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POV-Ray Competition Winners
An anonymous reader noted that you can "See how far POV-Ray developers have pushed the limits of raytracing in the POVCOMP 2004 Raytracing Contest." Yes it's from 2004. It's still neat. And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)
Many of those things I would at first glance say are real! If this is the kind of quality we can get now in 2005, imagine what kind of quality we will get in 5-10 years!
And the server is from 1995 because it's already slow...
Here's the story about the contest.
And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)
I line in Canada. It's not a holiday here, you insensitive clod ;)
Oh and just maybe first post
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
"Yes it's from 2004. It's still neat. And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)"
Rock on, Taco.
1. 'The Last Guardian' by Johnny Yip 2. 'The Kitchen' by Jaime Vives Piqueres
3. 'Dissolution' by Ziga Petric
4. 'Victoria's World' by Douglas Eichenberg and 'Twin Girls With A Pearl Earring' by Rene Bui
6. 'Pirates' by 'seawolf'
7. 'Bradbury Atrium' by Gary MacKinnon
8. 'Model Expo Entry' by Chris Holtorf
9. 'Waiting for the relief' by Marc Jacquier
10. 'Sentinel Rock' by Glenn McCarter
11. 'Song For The Earth' by Fabien Mosen
12. 'Natural History Museum' by Sean Day
13. 'Cybernetic Organism Caealis - Narcissism' by 'selsek'
14. 'The Three Blind Mice Return' by Jeremy M. Praay
15. 'Autumn' by 'Slime'
16. 'The buzzard and the dove' by 'emkaah'
17. 'Evie Evolves' by Joanne Simpson
18. 'Early morning tea' by 'St Dunstan'
19. 'Christmas Eve' by Gennady Obukhov
20. 'The Peek-a-Blocks' by 'danBhentschel'
21. 'After the Storm' by Christoph Gerber
22. 'Montezumas last meal No.2' by 'splendor'
23. 'Pathways' by Robert W. McGregor
24. 'Japanese spire!' by 'miyoken'
25. '13 Spiral Spheres' by Robert W. McGregor
Try looking outside the US. it's not a holiday here.
Of course, no article on POV-Ray is complete without the obligatory link to the site of Monsieur Gilles Tran, surrealist and POV-artist extraordinaire...
Has he entered the competition? Haven't seen his name anywhere so far...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
You are talking about pr0n right?
(You can see the homepage of the same image here if the pov website gets slashdotted)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)
;-)
Hey! How about this Holiday Dupe!
I hear people complaining about how we don't need better video cards or whatever, how we can't possibly get any better or need any more power than what we've got.
To these people I say, come back when my Playstation produces graphics like this in realtime.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
is in the artist so it can be achieved anytime.
..the POVRay short code contest.
Aaaah...Pov-ray, that brings back memories. Back in '93 putting my trusty 286 to work on a 320x200px image of a chessboard and some cubes. Took 12 hours, you could see every pixel being generated :-)
..hello ?..is this thing on ?...
Interesting, was expecting shiny metallic balls on a chequered floor plane, apparently it has evolved a lot
That's how you tell. Look at the way the light's coming down in the winning entry - absolutely uniform. Natural light is never that good. The water in the sixth-placed entry is amazing - but it's ruined by the sails. They're far too clean, and those crisp shadows look nothing like reality. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to add randomness to make pure digital textures look real, but at the moment they don't.
I am trolling
Pov-ray is cool, man. It'd be cool to generate a film with it. On today's computers, with a small cluster to split up the work, it shouldn't be any trouble at all.
You must be kidding that those look real. Those renders look like they are more like 5+ years old. Have a look at what a modern rendering looks like here. http://www.highend3d.com/artists/
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Actually, Gilles Tran work is used as an example of what a submission _should_ look like. In the first explanatory paragraph of TFA.
Quoting:
It can be used to generate photorealistic http://www.povcomp.com/hof/1b.html images that resemble objects in the real world, or to visualize 'virtual' objects that do not physically exist.
Okay, these images look extremely realistic.
So what is the best way to learn to program povray images such as these?
Any tutorial links? Free pdf books online? Or is the only way to "learn by doing"?
...that this was one more step on the road to realizing the Hitchhiker movie's vision of a Point of View ray.
For a second, I thought this was the Point Of View gun from The HHGTG movie.
I was thinking to my self "Self, if your wife see's this, you are in BIG trouble!!!"
Fortunately it is just some lame Persistance of Vision crap.
Could someone take a look at some pictures of my testicles. They're very itchy, and I think it might have had something to do with rubbing them on pink insulation.
Try pounding them with a large sledgehammer. I guarentee 100% that the itching will either stop or not be noticable if you keep on pounding. Then you can get back to your POV composition.
Table-ized A.I.
The word "monday" should be capitalized (e.g., "Monday"). Since it's an American holiday, maybe the rules of capitalization doesn't apply today. ;)
This image got me stunned. Looks quite real.
The classical raytracing demo, some metal spheres in a box. I have seen so many of them...
All of the images are good (especially the office), but far from photorealistic. What is keeping designers from making completely photorealistic renderings? Is it because the amount of computing power required is not practical at this time, or because they just do not know how?
...to make something photorealistic you need to create extreemly high-poly models, plus you need either humungous texture files or to write a dynamic shader. All that takes lots and lots of time.
The only thing that makes that office render not photorealistic is that a lot of the textures are too "perfect" for want of a better word. Look at the filing cabinet in the background, if this was a real office there would be lots of tiny dings and scratches. That kind of thing takes a lot of time to model.
I am NaN
JPEG is soooooo 2004. You need to sit back and blur your eyes just to hide the visual artifacts.
I suggest you read Slashdot
POV-Ray only, yet the renderings are (IMO) superior to those on IRTC. I'd think it to be the other way around, but I suppose the incentive might make a difference.
Fine, we'll disrespect the Spring Bank Holiday Monday instead.
Will this get +1 informative too?
I don't know. I think this one is pretty good.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Also check out the linux mirror project.
But given the higher prestige and longer prep time of povcomp (irtc competitions are bi-monthly) it's not so surprising that the balance of the images have a more polished feel. On the other hand, some of the povcomp entries are recognisable versions of irtc entries. The Gilles Tran "Wet Bird", posted as an example of good tracing (yeah! It's my favourite ever raytraced image - see the link somewhere up above) was itself an irtc winner. Anyone inspired to look into POVRay by this story should take advantage of http://news.povray.org/ too. Lots of expertise available for mere politeness over there.
.sigs: Just Say No!
indeed you are
I'd say a little of both.
I read a very interesting interview quite a while ago in (I think) a Wired magazine article. The topic of discussion was the creation of realistic 3D human models. One point, if I recall, was that you have a lot of leeway as you're moving toward a realisting image, but once you cross a certain line, the absence of the most seemingly benign details will give it away.
I think the same applies to modeling in general. Take the office image for example. The lighting is very good - if you look along the edges where the walls meet the ceiling, you'll see subtle light "spots". It's not that this is anything unique, but that they were rather well done. They're subtle - if they were missing, you might not notice at first, but I can pretty well bet that it would still register- not as something that would be readily identifiable, but something that's just "missing".
If you look at something in real life, and you set yourself to reproduce an exact replica, you're forced to deal with the collective imperfections that make the object what it is. Suffice it to say, straight edges are rarely perfectly straight, but 3D modeling makes it exceedly easy to produce them as such. The challenge is introducing just the right amount of imperfection.
Add in lighting - that's often something that will make or break an image. In fact, lighting is so important (imho), and getting it "right" takes a lot of time and tweaking. When you factor this into the length of time required for a good test render, you may find yourself settling for "not exactly what I want, but good enough."
So, it's a combination of things. Even if someone had a supercomputer at their disposal, I think you'll still see a lot of work that comes close, but just slightly misses the mark for one reason or another.
There's a lot of really good work on display at www.3dtotal.com too
Also, for anyone who's not familiar with Zbrush 2 and what it can do, the Zbrush central gallery is worth a look
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I remember playing with POV on my Atari 1024 STe upgraded from 1MB to 2MB (so it was a 2048 STe). Editing my scene by hand with Everest and rendering them in 80x50 with the lowest details to adjust the elements. Then, launching the final fullscreen rendering in 320x200 that could last half a day, just to get a glass ball over a heighfield rendered mountain. Then, the day I got my first PC (a P100 with 8MB) and could render those scenes in 5 minutes in 640x480 with full details, I never touched POV again...
This actually is news. While the competition was from 2004, the rendering just finished yesterday.
I always liked this better http://www.irtc.org/ It has a little more than POVRay, but its MOSTLY POVRay
A free copy of POV-Ray.
Go to cgtalk.com. Be far more impressed.
fifth sigma, inc.
This stuff is all done with POV-Ray. Most graphic artists use other tools. And certanly some of them use fractal textures and whatnot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Does that look 'too clean' for you?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We'd have more stories like this and less stories that merely mention RIAA/Open Source/Linux. It'd be nice to read slashdot and go 'Cool!' everyday.
Pov-ray is hardly the most-high tech software available today. Check out some of the links posted earlier like this site and in particular this artist. Its possible, but not with pov-ray (apperantly)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
check this out.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
too clean for you?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
by this entry, made by a 7 year old girl... (Read the description and making of.)
we aren't quite at the point where we can pull out every single stop on making computer generated movies.
Some frames from the Jellyfish Scene from Finding Nemo took twelve hours per frame to render.
A study of raytracing which simulates how light behaves on a normal scale really gives one a good idea of how many intricacies there are in our world.
You speak of The Uncanny Valley. Although the linked article talks about emotional response to humanlike qualities, you have a point in that it can also be applied to non-human common objects; the office, for example.
No rest for the livid.
...photographic evidence is no longer trusted? Some of these pictures look so good I cannot tell if they are real or not. Is it possible that in the near future crime scene evidence etc will be untrustworthy?
What happened to "Natalie Portman naked, petrified, and covered in hot grits"?
except for the trees and shadows.. yeah it's good, the trees look too blurry around the leaves and the shadows the leaves aren't blurry enough
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Sorry, but those all use post processing to make them look real. If those amateurs can make similar looking stuff without Photoshop then get back to us, until then ... **yawn**.
One thing I've learnde really matters is radiosity, practically no image without it can ever lock real, with exception of special cases like solarsystems and stuff. But the problem is that radiosity takes time to render, and often it aren't perfectly implemented in the renderer either.
But when it comes to faces only radiosity doesn't cut it, they also need Subsurface Scattering and that's even more time consuming than radiosity.
Note that both those techniques can sometimes be faked, but that often onvolves lots of manual tweaking on the behalf of the artist, it's often a balance between computer time and human time.
I was playing with POV-Ray macros a while back and came up with this example of a fractal using recursion, which is a trivial thing to do. POV-Ray has a fairly simpleminded macro system where the preprocessor keeps running, pass after pass, replacing all occurrences of any macro with its inlined definition, until no more macros (aside from their declarations) appear in the output. So you can easily create structures that replicate themselves at smaller scales.
//the order==0 case
The "FRACTAL" macro here references itself with a lower "order" variable each time, until zero is reached. It ends up rendering a huge scene with 4687 sphere primitives arranged so that each sphere has six (or more normally, five) smaller spheres attached to it, until you get to the tiniest (order==0) spheres. The resulting shape is a "spongy" octahedron that meets the definition of a fractal (at least until you reach the scale of the smallest spheres).
If you raise HIGHEST_ORDER, the load on the raytracer increases exponentially as the preprocessor produces more scene objects. (The "relationToParent" variable and the six "if" statements testing for it are there to control the exponential object explosion during preprocessing; without them, starting from order==5, the final number of spheres goes up to 9331 from 4687, as invisible/embedded spheres are included, and the rendering time for more complex scenes rises more quickly.)
You can make a Sierpinski gasket this way too. Recursive macros were also used in this image to render trees, albeit at a distance.
#include "colors.inc"
#declare SCALING_FACTOR = 0.50;
#declare DISPLACEMENT = 1.0 + SCALING_FACTOR;
#declare HIGHEST_ORDER = 5;
#declare NO_ORIGIN = 0;
#declare POS_X = 1;
#declare NEG_X = 2;
#declare POS_Y = 3;
#declare NEG_Y = 4;
#declare POS_Z = 5;
#declare NEG_Z = 6;
#macro FRACTAL (order, relationToParent)
#if (order)
union {
sphere {<0,0,0>, 1 TEXTURE(order)}
#if (relationToParent != NEG_X)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_X) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * x}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_X)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, NEG_X) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate -DISPLACEMENT * x}
#end
#if (relationToParent != NEG_Y)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_Y) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * y}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_Y)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, NEG_Y) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate -DISPLACEMENT * y}
#end
#if (relationToParent != NEG_Z)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_Z) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * z}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_Z)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, NEG_Z) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate -DISPLACEMENT * z}
#end
}
#else
sphere {<0,0,0>, 1 TEXTURE(order)}
#end
#end
#macro TEXTURE (order)
texture {
pigment { rgb (<1, 1, 1> * (1-(order/(1+HIGHEST_ORDER)))) }
finish {ambient 0.3 diffuse 0.7 phong 1 phong_size 80 brilliance 2}
}
#end
//camera {location <-0.15, 0.2, -3.5> look_at <-0.6, 0.2, 1>}
camera {location <-1, -1, -6> up <0, 1, 0> right <4/3, 0, 0> look_at <0, 0, 1>}
//camera {location <0.0, 0.0, -4.3> up <0, 1, 0> right <4/3, 0, 0> look_at <0, 0, 1> rotate <0, 0, 45>}
light_source {<10, 12, -15> color White}
light_source {<0, 20,0> color White}
light_source {<-4,-5,-8> color White}
background{color MidnightBlue}
FRACTAL(HIGHEST_ORDER, NO_ORIGIN)
The same, but at 20 FPS instead of 0.0001 FPS?
Cool.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Your saying this doesn't look real?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I might be wrong, but I guess this might be due to the "radiosity" feature of povray. PoV does not use the classical radiosity approach, but a distribuion raytracer with an irradiance cache. These dark specks result from incorrect interpolation of the irradiance samples. So though they might look good, they are not correct, just plausible.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Uh, the POV Ray finalists look as good as any of the ones at the site you linked to. The 'modern renderings' look very much like a high-end video game: a little too crisp here, a little too plastic looking there, etc.
What the devil are you talking about? There are no trees, leaves, nor shadows of leaves in the picture I linked to. It is a picture of two guys and a car.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Umm YES I AM. All the metal should be acting as a light source and the reflection on the back cabnet should also be radiating light. Its a good render for ray tracer but RAY TRACING IS OLD. Radiosity and stocastic renders are much higher quality then this.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Come on! That completely sucks. It doesn't look real. Maybe this is your first time looking at computer generated images?
POV-Ray's output looks incredibly dated.
pffft...
Of course it is not real! There's no cereal by that name! Jeesh!
sorry wrong post.. that one has its own problems though. the depth of field is very not right around his face too perfectly blurred.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
All the metal should be acting as a light source and the reflection on the back cabnet should also be radiating light. Its a good render for ray tracer but RAY TRACING IS OLD. Radiosity and stocastic renders are much higher quality then this.
Well, that scene doesn't look to be using photons, hence the lack of caustics. POV-Ray can do that though, it just takes a long time. (see the shadow of the bottle in the "blind mice" entry; the "peek-a-blocks" also have excellent caustics) Would it really have added that much to this image? Eh, it's quite good as it is.
Radiosity, well, if you'd read the notes with the image, it's obvious that that is used. Furthermore, the lighting would be very difficult to achieve otherwise, esp. in places like above the cupboards or under the sink.
No need to go that deep - look at the stuff on the fridge. Besides, there's not enough slight bends, dings, unevenness or wear on any of the surfaces. For a rendering of a sleek new kitchen you can get away with that, but look at how the vent hood, tile grout, and table have never seen a speck of food, water, or abrasion.
That having been said, it's damn impressive for the constraints POVRay users labor under. But photoreal? No way. Hardly anything that hasn't seen a lot of 2D post work is, regardless of the package, renderer, or artist.
Yup. Someone entered a snap I took on my digicam and it won first place!
WTF are you smoking? There's nothing at "High End 3D" that looks more real than the this.
You can turn out crap with POV-Ray, Maya, Mental Ray, or ANY tool, and High End 3D proves it.
Hmm, that image says it's done with Maya and Photoshop, but doesn't give any details of how it was done. The background doors could have been done in Maya, with everything else based on manipulated photos.
It's funny how even the best artists love hats because hair is the hardest thing to get right.
Kevin Fox
You're kidding, right? Those renders look like crap compared to what else is out there. POVRay might be a neat toy but it doesn't stand up to professional grade products like Maya, Lightwave, Poser or even Terragen.
I never said it was not good. I responded to someone who thinks povray is state of the art and its not. Its a ray tracer. All state of the art renderers use some form of Radiosity now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity and even radiosity is OLD NEWS. There is a siggraph paper on it from 1993 http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperG raph/radiosity/radiosity.htm Strata Studio pro version 2 from 1994 included a radiosity renderer. It took days to render a screen res file but it had it. I am not knocking the work or the quality of of the renders. I am saying that its not state of the art like the original poster thinks. He does not need to wait 5 years for far superior rendering. Its here. Global Illumination (aka Radiosity) Is just plain better rendering technique. Its still Slow, but thats what you get when instead of measuring 1 segment of light from light source to object you decide to measure say 5-500 segments of that light. Source to object, difusion off of object to next object, repeat, repeatl repeat, and ever difusion adds a non finite amout of additional rays. Well guess what It looks more like real life.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
POV-Ray has included Radiosity for years, and most of the top-ranked images used POV-Ray's radiosity, which you would know if you looked at the artist's scene comments. STFU and RTFA.
In that first image, "road", you can see the reflection of a truck or some other vehicle in the front fender...given the position of the car on the road, I'd say it's about to crash, no?
However, saying that raytracing is old news isn't really accurate as a blanket statement - most of those GI techniques involve tracing rays, and no newer tech for rendering reflections and refractions has come along. Mental Ray is a raytracer, for example.
Global illumination also isn't a panacea - having light behave in "real" (ahem) ways still means you need good lighting skills and software workarounds, and often the same effects can be achieved with much shorter render times by a skilled artist.
I find blurry reflection and refraction to be much more important for selling a scene than automatic bounced lighting - those of us who predate desktop GI with reasonable render times tend not to rely on it as much. Still, ILM used GI for the digital baby shots in Lemony Snicket, and it looked fantastic, so maybe that's where the tech is going all-out in a generation or two.
You are aware I hope that this particular render uses global illumination (I'm not calling it radiosity since this seems to mean different things to different people anyway) and stochastic rendering (Monte Carlo tracing to be precise).
Umm. You do realize how much time Radiosity, Photons and all the rest of that stuff takes right? Probably not, since your 'modern' ones all cheat even when doing that. And for your information:
Povray's most recent features - Isosurfaces, Radiosity and Photons. A mess of new dispersion settings and other tricks for interiors and media and other additions.
And the latest version is being completely redone to support dual core processors and systems with multiple processors. However, radiosity and photons take a 'lot' of time to render, so without the graphics card cheats that your so called 'modern' programs use, it would exceed the time limit of the competition. Most of the stuff on the sites you talk about the designers had effectively unlimited time. 4.0 is going to be more than a hack to support processors though, but a complete rewrite of much of the code to optimize all the 'old' stuff you complain about. There are not many really astounding POVRay artists. This is one:
http://www.oyonale.com/histoire/english/index.htm
His 'family' image (2003 images), both the night and day version are insane with details and he even made a panarama of it you can look around in. In fact, a lot have 360 degree panaramas and I am sure you can find something that uses radiosity and photons too. A lot of his 2004 ones seem to be using some sort of experimental stuff. The thumbnails look a lot worse than the full images. Look like he was experimenting with complex textures and stuff, including some photon effects in one ocean based one, but the 2003 ones are definitely worth a look, as are his earlier works.
Another posted one recently on the forums that the only issue anyone could come up with was that the clouds looked somehow off. It literally looked to me like someone took a picture of clouds, then cut out a photo, only to paste that over top of the cloud picture. Unfortunately the version on his website when I last checked was an earlier work in progress of it.
Point being that trying to use a competition site as an example is rediculous. As is assuming that algorythms designed to mimic real physics must be inferior to ones that use various non-physics based tricks to do the same job.
Those images you linked look like garbage. There is NO WAY that POVRay can compare to professional products like Maya, else they'd be using it for films and games.