POVRay Short Code Contest Results In

PateraSilk writes "The Results for the POVRay Short Code Contest are available here. This contest looks for the best images to be generated in POVRay with the smallest amount of code--in this case, under 256 bytes. Definitely 'less is more'."

Comments

Is this like POS code?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure to win any POS code contest!

Correction...

[andreMA]

That should be 256 bytes, not K.

Re:Correction...

[Yrd]

I was just about to say that! 256K is a LOT of POV code, in my experience at least.

Although of course you need a lot of POV code to get some of those glorious images on the IRTC.

Correction

[slothdog]

The challenge was to create a POVRay file smaller than 256 bytes. And the results are amazing. Fantastic work.

I remember leaving my 386 on all night rendering stuff that looked much worse than these....

Wow, a sphere

[Cecil]

I considered "Simple" to be only mildly more interesting than the red square that came in last. How the hell did it win first (and third) place?

Kind of disappointing, although when I read the conditions for each place, I realized that the 'real favourite' would end up being second -- and I was right. Agate Face is amazing for its size.

Re:Wow, a sphere

[Cthefuture]

I concur. And the first place entry didn't even have any commentary.

Who did the judging? Maybe it was a bug in the voting system. Recount!

Re: Wow, a sphere

[Thornae]

Well, "Simple" is aesthetically pleasing and has a sense of photo-realism, using only 50 bytes more than the red square. As far as use of POV goes, I liked it better than many of the others.

Nonetheless, I agree that "Agate Face" is the best image. So did the judges, by their comments.

Neat contest, anyway. I'll be having fun looking through some of those code fragments for ideas...

Re:Wow, a sphere

[MindStalker]

If you read the rules, the first place entry was determined by (votes total/bytes)
while second place was (votes total)
and third was (votes total/(bytes^2))
screwy really.

Re:Wow, a sphere

[Monsieur_F]

What happens if I submit the empty file as pov source file and get 0 vote ? ;)

Re:Wow, a sphere

[Monsieur_F]

Okay, I just found that it was impossible, because of this rule:
A valid entry will consist of a single text file containing between 16 and 256 bytes

Re:Wow, a sphere

[frAme57]

I can understand the appeal of The agate face. It has a cool sort of realism; kind of like a well made video game or CG movie. So maybe it is a success on its technical merits. But read the contest introduction. It is meant to be a contest of both technical and artistic merit.

I am not an art teacher but if I was (and did you read the blurb about the panel members?) I think I would say things like:

"The warm tones in the foreground and the blue background give The agate face a sense of space and a feeling that this is a glimpse of a place that continues on in all directions. But I wonder why I should look at it. What is supposed to be happening here? Was it meant to be a picture taken by a hiker who didn't pull out his camera fast enough when he saw a roadrunner? Is it a dying jawa's last glimpse of home? You have brought me to an interesting place but I have no idea why".

...and...

"There is a dramatic tension between the shadows in front of the sphere and the bright background. And the contrast between the sphere and its context is dynamic and mysterious. The sphere is a truly focused object: visually and physically it is symmetrical on all possible axes. That internal calm balances the external ambiguity in the scene and gives a sense of poise amidst chaos. There is no way to tell if the sphere is stationary, rolling slowly, or streaking by - or which way its going if it is moving. And whether it is in a small, brightly lit container or some vast, glowing space may never be known. But that does not matter; in fact it makes Simple all the more engaging. What does matter is that the compositional elements give a believable sense of physicality and of space while maintaining a visual unity through their contrasting qualities.

Yeah, I'd say something like that. But fortunately I am not an art teacher and don't have to.

However, I will say that I know how long it would take me to model Simple in Rhinoceros or Alias, and how long it would take me to tweak the surfaces and the lights before I could reproduce that scene. Visually, and to someone who can't grok it, the code for Simple is as unified and compelling as the image itself. I actually sat staring in wonder at the code for as long as I did at the image. Come to think of it, that's exactly why I consider it (and by at least one formal definition it is) art!

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Re:Wow, a sphere

[Davorama]

But I wonder why I should look at it.

Well, there's that face in the rock that might be more interesting that what's going on offscrean for one thing.... You made some great points but that wasn't one of them.

Re:Wow, a sphere

[Paul Lamere]

The rules for scoring are such that the score for a submission is based upon the judges votes divided by the byte count. This favors smaller images. 'Simple' being only 72 bytes gets almost a 4 times advantage over 'agate'.

Here are the rules:

Each voter will choose their six favourite images based upon artistic merit. A first choice will get 6 points, the second will get 5 points, and so on.

The gold place winner will be determined by dividing the total number of points awarded by the byte count.

The silver place winner will be the entry with the highest number of points.

The bronze place will go to the entry with the highest number of points divided by the square of the bytes used, this rewards the lower byte counts while still requiring an interesting interesting image.

How in the world...

[scootr1]

did something finish in first *and* third?

Re:How in the world...

[gauchopuro]

> How in the world did something finish in first *and* third?

A previous poster mentioned

If you read the rules, the first place entry was determined by (votes total/bytes) while second place was (votes total) and third was (votes total/(bytes^2))

Given this strange judging criteria, it happened that Simple had the highest score for both votes total/bytes and votes total/bytes^2.

Less vs. More

[nacturation]

Less can be more, but more is often so much more. The Chado Hall of Fame image is stunning. I'm still trying to convince myself that it's not a photograph.

Re:Less vs. More

[lawpoop]

Have you ever seen a photograph this well lit? The way you can tell that it's not a photograph is that it's way too perfect. Everything is shiny. Also notice that there are no lit translucent objects -- I've heard that we don't have the math for this yet.

Not sure about the math, but that's one of the reason that human skin looks so lifeless in CG. Skin is translucent (that's why your hand glows red when you hold a flashlight up to it). Currently CG skin is only a surface -- it doesn't show light reflecting from within the skin.

Re:Less vs. More

[Anonymous Coward]

sorta looks like a picture from architectural digest to me... lighting is on par with many professional shots i've seen.

Re:Less vs. More

[qbwiz]

Not sure about the math, but that's one of the reason that human skin looks so lifeless in CG. Skin is translucent (that's why your hand glows red when you hold a flashlight up to it). Currently CG skin is only a surface -- it doesn't show light reflecting from within the skin.

Actually, they have found ways to do this now. For example, there's PovMan which is an add-on to Povray that lets you make shaders that describe how a surface reflects and transmits. There's a skin shader on the website that lets you create more realistic skin.

Re:Less vs. More

[niff]

check out this gallery and scroll down.

http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.php3? pa ge=FeatureGalleries/Illumination

Re:Less vs. More

[WhyteRabbyt]

[i]Currently CG skin is only a surface -- it doesn't show light reflecting from within the skin.[/i]

Totally wrong. Try googling for 'subsurface scattering skin'.

Re:Less vs. More

[Hast]

To add to another post which talks about subsurface scattering I'd just like to point to the two other fields which has really given photorealism a shot in the arm.

Image Based Lighting uses a high dynamic range image as a source for lighting a scene. The result is quite stunning.

Photon Mapping is a way to simulate real light. It is used quite effectively combined with techniques like Sub Surface Scattering. Basically it allows you to make global illumination but at a relatively low rendering time. The results are often stunningly beautiful.

Naturally you can combine these techniques as well, not sure if that is done a lot though.

I'd recommend interested people to look into doing a simple renderer. Typically the math isn't very hard, it's just that it takes a lot of time to render the pretty pictures.

Re:Less vs. More

[rabs]

after following a few links from this, I found

http://www.povray.org/community/hof/view/1/

holy crap. if there were only a little more blur on the empire state building, i wouldn't have even thought /once/ about whether it was real or not.

- rabs

Wow...

[doublebackslash]

This is some of the most creative work I've ever seen. GREAT job.
I used to use POV (no time now) and I never even had thoughts that loked like this, let alone project that good.
Unbelieveable.

powerful

[whathappenedtomonday]

great example of how powerful POV has become - it's quite amazing what you can do with it with just a few bytes of code.
a very geeky contest with amazing results, but only a few /.ers seem to care (judging from the number of posts - even the trolls don't care...). guess i'll comfort myself with rendering some of the scene files from the site...

Higher Resolution

[nicklaszlo]

Wow. This is great. Is it possible to get higher resolution images? These would look realy bad if I wanted to put them up as a wall paper on my high resolution screen. How is it licensed? I have POV, but I haven't learned to use it. If I download the source, can I make my own high res. version? How long will it take?

Re:Higher Resolution

[nicklaszlo]

I downloaded it and imported. Then I rendered. Output: "Couldn't Call Povray". I have mandrake 9.

Re:Higher Resolution

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Mandrake comes with "KPovModeler" a graphical frontend, you need to install povray separately (command line). It comes in a tar, untar. In KPovModeler: Settings -> Configure KPovModeler you can fill in which command to execute... Good luck ;-)

Re:Higher Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

POV-Ray's command-line options are weird:
povray +Iyournewdesktop.pov +Oyournewdesktop.png +A +W1024 +H768 +FN

Replace the numbers with your screen resolution. Warning: some of these will take a *while*.

Re:Higher Resolution

[Just Some Guy]

Thanks much - that worked perfectly!

Very cool... makes me wanna learn

[Zegnar]

Wow.. wow this is very cool... anyone remember, comparatively, the 64kb competition a while ago? For video+audio? Any good tutorials out there for POVray? Don't say search on google, because that means 316,000 crap results and one or two good tutorials...

Re:Very cool... makes me wanna learn

[doublebackslash]

I learned from reading the included help files.
Best documentation out there.
After I muddled though the tutorial, I went wild, and just used the help as reference. Wish i hadn't lost my old files before I had backup systems in place ;(.
I'm sad now.

Judges need a thesaurus

[WTFmonkey]

"Evocative" and "aesthetic" used that often and in those ways make it sound like you're trying to be smarter and deeper than you really are. Stop it.

Re:Judges need a thesaurus

[Tablizer]

Evocative" and "aesthetic" used that often and in those ways make it sound like you're trying to be smarter and deeper than you really are. Stop it.

Your message lacks evocation and aesthetics. It resembles the sophomoric flow of a less talented slashdot participant. It thus should be delegated to those honed in the fine arts of non-positive moderation scoring techniques.

Re:Judges need a thesaurus

[dan_bethe]

Your message lacks evocation and aesthetics. It resembles the sophomoric flow of a less talented slashdot participant. It thus should be delegated to those honed in the fine arts of non-positive moderation scoring techniques.

That was awesome.

Re:Judges need a thesaurus

[DNS-and-BIND]

Sorry, but I can't take a guy seriously who has a giant section on "tactics my enemies on message boards use" on his (geocities) website.

Besides, it should be "It should thus be". Please stop trying to appear smarter and deeper than you really are.

Re:Judges need a thesaurus

[bark]

no it was not

Re:Judges need a thesaurus

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a joke. Lighten up.

Please learn how to use links.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn how to use links.

check out <a href="http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.p hp3?page=FeatureGalleries/Illumination">this gallery</a> and scroll down.

yields: check out this gallery and scroll down.

Amazing!

[Jacek Poplawski]

These pictures are amazing!
Now I have reason to install and learn PovRay...

Re:Amazing!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, then you can be on the cutting edge of 1997 technology...

explain

[jovlinger]

Can anyone explain where the buildings for City come from? I get most of the description, but the buildings seem to not be enumerated or randomly generated anywhere.

Re:explain

[Quill]

(Take a look at the verbose version of the code for an easier read.)

The buildings are actually just one big isosurface. This is a surface in 3D space that is described by a function, similar to describing a line on a 2D graph. For example (warning, I'm been out of school for a while!), the formula y=x would describe a straight line at a 45 deg angle, whereas y=x^2 describes a parabolic curve. You can make the formula more complex and make us of functions (like sin(), cos(), max(), etc...) to end up with some really funky lines that wobble all over.

The authors of "City" and "The Agate Face" both use isosurfaces effectively.

I cannot.

Re:explain

[jovlinger]

thanks. that's the hint I needed.

Entire ray tracer in 831 chars of postscript

[Curl E]

I like to keep this around for torturing postscript printers, you can also feed it go ghostview:

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You'll have to demunge the slashdot processing, there is an extra space in most of the lines, but you need the one between the J and cvx in the second to last line.