mature last time I looked at it.

Impressive but ... by KRYnosemg33 · 2003-12-13 00:49 · Score: 5, Funny

they still have a long way
Compare: www.whitehouse.gov
&
blender.org
Judge for yourself :)

Re:Impressive but ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:47 · Score: 2, Funny

At least, it looks like they got their competitor beat in the area of AI.
Re:Impressive but ... by ballpoint · 2003-12-13 05:34 · Score: 1

The former page can be found by googling for "miserable failure", the latter can not.

--
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Re:Impressive but ... by LuxFX · 2003-12-13 09:04 · Score: 1

hehe, you beat me to it!

But I will add that it is not only available by Googling for "miserable failure" (inside quotes), but all you have to do is hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button!

--
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Re:Impressive but ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 11:21 · Score: -1, Troll

He is President of the United States and a Yale graduate, what have you made of yourself?
(Black space below provided for you excuses and consipiracy theories)

Natalie Portman's Hot Grits by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:49 · Score: -1, Offtopic

There in the woods lies a 20 by 20 foot cinder block room packed with nude Jews and the one and only Natalie Portman stripped to the raw. Above in the ceiling is an opening to a chute. Natalie Portman and the Jews are packed in like rats. Suddenly the chute opens, and in pours tons of steaming hot grits. The grits overflow the Jews. The grits are steaming hot. The Jews are roasting among the hot grits. Soon they are choking, drowning in steaming hot grits. The Jews gasp and gasp but the grits are too powerful. Soon, a room of scalded steamed Jews is silent. Natalie Portman is forever silenced, having experienced the same fate.

The next morning the sun comes up. A cock is crowing in the background. The Jews are dead and still. Suddenly the side door to the cinder block room of grits opens. Many Jews and pounds and pounds of stiff grits spill into the swine yard.

There in the beauty of early morning Nordic sunshine, the bodies of the Jews are feasted upon by swine. They gobble the Jews and grits in a feeding frenzy. The Jewish fat flavors the grits not unlike hocks. The swine feast upon the grits and Jews. The sunshine sparkles. And all is good in the world.

Later workers hose off the grits stuck to the uneaten corpses. Natalie Portman lies petrified among the grits in a humorous posture suggesting either sexual ecstasy or horrible trauma. A blue jay sitting in a tree above looks on and thinks how curious that pain and sexual pleasure are so entwined.

Natalie Portman is silent and petrified. As the stiff grits are hosed from her naked corpse, it is apparent that she was at the height of her menstrual flow. Her vaginal discharge lends a pinkish tone to the grits which smothered her. The blue jay smiles and nods knowingly. He knows. Oh my god he knows.

Later, after Natalie Portman's petrified rigor mortis corpse is clean of grits, it is encased in liquid Lucite which preserves her comical pose. After it hardens, her petrified remains are then shipped to Arabia to serve as a greasy Muhammadan sheik's paper weight. The sheik will stare at Natalie Portman's bizarre corpse within its clear Lucite tomb and masturbate while dreaming of what might have been.

Re:Natalie Portman's Hot Grits by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:24 · Score: -1, Offtopic

My god, someone should make the above post into a movie! It'll be Grammy material for sure.

Wow! Almost Usable! by Andy_R · 2003-12-13 00:50 · Score: -1, Flamebait

I know I couldn't show an image with the terrible banding in the 'after' image to a customer without getting laughed out of the building.

How about they get back to us when it's ACTUALLY usable?

--
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a

Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:54 · Score: 0

Banding? You have no idea what you are talking about.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Fjornir · 2003-12-13 01:07 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Sir, You may do well to change browsers. No banding is present in the 'after' image.

--
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:15 · Score: 0

Maybe you've got your colour depth set too low?
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by TwistedSquare · 2003-12-13 01:16 · Score: 1

I presume he must mean the background
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by penguin7of9 · 2003-12-13 01:19 · Score: 4, Funny

You should upgrade to a 24bpp graphics card from your current 8bpp graphics card and the banding will go away. Really.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:06 · Score: 1, Funny

Actually my poor quality macintosh and PC with LCD display show the image in its smooth state, but only my professional Amiga 2000 with mil-spec processors (make sure you get the ceramic ones with gold heatsink) shows up the image for the poor quality it is.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by imgranpaboy · 2003-12-13 02:23 · Score: 1

lol, idiot.... he didnt mean that blenders new feature is almost usable. he meant raytracing in general... he talked about the raytracing speed right before he said it, how could you miss that? 'raytracing almost usable', aka 'it doesnt take 2 million light years to render' please read, dont just write granted its not perfect in those pictures, but ive gotten great results, and its a big step up
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:33 · Score: 0

> 'it doesnt take 2 million light years to render'

Oh sure, you just wait two miles and it's done...
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:07 · Score: 0

Uh... no. The banding is quite apparent on anything.

Blender sucks (it didn't even have undo until recently)... what a piece of crap
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 04:39 · Score: 0

Blender had Undo, but apparently you were too stupid to read the manual.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Hatta · 2003-12-13 08:35 · Score: 1

Light years are a unit of distance, not time.

--
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:17 · Score: 2, Informative

As has been mentioned previously, this /. article is very premature. The news announcement on blender.org is letting users know that it's being worked on. At the time of the announcement, there had been one CVS commit, no bug fixing, no UI design, and no testing. It's at quite a preliminary stage, and quite a number of bugs have already been fixed since the announcement. In any case, it is a positive piece of news, for those hanging out for this feature.
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by imgranpaboy · 2003-12-13 18:03 · Score: 1

i dont care
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by imgranpaboy · 2003-12-13 18:13 · Score: 1

ever seen a car going so slow that you said "geez buddy, how bout going more than 2 miles an hour!"... now whyd you say that?... because its going sooooooo sloooow.. blenders renderer goes from bottom to top, it travels that distance :) traveling distance takes time, and traveling 2 million light years would take a helluva lot of time just for a raytraced sphere!! /"way to save your butt grandpa" ;)
Re:Wow! Almost Usable! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-14 23:23 · Score: 0

OK, here a bigger post:

Blender has indeed been developed as an in-house tool for NeoGeo (the former biggest dutch animation studio), and that's what its interface is like. (I'm talking about the *old* interface, not the UNUSABLE current 2.3 one).

I'm probably one of the most hard-core blender users around. I am also maintaining my own tree of Blender since it got open-source, and I've developped about half of the new features since open-sourcing first in my tree, and then ported them / had them been ported to the official release.

One of the main motivations to maintain my private tree with the OLD interface is because I do *work* with blender (not play), and its old interface (which many people here classify as "from Hell" or "unusable") is in fact THE most usable and most efficient interface I've met in my whole computers career.

It is very different, it is very hard to learn, but that's no problem at all if you want to train yourself to do *one* thing with *one* application *perfectly* - and that's what Blender was meant for after all - it is an IN-HOUSE tool.

The new interface (2.3) adds more clicks for achieving the same results, is slower and more bloated, and I must say that I dislike it - which is why I'm even more motivated to maintain my own tree further.

Anyone who complains about Blender's UI is simply not serious about WORK.

Thank y00!

What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

Can anyone explain what the point of doing raytracing is over quicker better methods?. Raytracing uses inordinate amounts of time and processing wasting CPU cycles, to do what is in effect just an emulation of what a human eye or camera might see. The speed advantage of proper pixel shaders can't be ignored I think, it's several orders of magnitude quicker and to me doesn't look any different

Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:06 · Score: 0

over quicker better methods?

Why do you ask, you have already decided raytracing is a slower worse method.
Re:What's the use? by shamilton · 2003-12-13 01:09 · Score: 4, Informative

Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.

--
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:44 · Score: -1, Offtopic

ABUSIVE DEMENTIONS Family life education Scare the little fuckers shitless Be pitiless AID's sex morality Championing chastity Not safer ways of having fun With and without condoms Heroic mendacity Condoned by democratic sentiment Media agenda State propaganda Messages of hate Commissars of the cocaine trade Are made Incarnations of Beezelbub Political realities Fear hate and enemies Manipulated loyalties Someone's keeping score Problem solving systems Thriving on failure Keep things as they were Before Inculcating ignorance Enforcing innoncence On the horny pubescent child Who can now say "yes" and Take a practical lesson In being wild Abuse by lies and ignorance Not telling the young What they need to know Does more damage than Assaults by word or hand You gotta know to grow Authorized abuse Clad in white raiment But hardly heaven sent What can be done with it? Noble intent But bullshit
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:55 · Score: 0

If it doesn't look any different to you then you need better eyes. Real raytracing is just so much better. Actually, there are hardware-accelerated true raytracers available now, they just cost a small fortune.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:24 · Score: 1, Insightful

Actually raytracing is the faster method. When your polygon count goes beyond billion, that is.
Re:What's the use? by Spy+Hunter · 2003-12-13 02:29 · Score: 5, Informative

Raytracing is not THE elegant solution. It is one of many methods of rendering. It is very hard to simulate realistic global ligthing effects using raytracing (soft shadows and light reflecting indirectly off of other surfaces in addition to light coming directly from a light source). For example, take this image. You might think that's a fine raytraced image. But then compare it to this image, produced with radiosity. I think you'll agree that the second image looks *much* more real. Note the subtle shading across the back wall and ceiling, and also the way it is a little bit darker where the walls and ceiling meet at 90 degree angles. Effects like that would be nearly impossible to reproduce with raytracing, and don't even think about real-time rendering. Pictures like this really show how far real-time rendering has to go before it actually looks like reality.
Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either. There are a whole range of lighting effects we see in daily life, and even radiosity only simulates some of them. For example, caustics (the funny patterns of light on the bottom of the pool). Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.
Also, in case you were wondering, Quake/Unreal/etc actually use radiosity rendering as part of the map making process, then store the results in "light maps" which are basically textures that control how light or dark a wall is instead of its color. Pre-computing the lighting allows real-time rendering of nice levels with radiosity effects, but it has several problems. Firstly, light maps take up a lot of memory (there's one for each wall, while most other textures are used on more than one wall and are tiled repeatedly), so they are stored at a pretty low resolution to minimize memory usage. This produces a blocky "stair-step shadow" effect that you've probably seen if you've played Counter-Strike. Secondly, since all the lighting is pre-computed, you can't change it easily. If you want a light to turn on and off, you have to store two light maps for every wall affected by that light: one with it on and one with it off. This is why in most games where you can shoot out lights, there are only a select few that you can shoot out. This approach has even more trouble with moving objects or moving lights (flashlights, car headlights, explosions, muzzle flashes). Real-time OpenGL or DirectX style lighting is usually used for these types of lights and moving objects, but then you don't get the nice shadows and other lighting effects that radiosity gives you.

--
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:What's the use? by PixelSlut · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

Raytracing is *the* elegant solution. Rasterisers use smoke and mirrors to achieve the same effects. Often those tricks are not flawless -- for example, you often see a smoke or explosion texture intersecting with nearby walls, creating an ugly edge. This is not the kind of thing I would want to see in a production movie, but in a game, it's not so rough.
Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity. The reason you see those problems you stated above has nothing to do with raytracing vs rasterization (because they're essentially geometric problems, and raytracers use geometry in the same way that OpenGL and other rasterizers do), it's because games are real-time, and thus all possibilities are not accounted for. In a movie, the artists have the ability to check every frame for such artifacts, but they don't have that luxery in game development.
I think it's pretty clear that right now, both offline global illumination renderers (raytracing and radiosity) and real-time rasterizers have their places in the current market.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:02 · Score: 1, Insightful

Note that what the marketers on the PeeCee redefined raytracing to mean is not the original usage - if you look at output of the descendants of amiga "raytracers", they do far more than what PC people seem to think raytracing means. As far as Mad Finnish ex-Amiga people are concerned, raytracing means tracking simulated physically-accurate beams of light through solid objects, complete with mixtures of wavelengths and so on. Caustics, prismatic spectra and the like just drop out of real raytracing. If you model the physical equations of light, you get the right answer. As far as I'm concerned, if you model a convex lens, and put it in front of an object, if the object isn't magnified, then it's not raytracing!
Re:What's the use? by adrianbaugh · 2003-12-13 03:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

Your raytracing example appears to be using a point light source and not modelling any atmospheric effects, so naturally it looks rather basic. If you use a proper extended light source and set up your raytracer to model the atmosphere properly then it will look much better. If your raytracing program can't do that it's a limitation of that particular program, not raytracing in general.
Of course, proper accurate raytracing as I've described will take a /lot/ more CPU time...

--
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Re:What's the use? by Animaether · 2003-12-13 03:20 · Score: 5, Informative

Even more general approaches to simulating light are being researched, but I don't really know if any of them are in use commercially yet.

We make a commercial renderer ( Brazil r/s ), and I can safely say "Yes" to that one.

Most of the commercial renderers, either specific or coming with an application, support global illumination through the use of Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling.
It, in essence, does calculate everything accurately - as long as you set the scene up as such.
It's also stupid-slow :)

That's why there's Photon maps, Irradiance Mapping, metropolis light transport, and even more simple constructions such as highly optimized skylighting, arealights/shadows and so forth and so on.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:42 · Score: 1, Informative

You could look up photon mapping. This is an extension to raytracing that handles just about every lightning effect.
Diffuse illmunation - check. Caustics - check. Subsurface scattering - check...
It is pretty much *the* solution if you ask me.
Re:What's the use? by olethrosdc · 2003-12-13 04:02 · Score: 2, Informative

Perhaps, but what radiosity achieves is to model the diffracted light rays from other surfaces. For example, suppose you have a red-coloured surface next to a white one. The red colour normally spills on to the white surface because some of the light diffracted from the red surface reaches the white one. This is quite hard to model accurately with ray-tracing because for every point that you trace back to a surface you must not only calculate the effect of the light coming directly from the light source itself, but from all other points in all other surfaces, because they all transmit live passively. So, it can't work.

--
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Re:What's the use? by gmarceau · 2003-12-13 04:11 · Score: 1

For instance, the next step after radiosity, as I understand, is Metropolis Light Transport. It can render some rather nice caustics:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/metro/fig6.jpg

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/metro/

--
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 04:12 · Score: 0

The lens thing is trivial to simulate. Global illumination is a much harder problem. Yes, if you model the physical equations of light, you get the right answer. The problem is, when light hits a surface, it is scattered in *every* direction. If you tried to model that with raytracing, you would have to trace millions of rays every time a single ray hit a surface! All raytracers use a much simpler model of light (surfaces are only lit by lights, not other surfaces) out of a desire to run in less time than the estimated age of the universe.
Re:What's the use? by kbielefe · 2003-12-13 04:13 · Score: 2, Informative

Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not raytracing or radiosity.
Raytracing is prominent in the renderman feature list as being available since release 11 and used when the shot merits it. I'd be very surprised if raytracing wasn't used in "Finding Nemo" at least.

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This space intentionally left blank.
Re:What's the use? by hawkstone · 2003-12-13 04:15 · Score: 3, Informative

So, it can't work.

Sure it can! Raytracing can absolutely model diffuse interreflections. However, while radiosity is an analytic (though approximated through a mesh) solution, raytracing typically uses a Monte Carlo sampling technique to achieve this. You can imagine how painfully slow this is, but it works just fine. (And it doesn't require meshing your objects beforehand, either.)
Re:What's the use? by Arkaein · 2003-12-13 04:16 · Score: 1

The type of light source is not the issue at all. A true, pure ray tracer will follow a path from the eye, bouncing off of all reflective surfaces (to calculate specular reflected light) and adding it to the diffuse color seen directly by the viewer.

The scene would have looked much cooler if the walls were reflective, the normal type of surface that ray tracing used used for, because it would give really intricate reflections. Radiosity would not be able to calculate these reflections. Ray tracing cannot handle soft light effects, and with non-specular surfaces gives the boring result in the picture. Any "ray tracer" that gives other results is doing a lot more that just ray tracing, and probably incorporates radiosity effects.

That's the thing. Ray tracing handles mirror-like reflections, radiosity handles soft lighting and shadows. Some scenes look good using one technique, but most realistic scenes require a little of both.

--
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 04:16 · Score: 0

Actual raytracers tracer light beams back as they bounce from surface to surface or even through objects, so it goes

1 beam-> surface -> 1000 beams => lots of surfaces. Each 1 of those 1000 then becomes another 1000 beams on the next bounce.

3 such reflections is usually enough to give a decent scene, and is not too computationally intensive on todays computers.
Re:What's the use? by Spy+Hunter · 2003-12-13 04:18 · Score: 1

The raytraced image could be made a little nicer by using soft shadows. But the kinds of things that the radiosity image is doing really are impossible to simulate with raytracing. You can't get the kind of thing that shows on the ceiling of that image, or the windowsills, using raytracing. The problem isn't a lack of "atmospheric effects," the problem is that to accurately model light, you have to take into account the fact that lights are not the only light sources in a scene; surfaces are lit by other brightly lit surfaces. Raytracing assumes that all light comes from light sources.

--
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:What's the use? by Spy+Hunter · 2003-12-13 04:38 · Score: 1

Well, I would say that photon mapping is more than just an "extension to raytracing." It does trace rays, I suppose, but what it does with those rays is quite different from what regular raytracers do. It does look like it could be *the* solution. Neat stuff. I want a hardware photon mapping accelerator :-)

--
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:What's the use? by imroy · 2003-12-13 04:50 · Score: 1

Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either.

Just a nit-pick, but technically, radiosity isn't a rendering algorithm. It's an illumination algorithm. Once a scene has been run through a radiosity solver, the data can be used to drive a real-time interactive walk-through type application. Or it can be used to provide the ambient and diffuse terms in a ray-traced (or a good scanline) render. And the great thing about a radiosity solution is that it's view independent (i.e "global"). So, as long as the scene isn't meant to change, a whole bit of animation (maybe a walk-through again) can be rendered from one solution.

Radiosity is not without it's problems though. One of the biggies is that it fundamentally works on flat surfaces (polygons). I don't know if anyone has worked on extending radiosity to curved surfaces. That'd be tricky. Radiosity also gets bogged down in complex scenes because it has to find the contribution of potentially every element on every other element (i.e O(n^2)). But hierachical methods have been developed to help there. Radiosity normally only handles diffuse light but people have extended radiosity to include specular and reflective light as well. Not sure how well they've done. Anyway, if I talk much longer I'll be talking out of my butt, so I'll leave it there.
Re:What's the use? by uglyMood · 2003-12-13 04:52 · Score: 1

I will admit that raytracing is slow, but I'd like to know what is "better" than raytracing. The most recent version of POV-Ray not only does raytracing, radiosity, caustics and photon mapping, but comes with a dizzying array of primitives, lighting effects (including area lights for soft shadows), procedural and image-based textures, dozens of primitives, and a surprisingly powerful macro language. The unofficial patch of POV-Ray, MegaPov, adds many other features, such as visible light sources and cloth simulation.

Furthermore, a raytraced image is mathematically accurate, while a rendered image is merely an approximation. In raytracing, a sphere is an absolutely perfect sphere, where every single surface point is the same distance from the center. A rendered sphere is composed of a mesh of triangles, and its accuracy varies with the size of those triangles.

And let's not leave out the best part of raytracing: the input format is simple human-readable (and writable) text files with an easily-grasped scene-description syntax. There is something very satisfying about sitting down to a text editor with nothing but an idea in your head, describing it to the machine, and watching as that idea becomes a photo-realistic image. I've been raytracing for over a decade, and I still find that thrilling.

--
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
Re:What's the use? by szo · 2003-12-13 05:09 · Score: 1

Look at this: http://web.axelero.hu/kcsi/.

Szo

--
Red Leader Standing By!
Re:What's the use? by joesoundbyte · 2003-12-13 05:39 · Score: 1

you make good points here..
Re:What's the use? by olethrosdc · 2003-12-13 05:41 · Score: 1

How many samples do you usually have to take to make a good approximation? Imagine the case where you have a highly reflective small object, like for example a watch that shines reflected light onto a small circle somewhere far away. Hm.. I guess one could just sample a few times only on all objects, but in a complex scene something like that can be completely lost.

Also, it all must get quite a bit more complicated when the medium itself is diffracting. In this case you'd need to sample on all possible directions and ranges around your point. Not that any other methods could give you a better solution in that case, mind you.

--
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Re:What's the use? by hawkstone · 2003-12-13 06:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

Oh, sure it's painful! Extremely, tremendously painful. But mathematically it all works out.

Take caustics, for instance, like a magnifying glass focusing a light source onto a small point on a surface. This is, and has been, done using raytracing.

I've not actually implemented it, but I'm slightly familiar with the techniques. I imagine some intelligent sampling of incident rays, and maybe adaptive supersampling of these rays, would help a lot with the phenomenal costs.

Photon maps are another solution, and (if I remember correctly), they implement forward ray tracing instead of the usual backward ones. Since you can then cast rays from the light source outward, this can be much, much cheaper.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:14 · Score: 0

No, all raytracers do NOT use a simpler model. True raytracers like Realsoft 3D really do trace millions of rays per pixel, once a few reflections off surfaces happen. And Realsoft 3D is a SOLID modeller -the rays go through surfaces and are refracted by the volume inside the object (even down to different wavelengths being refracted differently). Really.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:23 · Score: 0

That's the core problem. when the Amiga went and the PC took over, marketers redefined raytracing to the point "regular" raytracers do far less than they ought to to qualify for the name. "Photon mapping" is closer to what people considered raytracing back in the day.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:26 · Score: 0

Not exactly though - "photon mapping" is forward ray tracing from source. Ordinary raytracers do backward raytracing, usually, and eat a lot of memory handling the billions of rays that result from diffuse reflections.
Re:What's the use? by rascal1182 · 2003-12-13 06:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

IIRC, not a lick of ray tracing has was used in "Finding Nemo." Only a handful of scenes in all of the Pixar films have employed ray tracing. It just takes too long to get an image that's good enough. On the other hand, Blue Sky's "Ice Age" was entirely ray traced.

The REYES algorithm (the scanline algorithm that has been the "backbone" of Renderman since its creation) is incredibly fast, but with great results. A G5 at Pixar's booth at the SIGGRAPH conference last summer was rendering a frame of "Finding Nemo" for all to see - I couldn't imagine how long it would take a ray tracer (with that complex of a lighting scheme) to finish this.

More importantly, ray tracing capabilities are new to Renderman's 11th release (the current one). Anyone who was "ray tracing in Renderman" a few years ago was lying to you. Again at the SIGGRAPH conference, Pixar was presenting the new ray tracing-based features of Renderman. They looked cool and all, but not the focus of the package. Heck, even to quote the very page you linked to:
Techniques that long-time RenderMan users have learned and refined will continue to be useful and effective - think of Release 11's new ray tracing features as an important addition to your bag of tricks.

This is all incredibly off topic. Renderman is not even in competition with Blender; they're two entirely different beasts. My point is that ray tracing, especially in the context of production, is not all that important. However, I'm very pleased that Blender is maturing as well as it is. Although this particular feature isn't too useful to me - I've never touched Maya 5's new mentalray capabilities, either - I'm excited that it will bring more people (and attention) to the only good animation package I can afford to use at home.

--

"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:50 · Score: 0

Of course all light comes from light sources. Surfaces are of course lit by other brightly lit surfaces - but a real raytracer tracks a ray back to a surface, splits it into thousands of rays of varying directions (depending on the properties of the surfaces), tracks those rays back to further surfaces and so on, eventually bottoming out after a few bounces. This CAN produce more realistic results than radiosity and other hacks. Yes, it IS computationally intensive. But for some scenes, it's worth it.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 08:01 · Score: 0

Blender can do radiosity too.
Re:What's the use? by Stunning+Tard · 2003-12-13 08:02 · Score: 1

There seems to be some argument over what is ray tracing and photon mapping. But what does Blender do?
Re:What's the use? by nacturation · 2003-12-13 08:58 · Score: 1

For example, take this image. You might think that's a fine raytraced image.

That's about the lousiest raytraced image I've ever seen. Now this is a fine raytraced image!

--
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Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 09:15 · Score: 0

"It, in essence, does calculate everything accurately - as long as you set the scene up as such."

Well, not at all,really. Pretty much all current rendering methods are poor approximations to physically realistic light transport. Some of them, however, are a hell of a lot better than a plain 'raytracer'.
"It, in essence, does calculate everything accurately - as long as you set the scene up as such."

Well, not at all,really. Pretty much all current rendering methods are pretty approximations to physically realistic light transport. Some of them, however, are a hell of a lot better than a plain 'raytracer'.

Global illumination is a good catch-all phrase for methods that at least try to be physically realistic (as against the usual 4th year graphics project tracer), but they all have there problems. Your straight-forward monte-carlo path tracer can't do caustics, you need bi-directional for that. Photon maps are a noisy, low quality density estimate. Radiosity also misses terms, etc. etc. None of them handle surface interactions 'properly' (i.e. brdf's are a pretty poor approximation to what is actually going on, in most cases).

all of these things *look* a lot better than early raytracers with phong/lambertian/cook-torrence/whatever surfaces -- but that is hardly surprising as these early methods are non-physical.

If you want a better idea of what sort of things would be needed to do light transport physically, look at what a few of the the medical physics people are doing with 'raytraced' treatment planning.... (note this is also quite approximate, but they are thinking about the interaction issues because they have too)
Global illumination is a good catch-all phrase for methods that at least try to be physically realistic (as against the usual 4th year graphics project tracer), but they all have there problems. Your straight-forward monte-carlo path tracer can't do caustics, you need bi-directional or whatever for that. Photon maps are a noisy, low quality density estimate. Radiosity also misses terms, etc. etc. None of them handle surface interactions 'properly' (i.e. brdf's are a pretty poor approximation to what is actually going on, in most cases).

all of these things *look* a lot better than early raytracers with phong/lambertian/cook-torrence/whatever surfaces -- but that is hardly surprising as these early methods are non-physical.

If you want a better idea of what sort of things would be needed to do light transport physically, look at what a few of the the medical physics people are doing with 'raytraced' treatment planning.... (note this is also quite approximate, but they are thinking about the interaction issues because they have to)
Re:What's the use? by Animaether · 2003-12-13 09:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Well I don't have the foggiest what you did to mess up your post like that, but to address the things you mentioned...

Yes, a bi-directional monte carlo path tracer

Yes, it's an approximation. It always is. The more samples you take, the more accurate. At some point, takin more samples won't do you much good, and it's accurate enough.

Yes, more advanced shader models (brdf, bssrdf, shader models derived from actual models, etc.) yield better results. But then again, that falls under the whole 'set your scene up accurately' part. Nobody expects accurate results if your shaders are Gouraud :P

I think when we mention 'accurate' here, though, we're talking within the scope of Blender and Blender-like applications. I'm very familiar with medical applications because half the stuff we use comes from research in that field. But for :
- architectural visualization
- broadcast/movie effects
- games cinematics
- etc.
The only level of accuracy that matters is the one that looks good enough.
Re:What's the use? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 15:15 · Score: 0

yeah, i don't know what the hell happened there either.

Something I didn't make clear I guess. Unless you do two things (that aren't done in most renderers) then you are at best doing a simplistic approximation of the physics:

a) work with full spectral light transport (including energy outside visible spectrum, and polarity)

b) get away from point interactions (light doesn't interact geometrically with surfaces at a point, it penetrates, interacts at the quantum level, does all sorts of stuff, then perhaps leaves again

shaders are, in general, a hack around these limitiations. in lots of cases they look pretty good, but that isn't the same as an accurate estimate of the actual physics. A shader is designed to capture, at least in a statistical sense, all those things that you aren't properly representing with your interactions. As such it is inherently scale and situation dependent. In other words, a poor physics simulations (but perhaps a *great* graphics hack)

i fully agree that for lots of applications this doesn't matter too much (at least not today). i was just pointing out that it is naive to believe that current rendering technology is much good as a physical simulation... it is really just baby steps yet.
Re:What's the use? by amchugh · 2003-12-13 18:15 · Score: 1

Check out povray.org before you talk about raytracing. My main beef with raytracing is not it's technical capabilities, but the culture of raytracing. Just because overly clean looking effects litter sci-fi and space movies does not mean that's the extent of ray tracings capabilities. I'm not sure if noise functions (pseudo-random tweaks to the way light bounces of the surfaces) are too computationally expensive, or if it's an intentional aesthetic (one that I don't like).
Re:What's the use? by Animaether · 2003-12-14 13:59 · Score: 1

agreed :)

We won't reach the full physical effect for some time to come, as there's many phenomena we either
a. don't understand yet
b. think we understand, but probably don't
c. have formulated an accepted simulation/rule/function/whatever for, even though it's not 100% correct

For what it's worth, there's many efforts, even from students, out there who do try to get a little closer, though. With relativistic raytracers, wavelength-dependent raytracers, etc. Just none as a commercial offering including a large enough featureset to be interesting to the graphics community.
Re:What's the use? by jonadab · 2003-12-15 17:16 · Score: 1

> Can anyone explain what the point of doing raytracing is over quicker
> better methods?

There are only quicker methods; there are no known _better_ methods. As for
raytracing's advantages, it has three major advantages over faster methods:

1. It looks better.
2. It looks better.
3. It looks better.

If you compare screenshots from 3D games versus raytraced images, the difference
is stunning. Good raytraced images *almost* look like photographs. Heck, if
you set up the raytracer's virtual camera with a slight blur on the lens, you
might be able to pass them off as amateur photos.

For some sample raytraced shots, see www.irtc.org

--
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:What's the use? by jonadab · 2003-12-16 03:05 · Score: 1

> Keep in mind that all the Pixar movies use rasterization techniques, not
> raytracing or radiosity.

This is due to the number of frames they have to render and the time they
have to do it in and the hardware they have to do it on. Raytracing takes
more time, and they have a deadline to meet if they want to come in under
budget. As hardware gets faster and cheaper, you'll *eventually* see things
raytraced more and more. I once tried to calculate approximately when good
PC hardware would be fast enough to raytrace a 3D FPS game in realtime. I
had to make some assumptions, and came out with something like 2020, based
on Moore's law, assumptions about increasing expectations of resolution,
and some other factors I don't recall now. It's a very rough guess. Also,
it assumes that raytracing technology will improve between now and then and
that for a FPS game you'd drop some of the more CPU-intensive stuff for
performance reasons. (For example, if you had reflective/refractive objects,
you wouldn't put them in a room with area lights, nor would you put either
of those things in a room with atmospheric effects. Also you'd want to
limit the number of light sources in any given room.)

Right now, a good high-end PC can render a frame every several hours if
it's complex or every several minutes if it's fairly simple.

For still images, though, nothing beats raytracing except _perhaps_ real
photography of real objects (or detailed models), maybe not even that (as
it's harder to get exactly the lighting you want with real photography), and
the same will be true for animation when the rendering hardware is up to it.

--
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.

DOWN WITH ALL PULLSTARTS hucka lucka camel jockies by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:50 · Score: -1, Troll

CLITORIS CHOPPERS. Hi there you fucking Islamic career clerics, doctors of death, Waffen Schutzstaffel doctor Josef Mengele is a patron saint compared to you fucking ragheads. You suck. You aide and abet terror and death. You are partially responsible for the deaths of other fellow men. For this fratricide you shall pay dearly. Your soul is black with the stains of inaction, ineptitude and sympathies to those who walk the dark side. Your foul life is full of sins, not religious, just heinous, your karma is low, you don't confess, and you aren't in prison where you belong. You are your own dark, kept secret. I see through you, the worthless academic, the pseudo intellectual, the unproven unpublished un patented WASTE OF FUCKING FLESH. You are a drain on society, you are a member of the 1st world but pretend to not be. I hate you, you are a stained man.

Hi clitoris chopper, ISLAM supports clitoris carving. You are Islamic, and of course are a fucking animal. I hate you you pull-start camel jockey lover. Towelheads, Camel Jockies, Sand Niggers, Ackmids, Abeebs, Carpet Flyers, Dune Coons, Rag Heads, Sand Scratchers, Habeebs, Abba-Dabbas, Camel-Humpers, Demi-niggers, Fig-Gobblers, Hucka-luckas (hucka hlacka ghalcka ghugh), Lefties (If you steal, you lose the right hand so, since they are thieves...) Ocnods, Pull-Start-ables (imagine pull starting Ossama's dirty rag like a Briggs and Stratton), Roach-Ranchers (habibs cant kill roaches by a tenant of Is-slum), Sand Moolies.

Shut up all you dirty fucking Islamic pigfucking swinehundts and the pigs, the communist fuckin Islamic terrorist supporter.

Take your fucking Koran and cram it up your ass. The sooner the earth sees Islam leave it, the better off it will be. Your Koran is Goat Piss.

I hope if there is a God and a Hell, you have to drink the liquidy shit from a Pig's ass, and Jewish Rabbis defecate on you.

I hate the stupid ISLAM fucks who read into the trash they come up with. Saddam Hussein [who needs to take a dirt nap] is higher on my sanity list than fucking Muslim "clerics." In fact, I like Saddam more than most of the other Arab leaders because he is secular. We should fucking nuke the Saudis and Mecca and Medina and turn it into rubble, then tell Saddam to remove the heads of all the buttfucking "royalty" in the area.

I want to wipe my ass with Mohammad's shroud. I want to grind his body up into bone meal and fertilize my garden with it.

Our tortured dead scream out in HORROR, asking for vengeance:

Kill all Camel Jockeys.
Kill all Mohammedans.
Kill all Dune Coons.
Kill all Rag Heads.
Kill all Towelheads.
Kill all Arabs.
Kill all Camel Rooters.
Kill all Osama Bin Laden supporters.

Nuke their countries to hell.

Nuke them again.

Death to Islam.

I piss on Mecca. I wipe my ass with the Koran. I shit upon Mohammed. I wipe the cum for a freshly fucked pussy with Mohammed's shroud then throw it in the pig sty so it can mire in pig shit as it decomposes.

FreshShit.net : Welcome to Freshshit.net by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 00:54 · Score: -1, Offtopic

AnusWm 0.0.1
By Tubgirl aturday, December 19th 2025 09:41 PST.

AnusWM is a clone of the Ancient Gnome Desktop Environment as it was in 2004 before the Linux Desktop Konfederation arrested all the developers and forced them to work on KDE. It is a fork of the Gnome 2.7 tarballs that was found on a 20 year old mirror I found in my Son's basement. This a beta release, as always, if you find a bug either fix it yourself or fuck off back to Kindows 24 on your pussy Athlon 256 machine fucktard.

Ewwwww by r00zky · 2003-12-13 00:59 · Score: 2, Funny

that before and after shoots look like my sister
*bleah*

--
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path

Re:Ewwwww by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:15 · Score: 0

Sorry to break the news to you dude - but I've seen your sister before she gets into bed and the morning after. She looks much better before and a whole lot worse at the breakfast table.
Re:Ewwwww by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:40 · Score: 0

I heard that! You are in big trouble, mister.

Blender on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:01 · Score: 1, Troll

I'm a long time user of Blender, and I'm thrilled that they've added raytracing....

My one beef with Blender, however, is the terrible performance on Linux. It is so poor, I maintain a Windows partition solely for Blender use.

I know you guys love Linux (and so do I!), but if you plan on using Blender, best to have a Win32 OS lying around somewhere.

Re:Blender on Linux by Quiberon · 2003-12-13 01:08 · Score: 3, Informative

It's probably a matter of configuring your Linux to use hardware graphics. Blender will get the graphics card to do the serious number crunching when it can; look at your graphics card vendor's web site and see if they provide a driver for your Linux.
Re:Blender on Linux by Exiler · 2003-12-13 01:17 · Score: 1

The only real problem I've seen with blender on Linux (That it doesn't have on windows) is that when it crashes the only way to recover the system alot of the time is through SSH.

--
Banaaaana!
Re:Blender on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:30 · Score: 2, Informative

Try recompiling blender with special cflags. It really helps with the speed, it can be up to 30-40% faster. Re compiling XFree86 can help too. To find out more, check out the Gentoo project.

Distributions such as Debian, SuSE and Red Hat ship slowest common denomitator binaires, which are very slow. I have done it, and the speed of blender well offsets the installation time.
Re:Blender on Linux by spinflip · 2003-12-13 01:47 · Score: 1

I dont think blender can do much with your graphics card if you are raytracing

--
http://sflip.com
Re:Blender on Linux by guhknew · 2003-12-13 03:46 · Score: 1

He's talking about the user interface. Everything is rasterized there and that's where you notice huge performance gains from 3d hardware.
Re:Blender on Linux by Lumpy · 2003-12-13 03:49 · Score: 1

you are using precompiled binaries... they are compiled to do software rendering and are not using Open GL for compatability.

grab the source and compile it with hardware rendering support.

Voila! it's not 2 times faster than windows. (really! it is!)

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Blender on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 04:03 · Score: 0

Stop using the static version then, and install proper drivers for your graphics card.

I have much better OpenGL-performance in Linux than in Windows. Always had.
Re:Blender on Linux by DetectiveThorn · 2003-12-13 04:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

What an odd comment. Even in the relatively early days (I personally started with rev 1.76) Blender has always rendered faster under Linux than Windows. Editing performance was a bit of a problem, since most gfx cards did not support Hardware acceleration under linux. (DRI was a fairly new addition to XFree86 at that time.) Blender is rather 3D graffics hardware intensive (are any 3D apps not?) as it was born under Irix on SGI boxes. However, things have changed. Two of the major vendors of high-end 3D gfx cards now have very good accelerated support either through their own driver (NVidia) or the DRI module (ATI). With the former, performance between Windows and Linux is nearly identical. For ATI users Linux performance can often be better, due to the fact that ATI's Windows drivers are much more painful to configure than DRl (you probably could get better performance from Window's drivers if you spent many many hours tweaking the ATI driver settings). Those two brands of card probably cover 95% of all serious 3D users. Blender is ment to be a proffessional application, not a toy. It has a way to go to be on par with Maya or LW, but even now, as an 80% ready application at 0% cost, it is an excelent tool for beginers, and even many professionals who don't regularly need many of the advanced (and expensive) features of the high end packages. I'll even risk being /.'s http://www.soylent-green.com to see some of my blender work. And I'm not even a power user.

--
Go ahead /. me. http://www.soylent-
Re:Blender on Linux by spitzak · 2003-12-13 05:41 · Score: 1

Sure sounds like you don't have graphics acceleration.

As you may know, you are pretty much stuck with having to get an Nvidia card or a recent ATI card to get actual hardware OpenGL on Linux. Kind of sucks but at least you will also improve the Windows performance as well, with these better cards. If you have such a card you may be missing the drivers, which is probably more of a pain to solve than replacing the card. You can get the Nvidia driver from their site, look for the file with the instructions "sh NVIDEA.something.run"
Re:Blender on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 08:04 · Score: 0

Umm. I'm using blender on linux and it works fine... do a little research and don't just rely on your own results next time.

Comparison by Psychic+Burrito · 2003-12-13 01:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

Hmm... wouldn't it be much easier to compare the two renderers if the rendered the same picture, the same size, and with the same lighting?

Re:Comparison by woodhouse · 2003-12-13 01:14 · Score: 4, Informative

The lighting is the same, they're just different sizes. I think the differences are pretty obvious though: the scanline-rendered image has no ray-traced reflections, and the shadows all have soft edges (presumably because they're shadow mapped).
Re:Comparison by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:11 · Score: 0

... and the shadows all have soft edges (presumably because they're shadow mapped).

real shadows have soft edges.

Ray tracing sucks. Blender sucks.
Re:Comparison by woodhouse · 2003-12-13 03:22 · Score: 1

Shadow-mapped shadows are fake soft shadows. They have soft edges due to the low resolution of the shadow map.
Re:Comparison by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:24 · Score: 1, Informative

Real shadows have hard edges unless the light source is extended, actually. with a real raytracer, you have to remember to put in extended (finite-size) light-sources to soften shadows, or you get an effect like a harsh spotlight due to the tiny point nature of the usual default light source.

Ray tracing by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:16 · Score: -1, Troll

If I had the first faintest clue what ray tracing was and what it involved I might be impressed by this.

Heavy load by MooCows · 2003-12-13 01:17 · Score: 0, Redundant

Looks like they're raytracing on their webserver, or could it be something else?

--
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.

This bug is easily reproducible. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:18 · Score: -1, Troll

Another good comparison: Before and after.

Hrm, mirror? by Pflipp · 2003-12-13 01:24 · Score: 1

OK, this is cool, now for a mirror of the screenshots...

--
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]

Moderator is an idiot by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:28 · Score: -1, Offtopic

What was so Troll-like about that? Offtopic at the very worst.

raytracing monkey's groin by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:29 · Score: -1, Troll

btw, is that public hair around the monkey's groin? its richly textured, so couldnt help wondering.
Cheers

Has to be said... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:31 · Score: 5, Funny

Bite my shiny metal ass.

Oh, you said Blender...

Re:Has to be said... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:46 · Score: 0

Raytrace my shiny, metal, semi-reflecting, Phong-shaded, bump-mapped, texturized ass!

Not a graphics expert.... by bobthemuse · 2003-12-13 01:33 · Score: 1

So if someone can explain it to me, what's the difference? I actually thought the 'before' image looked more realistic.

Re:Not a graphics expert.... by spinflip · 2003-12-13 01:43 · Score: 2, Informative

if you raytrace you actually follow the true path that light would take (or reversed, I am not sure which they use), it is pretty much the best method of rendering realistic objects. this is just the first step towards a very powerful renderer and...*big eyes* Caustics?!?!

--
http://sflip.com
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:53 · Score: 0

If you pay your money, you can already get Caustics in a Linux raytracer, see Realsoft.fi - and make a prism, and it will actually split simulated white light into a simulated spectrum. Bloody amazing raytracer.
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:17 · Score: 0

if you raytrace you actually follow the true path that light would take (or reversed, I am not sure which they use), it is pretty much the best method of rendering realistic objects.
And so this is why you'll notice more interesting stuff in the after image, such as reflections on the surface of the monkey.
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Pike65 · 2003-12-13 02:23 · Score: 2, Informative

(or reversed, I am not sure which they use)

I think it has to be done backwards, or you end up shooting rays all over the place, 99.99% of which are completely redundant. Whereas if you trace them from the screen back to their origin you don't end up burning processor cycles in vain.

But I may have that wrong - I'm a real-time graphics guy ; )

--
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by samhalliday · 2003-12-13 02:30 · Score: 3, Informative

are you serious? well... the "before" looks more realistic if you imagine it as a chocolate monkey... but its supposed to be bronze; in which case you must be mad if you think it is more realistic than the "after" image!
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Adam_Trask · 2003-12-13 02:51 · Score: 1

Did a quick search on google. This might be more information that you want, so just check out the figures. They give a pretty good idea about the ray-tracing process, which is the after picture.
The before picture is probably surface rendering, which does not take into account the recursive light travel (figure 4 and 5). It is conceptually similar to ray-casting (figure 3). But the process used is different, though and not the same shown in figure 3.
If you look again in the after picture, you will see reflections of the table on the monkey. This is not possible with plain surface rendering, but can be simulated with more complicated methods.
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by Abcd1234 · 2003-12-13 03:58 · Score: 1

You could also just download POVRay, which has been doing this for years. :)
Re:Not a graphics expert.... by AmerikaNoJingi · 2003-12-13 07:38 · Score: 1

I have to agree with the guy who says the before looks better. They picked a very poor model. But you're both right, it does look like a halfway decent chocolate monkey compared to a really crappy bronze monkey.

WTF? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:34 · Score: 1, Informative

Raytracing was usable on my amiga in the 90s. Geez. Sure, you had to go make a cup of coffee or three per frame of an animation, but it was definitely usable. Packages like Real3D actually did raytracing (and scanlining too - the PC usage of "raytracing" seems closer to amiga "scanlining" and the PC usage of "radiosity" seems closer to amiga "raytracing"... dunno why...). Realsoft 3D, a distant descendant of Real3D is available for linux Right Now.

Re:WTF? by vidarh · 2003-12-13 04:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

You miss the point. Implementing raytracing is "trivial". You can spend lots of effort at adding effects and handling materials realistically, and optimizing for speed, but a basic raytracing algorithm can be outlined on a sheet of A4 paper with sufficient detail for someone to implement it.
The news is that Blender now has built in support for it, so that you can raytrace your models to see how they'll look without messing with a separate program.

Raytracing on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:41 · Score: 3, Informative

Raytracing on Linux is already usable. Apart from POV , which AFAIK can do raytracing, Realsoft 3D, a new version of the old amiga Real3D (that also did raytracing, not just scanlining... WAY back in the 1990s...) is available for linux.

Re:Raytracing on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:50 · Score: 0

Lest there be any doubt on that point, check out the Realsoft Galleries of Glassware and Caustics.

I haven't used the new linux version of Realsoft 3D, but the old amiga version rocked.
Re:Raytracing on Linux by Abcd1234 · 2003-12-13 04:01 · Score: 1

"Apart from POV , which AFAIK can do raytracing"

LOL! Yes, POV can do raytracing. It's also a Monte Carlo raytracer (ie, Photon Mapping) and a Radiosity renderer, as well.
Re:Raytracing on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:22 · Score: 0

Wow, I didn't know any software handled prismatic effects so well. Damn that's sweet.
Re:Raytracing on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:40 · Score: 0

This raytrace in particular is just amazing.

SFC IS OWND BY GNAA by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:45 · Score: -1, Offtopic

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gathers SIMONIGGER FANS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being SIMONIGGER FANS.

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If you have mod points and would like to support SFC, please moderate this post up.

This post brought to you by a proud member of SFC

If they were serious by greepoman · 2003-12-13 01:49 · Score: 3, Funny

If they were really serious they wouldnt use a monkey, who's impressed by a monkey? Use a dragon or a hot chic like that butterfly girl nvidia uses. I mean come on!

Re:If they were serious by Pflipp · 2003-12-13 02:54 · Score: 2, Funny

who's impressed by a monkey?

Ximian people.

Yay - Blender/GTK+ shouldn't be far away now :-)

--
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Re:If they were serious by WWWWolf · 2003-12-13 04:57 · Score: 1

Nope, the real 3D apps use the Teapot. The monkey is a more complex shape than that. But yeah, a dragon would rule. =)

Mirror by linux_warp · 2003-12-13 01:51 · Score: 5, Informative

Blender.org was being hit hard so I mirrored the before and after pictures on my website, mindwarp.net

Before
After

Re:Mirror by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:24 · Score: 0

I'll bet Teacher selects you for Hall Monitor just about every day, doesn't she? I beat up suck-ups like you just about every day, too.
Re:Mirror by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:47 · Score: 0

You're not funny faggot. Mirroring the shots was a nice thing to do.
Re:Mirror by adamruck · 2003-12-13 03:59 · Score: 1

is it just me... or do the monkeys in those two pictures look like there made out of different materials? the first image is completely dull, while the second is shiny enough to see reflections off of.

--
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Re:Mirror by visgoth · 2003-12-13 05:30 · Score: 3, Informative

That's the whole point of using raytracing. The 1st image looks dull because its not reflecting anything. One could generate a reflection map and use that to approximate environmental reflections for the first image, but it wouldn't be very accurate.

My one issue with the second image is the lack of soft shadows. The shadowmaps in the 1st image look nicer than the overly crisp raytraced shadows in the second. If they could implement area lights or some other soft shadowing technique for raytraced shadows it would be good.

--
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Re:Mirror by Mahrtian · 2003-12-13 05:57 · Score: 1

This is fairly typical of standard raytracing (which I assume this uses). To acurately cause soft shadows in raytracing a distributed raytracing method is used. Variations of this method also allow for other effects such as shadow penumbras, hazy transparency, fuzzy reflections, motion blur, depth of field and antialiasing

--

--
Re:Mirror by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 15:01 · Score: 0

Hey you're cool. Can I be your friend? Let's forget about all those stupid people who try and help other people.

Info: The monkey on the picture/other stuff... by Qbertino · 2003-12-13 01:57 · Score: 5, Informative

FYI: The monkey on the pictures is called "Suzanne" - she's a girl - and is the mascot of blender. This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.

Further down somebody talks about more features (shader, etc.)
This was a big issue with the 'future developement talks' at the blender conference this year. Software design issues were discussed and different approaches were evaluated. This years suzanne animation award winner has designed a shader tool that will be integrated into / act as a interface/usability reference for the big blender 3.0 redo. Which will have a shading enviroment integrated. Some other major parts of the new stuff will probably make extensive use of the Yafray raytracer and the basic design that went into it.
Far out dreaming into the future led to considering a solid interface to the OSS crystal space 3D engine as to bring back the closed source realtime stuff into blender and provide a professional editor and design tool for crystal space.
The problem with that is that CS has a totally different structure than recent and current realtime solutions in blender, so this only is an option after the big Blender 3.0 redo that will shed all the dirty hacks and establish a solid software design to the Blender codebase.
So goes the plan for blenders future.
Can't say no to this karma-whoring, can you? :-)

--
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca

I Just had a Blender workshop by Pope+Raymond+Lama · 2003-12-13 01:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

I just had a blender workshop this week, and I can say: What a piece of software!

It si just great..definetivelly not ewasy to learn on one's self from the ground up. At elast not with another miriad of multimedia packages that come in any modern distro.

I have always being a POVray fan, and I'd say that some kinds of work I still could do faster on POVRay than on Blender, but it is great to see even more features in it.

Anyway, blender is wellcome to the team.

--
-><- no .sig is good sig.

Re:I Just had a Blender workshop by eadint · 2003-12-13 06:21 · Score: 0

where is this blender workshop and how or where can i sign up. ive been using blender for about 6 months now and i want to learn more,
Re:I Just had a Blender workshop by Pope+Raymond+Lama · 2003-12-13 10:10 · Score: 1

Well, sorry pal. It was in Brazil. Campinas city,more precisely, and it ain't planned to happen back so soon.

But it was part of a Free Software interchange initiative among cities - a guy froma city a couple hundred kilometers came up to coordinate this workshop. In exchange, one of ours will travel there to work out a Python workshop in January. Maybe you could try to organize stuff like this with your local LUGs or other groups.

--
-><- no .sig is good sig.
Re:I Just had a Blender workshop by eadint · 2003-12-14 07:32 · Score: 1

thanks ill try to do that.

Prior art by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:57 · Score: 0

Expect MicroSoft's legal dept. to embrace and extend a C & D for using Ballmer's image without his consent.

what did they use before?! by dioscaido · 2003-12-13 02:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

This is a pretty funny headline, for me, considering I just came out of a weeks worth of 16 hour a day straight programming to implement an advanced raytracer for my graphics course. What did they use *before* the raytracer? Ray tracing allows you all kinds of gorgeous real-world effects, like wavelength dependent refraction, shadows, and lots of lens effects.

Re:what did they use before?! by Adam_Trask · 2003-12-13 02:42 · Score: 1

My point exactly. I am guessing the usual surface rendering using z-buffer.
Re:what did they use before?! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:09 · Score: 0

Even worse, what a lot of commercial companies sell as "raytracing" isn't raytracing in the traditional sense - if a drone says "raytracing", they probably mean scanlining, and "radiosity" they mean "augmented scanlining to look a bit like real raytracing". Sigh.
Re:what did they use before?! by woodhouse · 2003-12-13 03:29 · Score: 2, Informative

Tell that to Pixar. Renderman is raster-based and they were doing just fine last time I checked.
Re:what did they use before?! by visgoth · 2003-12-13 05:42 · Score: 1

It is raster based, but it now can do raytracing as well. No need to use BMRT as a rayserver for PRman in frankenrender mode anymore. Check out Pixar's Renderman page for what its capable of now.

--
My patience is infinite, my time is not.

Whar Blender really needs... by Pig+Hogger · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

... is a way of outputting POV files.

Re:Whar Blender really needs... by Adam_Trask · 2003-12-13 02:39 · Score: 1

You mean in a format that can be input to POV?
Re:Whar Blender really needs... by Lumpy · 2003-12-13 03:52 · Score: 3, Informative

it does. please read the blender site to find the plugin to output to POVRAY..

I'd give you the link... but the website is slashdotted into oblivion right now.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Whar Blender really needs... by Lumpy · 2003-12-14 02:33 · Score: 1

Now that I can get back to the site....

HERE

there's your script/plugin to export from blender to POVRAY.

I've used it to render a B-5 like (and looked Damn like the show... POVRAY rules!) shuttle flyby scene between Juipter and mars (with an atmosphere halo on mars) it took a bit to get my textures right as ther was a bit of skewing but it worked.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.

Caustics by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 0

Raytracing won't get you much in the way of caustics, you need other methods too, such as surface subdivision, photon tracing, etc. Kind of like the difference between scanline rendering and radiosity.

Re:Caustics by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:06 · Score: 0

Actual raytracing gets you caustics. Marketroid-speak "raytracing" isn't raytracing.

Before and after pics - a graphics point of view by Adam_Trask · 2003-12-13 02:37 · Score: 4, Informative

Comparing the before and after pics is like an apples-to-oranges comparison. It is technically not "before and after". It should instead be called xyz rendering and ray-tracing. Depending on what the xyz rendering method is, the picture quality will vary. The reflections etc. that can be seen in the ray-tracing image can be reproduced (not exactly, though) using methods like environment maps.

I am not trying to put down the quality of ray-tracing though, it is the best. Others try to simulate ray-tracing. But folks rarely use ray-tracing in interactive settings (like gaming). Unless you can play at less than 1 fps.

Do not do this. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:08 · Score: 1, Informative

gcc's optimizations aren't very good. Just compiling for 686 with -O2 is as aggresive as you should go. Look at some benchmarks some time, dumb gentoo users frequently slow their systems down by adding too many optimization flags that end up having the opposite effect.

Others Blender Raytracing examples .. by gbitten · 2003-12-13 03:16 · Score: 2, Informative

here

YAFRAY!!!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:24 · Score: 1, Informative

If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out yafray. Truly a 2nd generation free 3d renderer.

Wrote one by B1ackDragon · 2003-12-13 03:26 · Score: 1

We wrote a raytracer in graphics class. We shot the rays from where the observer was, just one for each pixel (or whatever resolution you wanted). That way you aren't "shooting them all over the place." If the object is shiny when the ray hits it, move the eye to the point where it hit, figure out the angle of reflection (using quite a bit of mathy stuff) and continue from there.

Here is my ratracer written for class, and here is the majority of the source for it. Also, we did a raytracer using some previous code my prof had, and I was able to add antialiasing and using a grid of objects to render, as seen here. Warning, its a 136 k jpg.

Actually, I think it's been my favorite class so far. Lots of applied programming, math, and neat pics to look at afterward.

--
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings

Re:Wrote one by JerryKnight · 2003-12-13 04:01 · Score: 2, Informative

Pike65 was talking about tracing the light's path from the light sources. This would be redundant if you did it for every ray from the camera. The trick is to store the light "rays" or "photons" and use them to estimate the illumination at any given point that a ray hits. This is photon mapping, and it can accomplish much better lighting than any "reverse" ray tracing method.

It does have some pretty big deficiencies, which is what my graduate work is about. ;-)

Your tracer looks nice (it's in java?!?), but you don't appear to be doing any attempt at "radiosity" or "global illumination." This is where the real interesting stuff is. You've only scratched the surface. And any math person would say that the math involved here is elementary (that's why I hate math gurus) - A few 3 dimensional line equations, some vector math, a few affine matrix transformations..

If you really like the rendering thing, check out any of a number of books about illumination. The one that inspired me was was Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping by Henrik Wann Jensen.

--

Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
Re:Wrote one by Pike65 · 2003-12-13 04:55 · Score: 1

Actually, B1ackDragon was right - that was what I meant.

I only really know anything about ray tracing through hanging around on graphics forums for real-time stuff and soaking it up subconsciously, so I understand ray tracing from a very basic level, and some of the global illumination techniques are so far over my head that probably register at air traffic control.

Got an advanced graphics module in my course after Christmas though : )

--
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Re:Wrote one by B1ackDragon · 2003-12-13 06:21 · Score: 1

Yeah, my prof did say something about doing soft shadows via taking the point the ray hit, and sending out some random rays from that to get an idea of how indirectly illuminated it was, and by what colors, and adjusting the color at that point accordingly. I thought it neat, but never really got around to actually implementing it.

Ok, its in java, because that was the only language I knew at the time (and still the only language I can do graphical stuff in), and that is what our university (NMU) teaches as intro stuff. And it lends itsenf very nicely to graphical work, even if it is god-awful slow. The big pic (~131000 objects) took 45 minutes to render on my laptop.

I might check out that book you mentioned. Not to try and get you to oversimplify your grad work (ok, maybe a little), but what are some of the deficiencies you mentioned with "reverse" raytracing, such as I am doing?

--
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings

Indeed, I thought the same by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:38 · Score: 0

Whatever the reason, the first image does look better. Of course, if the monkey is supposed to be made out of metal than it's not bad but I can't make my mind to the fact that the metal is actually bronze, it doesn't have the texture, nor the color, nor the reflectivity of bronze, the "before" image is smoother and more pleasing for the eyes, the "after" one is blocky and "cheap" the reflections are totally unrealistic, I don't care some manual says that raytracing is better, as much as I mix sound with my ears and not the board meters, one should create 3D with his eyes not some sort of theory...

Anyways, even if technicaly speaking the "after" image is better, visually speaking it isn't.

Oh yeah, one more thing...
I started using open source software out of curiosity a few month ago and I agree with people saying open source develloppers should stop going "I am god" everytime they have an idea or a draft of some idea, make that idea into usable, stable code and give it a well crafted interface and when it's actually working then implement it, partial features are way too numerous in open source software...

Anyways, keep the good work, I might sound harsh but I'm actually excited that crazy stuff like 3D creation apps are progressing well in the open source community, at this pace we might see some nice and usable stuff sooner than later.

liberte
solidarite
fraternite

...ou quelquechose comme ca... ;)

Open source success story by Picass0 · 2003-12-13 03:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

As a blender user and foundation member I've watched as the features, inovations, and rate of development have gone up since it went open source and GPL last year. We have tons of new python scripts, a new gui that continues to evolve, better rendering...

It's not Maya, but it's on par with anything in the low-mid range for windows, and it's getting better by leaps and bounds

Give Blender a couple years and we might Hollywood contributing code. Hollywood lves Gimp, and I could see this becoming a real player in 3D.

Re:Open source success story by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:58 · Score: 0

Hollywood lves Gimp...

Actually they don't, but they're pretty comfortable with CinePaint
Re:Open source success story by digitalhermit · 2003-12-13 04:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's not Maya, but it's on par with anything in the low-mid range for windows, and it's getting better by leaps and bounds.

Completely agree. Blender is a real workhorse now. It's stable, fast, and I can do a lot of things very quickly. In one demo I created an airplane complete with rivets, rusty tail section and bullet holes in under 15 minutes. It can easily replace many of the $15,000 setups used in news stations or even some low end studios.

No need of raytracign really by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 03:51 · Score: 0

Many people think that raytracing is a must have feature for serious CG. Pixar did not use raytracing or any other type of global illumination technique before Nemo.

Anyway, this doesn't mean Blender isn't growing up.

Re:Before and after pics - a graphics point of vie by entartete · 2003-12-13 03:53 · Score: 1

new for 2004! ray tracing technology to be featured in these exciting products: watching paint dry VR X-treme continental drifting MS visual navel contemplator

How was the statuette produced? by John+Jorsett · 2003-12-13 04:41 · Score: 1

This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.

Out of curiosity, how was the statuette produced? Was the output of blender used in the making of a mold or numerically-controlled machine instruction file?

I ask because I've begun wondering if blender could be used for modeling things that would ultimately be made in the real world, like prototypes of enclosures, mechanical gears, etc.

Re:How was the statuette produced? by visgoth · 2003-12-13 05:37 · Score: 1

Pure speculation on my part, but it looks like the easiest way would be to output a .stl file (or whatever the compatible 3d file format would be) for a rapid prototyping machine. The machine would then build up a physical model that would then be the master for a mold so you could make billions of monkeys!

--
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Re:How was the statuette produced? by Qbertino · 2003-12-13 06:48 · Score: 1

Suzanne is modelled in Blender - that's for shure. Probably somebody from the core blender team exported the model to AutoCAD or something 'prototyping industry compatible' to make the mold.

Ton showed a picture of the box that came with the statuettes all broken of on the standing leg. Apparently the dutch company that had made them had forgotten to fill the box with stuffing material. Suzannes standing leg was thickened and then the statuettes were to be remade.
Apart from the bad packeging they where definitely professionally done and since there are even examples of professional motion capturing in Blender I'm shure it's not to much of a hassle to export/migrate blender data to CNC machines or the likes. It could be that you need a programm inbetween. Write to the blender team and ask to get a more detailed answer.

--
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Re:How was the statuette produced? by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:25 · Score: 1

I'm almost 100% sure it was with these guys:
3D Art to Part
Re:How was the statuette produced? by John+Jorsett · 2003-12-14 09:03 · Score: 1

Wow, that's an amazing service. Thanks for the tip.

MICRO$OFT by DRAGONWEEZEL · 2003-12-13 04:54 · Score: 1

I Was once in an engineering study where they put me in a dimly lit room for an hour and told me to choose between real photo's and rendered photo's. This was a few years ago, but it was still very impressive.

They showed us the pictures in sets of ten. When after we were done comparing, they explained that they were all pics in a set were either all rendered or all real. (which explains why i had to pic 8~10 in a row alot) They also explained the purpose of their test which was to create a system for making artificial lighting effects by using simulations of real light. While they weren't quite there yet. I am sure that they are progressing with this technology.

Either way I got VS 6.0 for it, and as a poor college student, it was like three years of christmas @ once! 8')

-DW

--
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.

What I want to know is .... by Douglas+Simmons · 2003-12-13 04:58 · Score: 1

Your whole "raytracing algorhythms" world confuses me. All I know is I'm looking at a very aesthetically pleasing website (blender's) which was, I'm guessing, designed in UNIX, maybe not. If it was made exclusively with *nix ware, that's good enough for me to ditch everything Macromedia and delete my Windows partition.

Anyone know which progs might have been used to whip up their site (other than vi)? What are your favorite eyecandy web progs? Sorry to get offtopic and thank you for the info, slashdot folks!

Re:What I want to know is .... by spitzak · 2003-12-13 05:52 · Score: 1

According to the page source it is PostNuke.
Re:What I want to know is .... by GiMP · 2003-12-13 07:09 · Score: 1

I'm not sure what their site was made in, but Unix software is certainly capable of being used to create webpages and other media just as well as Windows based applications.

As far as 3d applications go for Unix you have Blender, SoftImage, Lightwave, Maya, Alias/Wavefront, PovRay, Renderman, and more. Note that Lightwave doesn't run under Linux, but is ported to SGI's Irix - a Unix based OS.

There are 2d applications as well: the GIMP, Photogenics, even Photoshop if you count MacOS X - or version 3 which was ported to Solaris and Irix.

For editting of the pages themselves, there are various editors but I personally wouldn't do without VIM (advanced vi clone), others prefer Emacs. There are editors specifically designed for HTML/CSS work - but like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, real webmasters probably wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.

HTML/CSS specific editors include but are not limited to Bluefish, Scream, Netscape, and Mozilla (Netscape and Mozilla have built-in WYSIWYG editors).
Re:What I want to know is .... by acidtripp101 · 2003-12-13 08:13 · Score: 1

like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, real webmasters probably wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.

That reminds me of my last job. I was the 'IT Director' (aka computer repair dude with a fancy title) and part of my duties was to admin the webserver.
Long story short, I decided to leave that job when the head webdesign lady told me "I don't know HTML and I don't plan on learning it." I'm not kidding, those were her EXACT words. Apparently she was just using frontpage (which COMPLETELY fucked up a bunch of SSIs everywhere, making my job a living hell).

I know it was offtopic, but your comment made me think about it.

--
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
Re:What I want to know is .... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 13:43 · Score: 0

but like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, real webmasters probably wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.

You've obviously never used Dreamweaver the way it's meant to be used then. Frontpage is a piece of crap, I'll grant you that, but Dreamweaver is a very capable and useful tool. I've worked solely with developing for the web the last couple of years, and it is definately my tool of choice, any time. Give it another try!

W
Re:What I want to know is .... by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:12 · Score: 2, Informative

Blender.org is based on postnuke, though the design was modified by Xype. He used either Windows or Mac OS X, with Dreawmeaver/Photoshop/etc. Blender3d.org was designed and built on Windows with Dreamweaver/Photoshop/etc.

On the other hand, there may not really be much there that technically couldn't be done on UNIX/Linux software, though a) it may involve repeated head-bangning-against-the-wall and wasted time due to the interfaces of much of the programmer designed *nix graphics software interfaces, and b) it's not the software that produces the site, it's the designer, and not many good designers use Linux.

Although Blender is popular in the Linux world, 85%~90% of its users run Windows. It's a cross platform piece of software, so I wouldn't make assumptions about things being done on UNIX.

Cheers

Well-written tutorial on radiosity by John+Jorsett · 2003-12-13 04:58 · Score: 1

I took a look at the radiosity tutorial from which those pictures come, and it's really well written. It's clear that raytracing is better than nothing, but that other techniques will yield even more realistic images.

Now let's get some real-time raytracing by PixelSlut · 2003-12-13 05:08 · Score: 3, Informative

Someone recently posted on NeoEngine's forum a link to a development, both software and hardware, towards Real-time raytracing. It's not yet a reality, but think about where it may be in only three years or so.

Of course, people also already have photon mapping working on the most recent generations of NVIDIA and ATI hardware offerings, and I think I recall someone from NVIDIA saying at some point that they expected this to be able to work at interactive framerates sometime during the NV4x cycle of GPUs.

Usability? by dmouritsendk · 2003-12-13 05:26 · Score: 1

... raytracing is almost usable

Yes, all we now need is a complete rewrite of Blenders UI-from-hell(TM) so people finally can say the same thing about Blender.

Re:Usability? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 06:17 · Score: 0

Funny, I really like Blender's interface. It's got a steep initial learning curve, but then is very easy to work with.

Of course, you've probably heard all of this, and simply wanted to stir up some annoyed Blender users. Is this fun for you?
Re:Usability? by PixelSlut · 2003-12-13 09:44 · Score: 1

I strongly agree with this. Blender is actually a fantastic piece of software, and is doubly cool because it's Free. But its user interface is really one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.

I can make a statement like this because first impressions mean everything with user interfaces. One of the major points of a GUI is to be reasonably intuitive.

The first time I sat down at Blender, I had no clue what it was all about and couldn't figure out how to do anything with it. But that was a long time ago, and I didn't really know much of anything about graphics yet at the time.

Skip ahead a couple years... I learn a decent amount about graphics.

I sit down in front of Realsoft3D on Linux, and while I can't yet produce beautiful scenes or complex models, within about 20 minutes of working with it I can use most of the basic modelling features. My main issues with Realsoft3D were that there were some general bugs in the GUI. The Windows version was great. (The Linux version was a beta release, so I didn't hold anything against Realsoft, Oy)

Later I sit down in front of Maya 5 on Linux, and I find that its user interface is fantastic. Again, within a short amount of time I am modelling some stuff in Maya. It will take time to master it and become at all good with it, just as with any fairly complicated technical software.

So then I figure it's time to take a look at Blender again. I still can't figure out crap with it, because its user interface is just THAT BAD. I could do some websearches, I could find some tutorials. But I've got Realsoft3D and Maya, and I'd just rather not waste any more time on Blender.

What would be amazing is if they would split Blender into frontend and backend units, and those who are accustomed to the current UI could continue using that frontend. But then some interested parties from GNOME and KDE camps could come along and write some beautiful user interfaces that are more intuitive. This would be a Very Good Thing.
Re:Usability? by dcuny · 2003-12-13 12:53 · Score: 1

Blender's user interface used to be a shining example of a hostile user interface.
However, the Blender UI has gotten a major overhaul with the 2.3 release. It's now possible for me to use Blender, where before I'd just become frustrated and give up (and yes, I read the documentation).
There's a lot that remains to be done, but from the mockups I've seen (for example, those by William Reynish), using Blender in the future promises to be a joy rather than a case of "Rage Against the Machine".
Re:Usability? by FunkyChild · 2003-12-13 14:05 · Score: 1

You're a couple of months late there, pal. Go and look at the release notes for version 2.30.
Re:Usability? by Art+Tatum · 2003-12-13 18:53 · Score: 1

I'm not a Blender user, so I can't give any personal experience on this. But I've heard people who have used both Blender and other modellers say that while Blender's UI is not intuitive at first, in the long run it's much faster and easier to use than anything else available.
Re:Usability? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 23:07 · Score: 0

Once you learn to use the Blender UI, it's amazingly fast and easy to use. I've tried other modellers and just got very frustrated trying to keep track of 3D scenes and select objects or vertices. Blender makes it a breeze. People say that a UI should follow the conventions that users expect but if a Better Way comes along, use it.

What he forgets to say by SmallFurryCreature · 2003-12-13 06:00 · Score: 1

She is the looker in the family.

--

MMO Quests are like orgasms:

You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

Finally... by ducomputergeek · 2003-12-13 06:27 · Score: 1

I have been using Blender since 1.8. At the time I was working as a system admin for an arcitecture and GA firm. They were using a special packge designed for ALPHA processors and 3D studio for everything else.

Blender had that year of non-development and was stuck at 2.23 until NAN was able to get the donations to free the code.

Since Blender has come a long way adding in Quicktime export, a new interface, NTSC (16:9 HD) rendering size. Granted the Game engine had been removed, but still it was comming along and getting a lot of attention.

I just worked this fall for my old company as a consultant helping them move to Maya and Linux. They spend about $40k on Maya linceses. They looked at blender, but the fact that one had to export to a 3rd party app, like POV-Ray, for raytracing was a big strike against it.

I hope they leave Raytracing as an option, because one of Blender's advatages was it its speed without raytracing.

--
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.

Re:Finally... by acidtripp101 · 2003-12-13 08:27 · Score: 1

Out of curiosity, why did your company consider it a bad thing that Blender exported to a 3rd party app for raytracing?
To me, it would seem like this is an advantage, because then you aren't locked in to one raytracer.
Plus, Povray is AWESOME. I was hopelessly addicted to making a recreation of a Dr. Seuss scene. It was my first real project using povray (aka non chrome ball over green and white checkers) and it turned out VERY decently!
povray is VERY professional grade software. check out these for what povray is really capable of.

--
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")

Blender is great. by eadint · 2003-12-13 06:28 · Score: 1, Informative

Ive been using blender for about 6 months now. i started using it when my boss needed some 3d animations for his lectures., as a rule i allways try to use opensource software before i go out and buy stuff. i have made several animations in blender and i love it. the I is a little hard to get use too. but Ive done just about everything i need to do in it. the only qualm i have about it is documentation. i know there is Elysium but sometimes you just want a good user manual with nice tutorials on how to do everything. i think I'm going to donate to blender. 1 ) because i use it allot 2) because i don't thing i can contribute with code 3) i love the program.
also i made an animation of a carrier engagement and another 3d artist made one with lightwave, and in many aspects my version was better than his. so i think that blender can compete with the mainstream,

Re:Blender is great. by UglyMike · 2003-12-13 10:31 · Score: 0, Redundant
Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org
Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond or simply downloaded as PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content.
Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others
- internationalisation
- way better meta ball implementation
- knife tool
- raytracer (reflections&shadows)
- completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
- a newer, better Python API and a truckload of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see
- Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
- better nurbs based on Nurbana
- integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
- Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
- ???
And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
Re:Blender is great. by eadint · 2003-12-14 07:36 · Score: 1

yes i have the two books and the html files. but their documentation is a little cryptic and hard to follow. im hoping for a book that is more comprehensive and eysier to follow. say like
with totorials on that really tell you how to use the python interface and ways to make explosions look more real. i know that maya made allot of money off of their documentation. so why not blender.

Before and After pictures by Afrosheen · 2003-12-13 07:11 · Score: 2, Funny

Where are the before and after pictures of the server pre-and-post slashdotting?

Figure 1. A normal webserver
Figure 2. A molten, smoking mass.

What's with the example picture? by lowkster · 2003-12-13 07:16 · Score: 3, Funny

Ray traced monkeys? No way! Where's the chrome sphere floating over the black and white checkerboard floor?

Hybrid Renderer by dcuny · 2003-12-13 07:19 · Score: 4, Informative

Actually, the beta that Ton posted is a hybrid renderer. It's still primarily a scanline renderer, but you now have the option of using raytracing for shadows and reflections.

Ton's had the raytracer written for some time now, but it never got incorporated into Blender. The preview is the first to incorporate the code.

You could already do shadows and reflections in Blender, but they were simulated with shadowmaps and reflection maps, the same way that Pixar's Renderman renderer had done it.

Worthless trivia: Renderman only recently acquired raytracing - for the few times that it was actually used, they used the BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Toolkit), a raytracer developed by Larry Gritz. Larry quit Pixar and formed ExLuna, which marketed another Renderman compliant renderer. Pixar sued ExLuna for IP infringement (the exact details are hazy, since they came to an out of court agreement), ExLuna was bought out and all the renderers (including BMRT) disappeared. Soon thereafter, Pixar's Renderman added raytracing support. Still, full raytracing is used in Renderman quite sparingly.

The Yafray (Yet Another Free Raytracer) is a stand-alone full raytracer with a lot of features that has nice integration (thanks to Python scripting) in Blender. Future versions of Blender promise to integrate it more tightly, and seems more likely that's where a 'full raytrace' option for Blender will come from.

Re:Hybrid Renderer by Pseudonym · 2003-12-13 21:55 · Score: 1

Even more worthless trivia: Pixar's product is called Photorealistic RenderMan, or prman for short. RenderMan is the standard to which prman adheres, not the name of a product.

--
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});

Undo in Blender 2.3* by barista · 2003-12-13 07:24 · Score: 4, Informative

AFAIK, it only works in Edit mode, but you can use it by either hitting the U key, or by hitting the spacebar and in the pop-up menu go to Edit, then Undo.

It's quite useful, and you can also set how many levels of Undo you want. You can also set it to auto save every so many minutes.

The Blender documentation is ongoing, but they are coming out with a new 2.3 manual in January. 600+ pages and Blender 2.31 on a CD, along with tutorials.

Check out blender.org for the main site and some useful overviews. To really hone your skills, visit Elysiun and browse the forums. They are all about Blender and have sections for animation, modelling contests, GameBlender (Blender 2.25), and an extensive artwork section. To me, Elysiun is a great place to learn about different aspects of modelling in Blender.

Art of Illusion by UpLateDrinkingCoffee · 2003-12-13 07:24 · Score: 4, Interesting

If you guys like blender, you might be interested in another project called Art of Illusion. It is a poly-based modeller and renderer and I have seen some amazing results. It's completely open source (GPL I think) and achieves great performance being written completely in Java. Check it out, and also the other work Nate has done.

Re:Art of Illusion by rofthorax · 2003-12-14 09:18 · Score: 1

Blender stores everything in a binary struct format.. To read it the program would have to be blender.. The best solution is to use something to access blender, like using a python plugin.. Of course you can use the VRML format, or some of the existing python scripts for converting between blender a number of formats..

--
Just say no to license servers!!

Suzanne? Is that the MENKEY's sister? by upside · 2003-12-13 07:55 · Score: 1

Ok, so you won't get this if you don't play FireArms.

--
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone

Oh please!..... by Billly+Gates · 2003-12-13 07:57 · Score: 4, Funny

Emacs has supported raytracing for years.

--
http://saveie6.com/

Re:Oh please!..... by d99-sbr · 2003-12-13 08:16 · Score: 0, Flamebait

All it needs now is a better text editor...
Re:Oh please!..... by Ziviyr · 2003-12-14 02:33 · Score: 1

I bet it even animates realtime. :-)

--

Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Re:Oh please!..... by Billly+Gates · 2003-12-14 08:55 · Score: 1

Yes if you have a few gigs of ram.

--
http://saveie6.com/
Re:Oh please!..... by Ziviyr · 2003-12-14 10:17 · Score: 1

How much texture space do you need to render to monochrome 80x24 ASCII?

--

Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!

now all they need is a good interface. by meatbridge · 2003-12-13 08:48 · Score: 1

the one they have now is pretty piss poor.

Blender is going places by UglyMike · 2003-12-13 10:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org

Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond in some shops or simply downloaded as a PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a newer documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content. Of course, there is also a truckload of tutorials available on the Net

Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others

internationalisation
way better meta ball implementation
knife tool
raytracer (reflections&shadows)
completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
a newer, better Python API and plenty of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)

These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well.
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see

Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
better nurbs based on Nurbana
integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
further tuning of the new GUI
???

And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!
If your first encounter with Blender's non-standard GUI made you trow up your hands in disgust, you should consider to try it again.

Re:Blender is going places by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 12:44 · Score: 0

How could you miss:

-Sound Support in Blender Sequencer (which makes it one of the better sound-sequencers on Linux ;)
-64steps undo in edit-mode
-More shading abilities, including Toon-shading. ;)

Re:Art of Illusion - exellent stuff by vik · 2003-12-13 11:11 · Score: 2, Informative

Yup, I use ArtOfIllusion for commercial artwork. It is indeed most exellent and powerful. Not only that, but there is some great documentation available for it too.

It would be great if Blender and ArtOfIllusion could share a decent file format. It'd save everyone a lot of heartache in the long term.

It has rendering and raytracing options, so both camps can be kept happy. Oh, and don't be put off by its use of Java. This is by far the speediest Java graphics app I've come across anywhere.

Vik :v)

Don't forget ArtOfIllusion by vik · 2003-12-13 11:18 · Score: 1

That's got a very nice rendering engine as well as rastering, and a user interface that 3D Studio Max affectionados will easily understand. It'll export to POV, which is handy sometimes as you can model a tricky object in the GUI, then import it into a POV script later.

Oh yeah, runs on Windows and Mac too. Guess someone might find that useful :)

http://www.artofillusion.org

Vik :v)

Jacob Two-Two by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 20:34 · Score: 0

So you grew up to be a programmer, Jacob. How's the Hooded Fang enjoying his retirement?

Blender is pretty good despite criticism by rofthorax · 2003-12-14 08:52 · Score: 1

You have to keep in mind this is a
package that was developed to be used by
someone else, not developed to be sold on a
shelf.. Pixar makes their own inhouse software
for instance, they only use Maya because their artists couldn't have learned their inhouse software before coming to Pixar, and their inhouse software is their proprietary experience, that nobody else owns.. Also its also the way they can keep their animators from leaving, if you know pixar's software really well and its not available to Pixar's competitors, you are only as useful as the experience you can abstract away from what you know of Pixar's software.. Same goes for Maya..

However the case with blender is its never going away.. And if it becomes a industry tool, it will mean less means to leverage artists into binding relationships with companies and with proprietary software vendors.. Thus Maya becomes only as good as it really is, and Pixar is only able to retain the artists that really want to stay. Its that case anyway.. But the existence of blender allows ayone with access to a computer a choice..

The reason there is any seperation between the exlcusively feeling wannabe or professional 3D artists using proprietary high dollar packages and everyone else is produced by jealousy. Its like the difference between Mick Jagger and Keither Richards.. But everyone is offered the ability to become a "rock&roll knight". So while the ones who would scoff, scoff, watch as their investment in a high-dollar package gradually deminish in value, and they pick on the lowly blender users as a result..

But its questionable if their art is worth as much as their say.. If you feel threatened, you probably are not a very good artist anyhow.. If you invest much of yoru artistic value int he tools, you are not a very good artist..

Sorry..

--
Just say no to license servers!!

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