Slashdot Mirror
Photon Soup Update
rkeene517 writes "Two and a half months ago I posted an article asking for spare computer cycles. I was swamped by emails and volunteers. After the first weeks most dropped out. The die-hards kept running the program and we simulated 45.3 billion photons. The pictures are here. Thanks to all that helped out. I will be submitting the images to SIGGRAPH 2005 and a paper. (P.S. Never post your email address on slashdot. I got 900 emails! ouch.)"
How difficult could it be to auto-mirror front page stories on
I mean, data-wise, local websites probably take up anything under a 100 Meg, and only go a few pages deep. The rest of it can still link to the outside world, since the probability of people following over 2 pages deep links away from the actual report is small. So the outside server could easily survive, and is not forced to switch servers just because there is ONE spike.
It seems a bit silly to force websites onto larger bandwidth servers because they get linked to from news sites such as these. It's nice for the advancement of broadband, but it's also wastefull in resources most of the time.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Computers got 3000 times faster, but Java managed to compensate for 11 years of evolution.
The previous article says:
Year: 1994
Computers: 100 SparcStation 1
Time: 1 month
Photons: 29 billion, 29 billion/month
Now we have:
Year: 2004
Computers: Unknown, supposedly 3000 times faster
Time: 2.5 months
Photons: 45.3 billions, 18 billion/month
If computers are indeed 3000 times faster, or heck, even 100, you should have got 72 billion just out of one of those computers running for the 2.5 months.
Firstly, I'm kind of irritated that the usual slashdot troll crowd expends so much hatred and ignorance on a truly creative project. The technique might not be using OpenGL, DirectX or ATi or NVidia's newest cards, but that is no reason to trash talk a technique that, in a few years time, might revolutionise CGI work in movies.
And in movie production is where this technique will most probably eventually find use. Movie studios have the budget and the server farm equipment to make good use of a time and resource expensive technique such as this.
And they certainly would want to. The images have almost exactly the same quality as grainy 1950's kodacolor or poor images from my 1970's vintage Kodak instamatic. While adding grain to a movie is no problem, most rendering techniques used today produce surfaces that are simply too clean and glass effects that are too clear, and this immediately gets picked up by the human eye, which is very good at subliminally noticing differences in image quality. Tracing the paths of photons and their interaction through and with materials produces images that mimic reality in an excellent way, IMO.
I'm pretty sure that a large cluster, such as the one using Apple's G5s at Virginia tech, running optimised C or C++ code would be able to produce usable footage for movies. And what's more, I'm pretty sure that sooner or later, there will be tools to make this technique more accessable.
After finally finding the pictures I was really impressed. Someone noted that rendered images are easily detected by the human eye, but these look like pictures. Granted parts of it are fuzzy, but that is part of what makes it look so real. The actual glass images look very real.
Great job.