Re:[9fans] povray on p9

Re:[9fans] povray on p9

[Tom Duff]

I try to keep quiet when povray is
mentioned, but someone invoked my name.

Anyway, George Michaelson said:
> don't go past radiance without a look.
> its not povray but its very good.

This, as bwk used to say, is vacuous.

Povray is an abomination -- the perfect
rejoinder to The Cathedral And The Bazaar.
Radiance is a work of art.  Neither can
handle scenes of any complexity, and neither
is fast enough for serious animation.  (Before
someone says, "Oh yeah, look at this,"
let me say that the sort of complexity we're
interested in involves geometry files in the
gigabyte range accompanied by texture maps of
similar size, and shaded by hundreds of custom-
programmed shaders, averaging about a thousand
lines long.)

--
Tom Duff.  Nature loves to hide itself.

Re: [9fans] povray on p9

[George Michaelson]

  I try to keep quiet when povray is
  mentioned, but someone invoked my name.

Not me. Arthur Ransome says of sailors:

"Better drowned than duffers if not duffers wont drown"

But I don't think that applies here.

  Anyway, George Michaelson said:
  > don't go past radiance without a look.
  > its not povray but its very good.

  This, as bwk used to say, is vacuous.

At least my content is consistently awful. I aim for a shorter
encoding in killfiles.

  Povray is an abomination -- the perfect
  rejoinder to The Cathedral And The Bazaar.
  Radiance is a work of art.  Neither can
  handle scenes of any complexity, and neither
  is fast enough for serious animation.  (Before

I don't think radiance *seeks* to be a viable animation engine.

And that it both renders works of art, and is one, seems a nice
convergeance of desire and reality.

-George
--
George Michaelson         |  DSTC Pty Ltd
Email: ggm@dstc.edu.au    |  University of Qld 4072
Phone: +61 7 3365 4310    |  Australia
  Fax: +61 7 3365 4311    |  http://www.dstc.edu.au

Re:[9fans] povray on p9

[Matt]

Excellent. I started my 3D career on Povray before moving to 3dstudio

http://www.hardlight.couk.com

I see from your render that it's capabilites have moved on some from the simple renderer I knew.

There are different approaches to distributed rendering. AFIK Povray renders by pixel so instead of having each cpu render a different frame you could use a scheduler and have each CPU render a different pixel of
the same frame. Slightly more bandwidth I think but it would reduce the rendering time of single frame work which would be excellent for rendering poster sized artwork for printing.

Another advantage would be that if you had one slow CPU in the farm or one that suddenly got busy during rendeing than you are only waiting on one pixel to be rendered and not the whole scene

It would alo make it easier for laying down to video with my digital video processor (PVR from www.dps.com) which needs the frames in order as I imagine most such systems do.

You are correct though, the world of 3D rendering and animation is fascinating and immersive, just ask Tom Duff 8-)

Matt

Re: [9fans] povray on p9

[George Michaelson]

don't go past radiance without a look. its not povray but its very good.

real architects use it for lighting studies.

-George

Re: [9fans] povray on p9

[Randolph Fritz]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 10:55:24 GMT, George Michaelson <ggm@dstc.edu.au> wrote:
>
>don't go past radiance without a look. its not povray but its very good.
>
>real architects use it for lighting studies.
>

Oh someone else on this list uses Radiance!  But it has a different
goal from most rendering tools; the Radiance developers have tried
very hard to make it predict physical lighting.

Randolph

[9fans] povray on p9

[Andrey A Mirtchovski]

disclaimer: for those of you not interested in povray or not knowing what
it is, you can stop reading now, or first visit www.povray.org (this is
not an add/spam)

i did something very stupid yesterday -- i actually sat down and started
playing with povray in order to see its capabilities and to learn something
more about it...

what a mistake!

i spent the whole night sunday trying and testing different scenes,
textures, this and that...

not being an artist at all i quickly exhausted my imagination for new scenes
and thought 'let's try and do an animation' -- simply enough, three
one-liners later and some configuration magic and i was sitting there with 180
identical (almost) povray scripts for 180 frames of my first povray
"animation"...

wallclock execution timing showed that 180 frames were calculated for 196
minutes on my K6-2/500 running FreeBSD and i thought --  i have three cpu
servers at school running plan9 and just waiting for somebody to send
them some scenes to render. it could be done very easily (rc script), needs
no excessive bandtwidth (i.e. all the information can reside on a single
fileserver and needs not be local to the cpu doing the rendering, something
that can't easily be done with bioinformatics and gigabyte-size databases)
and will prove to be something very fun to play with!

so, i downloaded the sources and amazingly 15 minutes later povray was
operational -- the port proved very easy and probably everyone on this list
will have no problems doing it.  if anyone wants though i can provide
additional information, or will gzip povray in modified state so
that you just need to type 'make'...

so far i do not experience any trouble running it on plan9 -- the speed is
very good, but that can be due to the fact that i'm running on 450mhz
PIII's instead of a 500 MhZ AMD.. 3-fold speed increase is what i observe.

size of executable is:

--rwxr-xr-x M 649 f2f sys 1904625 Feb 24 23:30 /386/bin/povray


here is a link to one of the standard images that come with povray..
generated with the command (note, i have moved the povray library to
$home/lib, will be fixed later):

cpu%  povray +Ichess2.pov +O$home/chess2.ppm +L$home/lib +W320 +H200 +FP
Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.1g.Plan9.cc
This is an unofficial version compiled by:
FILL IN NAME HERE.........................
The POV-Ray Team(tm) is not responsible for supporting this version.
.
.
.(rendering sounds)
.
.
Time For Trace:    0 hours  6 minutes  13.0 seconds (373 seconds)
Total Time:    0 hours  6 minutes  13.0 seconds (373 seconds)


the generated image is located here:

http://homepage.usask.ca/~aam396/chess2.jpg


So... i hope this isn't gone to waste -- didn't somebody say somewhere that
p9 would make a great rendering farm?


regards: andrey



ps: together with povray came zlib and libpng -- those compiled
effortlessly, so a port of those can be considered done :)