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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 ;)
Here's the story about the contest.
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
..the POVRay short code contest.
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
Plus, later in the text...
D'oh! Note to self: in future, read article, don't just look at pretty pictures...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Learning by doing is the only way you can make POV-Ray work for you. While there are modellers out there which will output POV-Ray compatible script code, the best way to be good is to learn the language and write it by hand, keeping in your mind what each thing will do when it runs.
/. when you want a clear blank line between paragraphs, it becomes second nature after a while.
Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on
Start with the simplest sample scripts and step through each entry and compare it to the directions and manuals.
The more you do it, the more you learn how to rationalize in your head the simpler geometric forms that comprise more complicated objects and how voids in those objects can be represented by negative structures subtracting from the remaining positive structure. A rectangular block with a chunk taken out corresponding to an intersection with a sphere creates a simple ash tray. Add a marble texture and tweak the surface properties.
I myself put POV-Ray aside pretty much years ago when I went full-on into Caligari trueSpace. I was scripting all night until my eyes were falling out and I started to do verbal deconstructions of things in public, pointing out what simpler objects made them up. Similar to where you catch yourself thinking, "potato, instance of tuber..." after too much OOP.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Here is a link to the documentation. The first section is a tutorial, the second is a reference for all of the povray features.
The language is very simple, yet includes programming language constructs like loops, variable assignment, and procedures (which can be recursive). Modelling by typing into a text file works suprising well for most things. I have two pieces of advice: 1) use graph paper for initial planning and 2) if you use the same number more than once, declare it as a variable rather than hardcoding it (it makes it easier to tweak the shape of complicated objects later).
Povray takes much longer than 24 hours to learn to use well, but you should be able to learn to program simple scenes with a camera, a light, and some geometry in a few hours.
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!
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.
Yes, it does actually, it's probably the best CG render I've seen but you can still tell it's a render instead of a photo. Why? The eyebrows and eyelashes are too blurry, you can't make out individual hairs easily. Second, the out of focus blur is too perfect, especially around his face.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.