The wet bird (2000)

http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=464&mode=info&section=2000&lang=en&

by networked • 3 years ago

133 34 3 years ago

Y_Y• 3 years ago

Pov-ray had its first release in '91 and at least as recently as two years ago was still putting out new versions. That's cool.

Sharlin5• 3 years ago

The development is very, very slow these days, unfortunately. Nothing seems to have happened at least on GitHub after 3.8.0 beta 2 was released in 2021. I was a big fan back in the early 2000s; there are few, if any, comparable products out there, combining a high-quality, featureful renderer with an interface based on a Turing-complete scene description language rather than a graphical modeler.

It's a shame (although understandable in 1991) that the original developers chose a custom non-free "source available" license, so POV-Ray was late to the "open-source party" and the GitHub revolution due to the understandable difficulty of contacting all of the various authors and asking for re-licensing under a more popular, more permissive license, or rewriting those parts that could not be re-licensed. Back in the day (~15 years ago) the eventual goal was to release a 4.0 version which would've been a major rewrite, but I doubt that's ever going to happen.

miohtama• 3 years ago

What has replaced POV-Ray? Blender?

ofalkaed5• 3 years ago

I remember when this one came out and letting my computer spend insane amounts of time rendering images. There is something about POV-Ray, its limitations and interface (or lack of) seems to make it excel at this sort of half real impressionist style while never entering the uncanny valley. Or maybe POV-Ray just attracts people who work towards that style. I miss the POV-Ray community and spending weeks coding an image and 14 hours rendering an image just to find out you made one tiny stupid error and have to do it all over. Last I used it I had a 1.8ghz single core processor, I wonder what it is like on a modern computer.

Sharlin5• 3 years ago

I think the author of "The wet bird", Gilles Tran, is one of the very few artists who were adept with both the more graphical, modeler-based workflow and the fully programmable code-based interface of the POV-Ray renderer, very successfully combining the best of both worlds (see eg. [1][2][3]). Unlike most POV users, Tran liberally used commercial tools like Poser, Terragen, as well as third-party models.

Programmatically composing mathematical primitives does only get you so far if your goal is to create art relatable to humans. For abstracts, surrealism, and "mathematical art" plain POV-Ray is great, as well as for many natural forms exhibiting some degree of fractalness, but for animals, humans, and many manmade things a mesh-based modeler – or at least the use of third-party meshes – is essentially a requirement.

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Due to the end of Moore's Law, POV-Ray these days is not tremendously faster than what it was on late-00s hardware. It does fully support multicore, so there's that (and raytracing is famously an "embarrassingly parallel" problem). Modern SIMD could also bring a 2x to 4x performance boost; I'm not sure how vectorized/autovectorizable the current POV-Ray code is. If the shader language could be JITted, that might bring a nice benefit as well.

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[1] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=590

[2] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=737

[3] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=17

ofalkaed5• 3 years ago

Programmatically composing mathematical primitives does only get you so far if your goal is to create art relatable to humans.

Of coarse, that is one of those weak areas you have to work around and ultimately helps define the style of povray, that incredible pathos of all those images devoid of people beyond the implied. This thread got me to install povray and start playing with it again. There is a fairly large speed increase, rendered the diffuse-back sample scene and it took 8 minutes, took hours on my old T42.

virtualritz3• 3 years ago

[...] but for animals, humans, and many manmade things a mesh-based modeler – or at least the use of third-party meshes – is essentially a requirement.

That was/is not true. It could be even a CAD modeler. In fact, in the 90's, before the advent of subdivison surfaces (sds) in VFX production, everything you saw in blockbuster movies that was organic was NURBS patches. E.g. the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park". Usually modeled in Alias PowerAnimator and then animated in Softimage.

Nowadays you can choose between polygon meshes, sds, T-splines also signed-distance-based modeling for organic stuff. In fact, even then you could do organic modeling from SDF primitives using the Oranica[1] modeler.

There were also many cheap or even free modeleres that supported bezier patch modeling at the time. Bezier/B-spline patches modelers were accessible to everyone on Windows and Mac OS at the time. And there were many renderers that could render those without artifact. I.e. REYES[2]-based.

You may have to mesh the SDF for further work (and then maybe render a Loop sds if you want a high order surface at render time). So mesh-based being the only choice was neither true when "The wet bird" was produced nor is it now.

I ran a small CGI shop (five people) a few years before this image was produced. We used Real3D/Alias PowerAnimator with a custom pipeline to do organic modeling with B-spline patches and rendering with PhotoRealistic RenderMan for Windows. No polygons were ever created (or harmed) producing any of the images we were paid for.

So yeah, the humans in that image were polgon meshes from Poser and exported to POV but that was just what the artist knew/choose.

[1] https://archive.org/details/organica-12 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering

DeathArrow2• 3 years ago

Can't it use the GPU for rendering?

qwertox3• 3 years ago

Those were the 90s. Rendering on a GPU wasn't a thing back then.

ofalkaed5• 3 years ago

From what I understand the average GPU is optimized for meshes which is not the povray way so GPUs tend not to offer much improvement. Quick search for a more informed explanation.

  The main problem here is that POV-Ray is primitive based, NOT mesh based.
  GPU rendering is heavily mesh optimized. They can process in parallel, 
  but only if all threads need to use the same base code. With POV-Ray,  
  there is no universal geometry handling code : Each and every primitive 
  require different code and GPU just can't cope with that requirement.

https://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C6115a40a$1@...

qwertox3• 3 years ago

Same with me. I'd spend the late afternoon creating the file, then start rendering in the morning and watch the result after I got back from the university. I still have the images of the animation and they are like 250x250 pixels or something like that (they're on an offline drive).

I can't even remember how I turned them into an animation, or if I even got to do that.

DragonMaus• 3 years ago

I have fond memories of creating LEGO CAD models and running them through POV-Ray for hours on end to turn them into gorgeous renders.

techknight• 3 years ago

When this originally came out, I kept it bookmarked for 20 years before finally buying the poster and putting it on the wall :D https://imgur.com/ffS4pds

daneel_w• 3 years ago

Do check out the rest of his gallery. So many stunning and intricate works. Possibly the most accomplished Pov-ray artist out there.

zokier2• 3 years ago

I just noticed that the tip of Chrysler building seems to be casting shadow on the sky which looks weird.

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

Hah! Wow, now I can't unsee it!

themodelplumber2• 3 years ago

I really wonder what led to that, technically.

Back in the day it was really common to speed up renders by building custom direct lighting rigs for illustrations like this. So it may be the result of a workaround to optimize render times, or the result of moving the workaround through the scene to various places and forgetting to move one of the lights in the rig, etc.

Or, changing the cloud materials, or recreating one of the cloud materials in one location, and forgetting to turn off "accept shadows" for example, which is a common toggle to see in 3D rendering software.

It's kind of fun to remember all the different ways you could hack the lighting alone, to say nothing of using procedural textures to trick the eye, various modeling tricks, and so on...

ofalkaed5• 3 years ago

What ever object he used for the sky is set at the height of the Chrysler Building. If it had been moved up higher the shadow would either not be seen or there would be a gap between the shadow at the top of the building. Generally (if memory serves) the sky in povray was a sphere, you would model you scene inside the sphere and map the sky texture on the inside of the sphere but it does not look like he did this, that shadow looks very flat but I can not see any telltale signs of what he did use.

KaiserPro• 3 years ago

This is spectacular. I remember when I first came across povray, on the home page there was a book with glasses in the middle, with excellent caustics. I tried to have a go, but as I was doing it with a text file, I found it impossible.

I went into the world of blender soon after (this is about 2001), but never really worked with povray, even though there was a plugin.

Its wild that someone can make something so nice with just a text file.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

One of my favorite (quite dated, now) 3D art pieces, was "Worth Enough," by Radoxist: https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

cjsawyer• 3 years ago

Blast from the past! I’m not sure where I saw it originally but clearly remember liking it.

qwertox3• 3 years ago

"Published: Dec 29, 2007", so it's not that old. I remember seeing it back then and looking at it for a long time, and while it felt like "a good amount of time ago", it already feels like the more modern times to me.

The wet bird (2000)

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