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POV-Ray Competition Winners 168

Posted by CmdrTaco 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 ;)
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POV-Ray Competition Winners More

POV-Ray Competition Winners

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  • 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!

  • Callback (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:16PM (#12677595)
    Here's the story [slashdot.org] about the contest.

  • Holiday? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Jeff Hornby ( 211519 )
    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

  • Quicklink Top-25 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:19PM (#12677612)
    1. 'The Last Guardian' [povcomp.com] by Johnny Yip 2. 'The Kitchen' [povcomp.com] by Jaime Vives Piqueres
    3. 'Dissolution' [povcomp.com] by Ziga Petric
    4. 'Victoria's World' [povcomp.com] by Douglas Eichenberg and 'Twin Girls With A Pearl Earring' [povcomp.com] by Rene Bui
    6. 'Pirates' [povcomp.com] by 'seawolf'
    7. 'Bradbury Atrium' [povcomp.com] by Gary MacKinnon
    8. 'Model Expo Entry' [povcomp.com] by Chris Holtorf
    9. 'Waiting for the relief' [povcomp.com] by Marc Jacquier
    10. 'Sentinel Rock' [povcomp.com] by Glenn McCarter
    11. 'Song For The Earth' [povcomp.com] by Fabien Mosen
    12. 'Natural History Museum' [povcomp.com] by Sean Day
    13. 'Cybernetic Organism Caealis - Narcissism' [povcomp.com] by 'selsek'
    14. 'The Three Blind Mice Return' [povcomp.com] by Jeremy M. Praay
    15. 'Autumn' [povcomp.com] by 'Slime'
    16. 'The buzzard and the dove' [povcomp.com] by 'emkaah'
    17. 'Evie Evolves' [povcomp.com] by Joanne Simpson
    18. 'Early morning tea' [povcomp.com] by 'St Dunstan'
    19. 'Christmas Eve' [povcomp.com] by Gennady Obukhov
    20. 'The Peek-a-Blocks' [povcomp.com] by 'danBhentschel'
    21. 'After the Storm' [povcomp.com] by Christoph Gerber
    22. 'Montezumas last meal No.2' [povcomp.com] by 'splendor'
    23. 'Pathways' [povcomp.com] by Robert W. McGregor
    24. 'Japanese spire!' [povcomp.com] by 'miyoken'
    25. '13 Spiral Spheres' [povcomp.com] by Robert W. McGregor

  • Holiday monday? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by temojen ( 678985 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:19PM (#12677618) Journal
    And you try finding something interesting on a holiday monday ;)

    Try looking outside the US. it's not a holiday here.

  • Gilles Tran (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:20PM (#12677620) Homepage
    Of course, no article on POV-Ray is complete without the obligatory link to the site of Monsieur Gilles Tran [oyonale.com], surrealist and POV-artist extraordinaire...

    Has he entered the competition? Haven't seen his name anywhere so far...

    • Exemplified (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fenodyree ( 802102 )
      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 [povcomp.com] images that resemble objects in the real world, or to visualize 'virtual' objects that do not physically exist.

      • Re:Exemplified (Score:5, Informative)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:52PM (#12677804) Homepage
        Actually, Gilles Tran work is used as an example of what a submission _should_ look like. In the first explanatory paragraph of TFA.

        Plus, later in the text...
        We would like to thank our sponsors Appro, AMD, Zazzle, and Planet Mirror for making this competition possible, plus our judges Dennis Miller, Evan Hallein, David Hook, Gilles Tran, Lance Birch, and Juha ('Warp') Nieminen for taking time out of their busy schedules over the past two weeks to rank the entries.

        D'oh! Note to self: in future, read article, don't just look at pretty pictures... ;-)

  • Needs new caption (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) * on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:22PM (#12677627) Homepage Journal
    I think this one [povcomp.com] needs a caption, something like: "Leaving a trail of crap wherever we go". The boy reaching for the stars is an ominous portent of things to come if we ever achieve a means of intersteller travel.

    (You can see the homepage of the same image here [oyonale.com] if the pov website gets slashdotted)

    • First off it's spelled "interstellar". Secondly, it's pretty obvious that it's celebrating human accomplishments and innovation. But I suppose subtelety and symbolism are lost on you.
      I'll bet you're probably one of those that though the Native Americans were wonderful stewards of the land (notice that I'm using the past-tense), rather than simply dumping all their broken pots and such all over the place, then moving on. The only reason things aren't trashed more is because they used mostly organic mater
      • First off it's spelled "interstellar". Secondly, it's pretty obvious that it's celebrating human accomplishments and innovation.

        Thirdly, it was actually rendered on a laptop in space thanks to a certain Mark Shuttleworth [markshuttleworth.com], most recently known for his Ubuntu Linux distribution [ubuntulinux.org].

        He may be a multi-zillionaire, but I have to admit he spends it on some pretty cool stuff. :-)
    • It reminds me a lot of the cover of Heinlein's "Job" book.

  • Yow. (Score:2)

    by oGMo ( 379 )
    Those are amazing. I wonder a bit at the placing order, but regardless... some of those are amazing.

    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.

    • Tech isn't the problem, though. This is an artistic competition, and however good your graphics card is, you are going to be limited by your artists' talent. Are games developers really going to be bothered spending the decades it would take to make each and every room look as good as these? I predict that graphical development is going to reach a peak fairly soon.

  • Also of interest.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by JaF893 ( 745419 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:25PM (#12677654) Journal
    ..the POVRay short code contest. [slashdot.org]

  • Aaaah,,,the memories (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wired303 ( 217544 )
    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 :-)
  • Hey, nobody said you can't write a program to create the instructions for Pov-ray out of a ridiculously complicated geometry that's made interactively...

    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.

    • Problem is, some of those images took over 10 hours to render using multiple computers. You're still looking at a serious investment in horsepower if you want to produce a 130k frame film (that's about 90 minutes) ... :)

    • Actually... (Score:3, Informative)

      by xRelisH ( 647464 )
      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 [cgnetworks.com] 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.
  • 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"?
    • Go to povray.org and install the program.

      Then go to help, and select pov-ray help (not windows help).

      The first few chapters are a fanTAStic tutorial.
    • 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.

      Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on /. when you want a clear blank line between paragraphs, it becomes second nature after a while.

      Start with the simplest sample scripts and step through e

      • Sort of like entering two HTML line break codes while posting here on /. when you want a clear blank line between paragraphs, it becomes second nature after a while.

        Learning by doing is fine, but it really helps to read the docs too - that way you'll know that the best way to mark paragraphs is to put the paragraph between <p> and </p> tags. This lets the browser know that the text is a paragraph and render it as the user is used to, leading to the minimum of confusion - especially if the

    • Re:Learn povray in 24 h (Score:5, Informative)

      by j1m+5n0w ( 749199 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @03:13PM (#12677933) Homepage Journal

      Here [povray.org] 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 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 "FRACTAL" macro here references itself with
    • Shameless plug:

      http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/ray_tracing [digitalhermit.com]

      The link is to a presentation I gave to my LUG on Linux Ray Tracing. It's very basic, but (hopefully) is a good start.
  • ...that this was one more step on the road to realizing the Hitchhiker movie's vision of a Point of View ray [psychcentral.com].
  • 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.
  • The word "monday" should be capitalized (e.g., "Monday"). Since it's an American holiday, maybe the rules of capitalization doesn't apply today. ;)

  • Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @02:59PM (#12677840)
    This image [povcomp.com] got me stunned. Looks quite real.
  • The classical raytracing demo, some metal spheres in a box. I have seen so many of them...

  • rednering contest (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MichaelGospatric ( 888057 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @03:02PM (#12677856)
    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?

    • It's the modelling required... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Phil John ( 576633 ) <phil.webstarsltd@com> on Monday May 30, 2005 @03:10PM (#12677904)

      ...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.

    • Re:rendering contest (Score:5, Interesting)

      by symbolic ( 11752 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @03:57PM (#12678163)

      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 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.

        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 incorr

    • Pov-ray is hardly the most-high tech software available today. Check out some of the links posted earlier like this site [highend3d.com] and in particular this artist [slashdot.org]. Its possible, but not with pov-ray (apperantly)
  • POV-Ray only, yet the renderings are (IMO) superior to those on IRTC [itrc.org]. I'd think it to be the other way around, but I suppose the incentive might make a difference.
    • 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 advanta
  • Also check out the linux mirror project [tlm-project.org].

  • Remember when... (Score:3, Funny)

    by eguaj ( 612494 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @04:06PM (#12678204)
    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 IS News (Score:4, Funny)

    by RealityMogul ( 663835 ) on Monday May 30, 2005 @04:19PM (#12678289)
    This actually is news. While the competition was from 2004, the rendering just finished yesterday.

  • Better (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I always liked this better http://www.irtc.org/ [irtc.org] It has a little more than POVRay, but its MOSTLY POVRay

  • The Grand Prize... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A free copy of POV-Ray.

  • Go to cgtalk.com. Be far more impressed.
  • check this [cgtalk.com] out.
  • by this [povcomp.com] entry, made by a 7 year old girl... (Read the description and making of.)

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