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POV-Ray Competition Winners

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the trip-down-memory-lane dept.

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 ;)

1 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:rednering contest by Lord+Crc · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    All of the images are good (especially the office), but far from photorealistic. What is keeping designers from making completely photorealistic renderings?

    Last time I checked out POV-Ray, the evolutionary roots showed. It was never built to be a physically based ray tracer, and it shows. It certainly has become better over the years, but to really generate photorealistic images, I think you need a raytracer who was designed to be physically correct from the ground up, as this image illustrates (imho).

    However that's still not enough. Most shaders used to describe various materials, while physically "sound", are not based on direct physical simlulation. Thus the artist can't punch in some known physical values and get that right kind of blue plastic. He/she has to fiddle with a lot of parameters to make it look like the real thing.