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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
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?
..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
The light is the only unusual thing you noticed about the first entry?
I'd say the big dinosaur is a further tip-off that is is not real!
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?
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
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.
I don't know. I think this one is pretty good.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Actually I do like the surreal lighting of raytraced images a lot. It imparts an abstract sense of cleanliness into the decrepit and muddy real life we all know.
Over time raytraced images will no doubt look more natural, but I hope to still be able to see new and interesting images rendered 20th century style in the future.
Compare the essence of a Bach fugue with the bombast of Mahler. Both have their place.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
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.
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.