10 ms·

The wet bird (2000)

133 points by networked 4y ago

Y_Y 4y 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.
- Sharlin 4y 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 4y ago
    What has replaced POV-Ray? Blender?
    - zokier 4y ago
      Especially with geometry nodes I imagine Blender does indeed satisfy many users need.
    - RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
      In some cases, ShaderToy.
      - Sharlin 4y ago
        True. Composing SDF primitives in a shader language is quite reminiscent of writing POV-Ray scenes. Of course, the "renderer" is much less powerful than a full-fledged raytracer, but on the other hand realtime animation is entirely feasible and SDFs allow for much more creative freedom than rigid spheres and boxes.
    - themodelplumber 4y ago
      Keeping in mind you can still use POV, and many would say it doesn't really need a replacement if it still works... Art of Illusion is a good replacement in various ways, with continuous development. These days as a community it's mainly centered around the SourceForge forums for the project. In years past, I created paid professional illustration work with AoI, and IIRC some of my art's still in the software's splash screens (good nostalgia feel!). Even back around 2006-2007 I created a 21 megapixel image with it, for use on an event poster for a city-managed event where I live, which was pretty darn credible for FOSS. It's very capable software if it fits your needs and you are aware of the various ways to do things. The manual is exceptional and an exemplary example of FOSS help docs IMO. Just the other day I used it for some home design visualizations as well, and the current version seems to work great. Especially if you use the Scripts & Plugins manager and try out the many plugins available for things like N-gon mesh modeling (PolyMesh Editor), various UI changes, etc. You may also want to consider Bforartists which is like a Blender fork aimed at artists, including its own keymap, UI changes, a different set of defaults, and various other changes.
    - kbob 4y ago
      Is pbrt a viable replacement? (I don't know; I've looked at it but never tried to produce art with it.) https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/
ofalkaed 4y 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.
- Sharlin 4y 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. --- 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. --- [1] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=590 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=590 [2] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=737 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=737 [3] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=17 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=17
  - ofalkaed 4y 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.
techknight 4y 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 https://imgur.com/ffS4pds
daneel_w 4y ago
Do check out the rest of his gallery. So many stunning and intricate works. Possibly the most accomplished Pov-ray artist out there.
zokier 4y ago
I just noticed that the tip of Chrysler building seems to be casting shadow on the sky which looks weird.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Hah! Wow, now I can't unsee it!
- themodelplumber 4y 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...
  - ofalkaed 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
One of my favorite (quite dated, now) 3D art pieces, was "Worth Enough," by Radoxist: https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-73247873 https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...
- cjsawyer 4y ago
  Blast from the past! I’m not sure where I saw it originally but clearly remember liking it.
  - qwertox 4y 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

The wet bird (2000)

133 points by networked 4y ago

Y_Y 4y 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.

Sharlin 4y 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 4y ago
  What has replaced POV-Ray? Blender?
  - zokier 4y ago
    Especially with geometry nodes I imagine Blender does indeed satisfy many users need.
  - RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
    In some cases, ShaderToy.
    - Sharlin 4y ago
      True. Composing SDF primitives in a shader language is quite reminiscent of writing POV-Ray scenes. Of course, the "renderer" is much less powerful than a full-fledged raytracer, but on the other hand realtime animation is entirely feasible and SDFs allow for much more creative freedom than rigid spheres and boxes.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Keeping in mind you can still use POV, and many would say it doesn't really need a replacement if it still works... Art of Illusion is a good replacement in various ways, with continuous development. These days as a community it's mainly centered around the SourceForge forums for the project. In years past, I created paid professional illustration work with AoI, and IIRC some of my art's still in the software's splash screens (good nostalgia feel!). Even back around 2006-2007 I created a 21 megapixel image with it, for use on an event poster for a city-managed event where I live, which was pretty darn credible for FOSS. It's very capable software if it fits your needs and you are aware of the various ways to do things. The manual is exceptional and an exemplary example of FOSS help docs IMO. Just the other day I used it for some home design visualizations as well, and the current version seems to work great. Especially if you use the Scripts & Plugins manager and try out the many plugins available for things like N-gon mesh modeling (PolyMesh Editor), various UI changes, etc. You may also want to consider Bforartists which is like a Blender fork aimed at artists, including its own keymap, UI changes, a different set of defaults, and various other changes.
  - kbob 4y ago
    Is pbrt a viable replacement? (I don't know; I've looked at it but never tried to produce art with it.) https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/

ofalkaed 4y 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.

Sharlin 4y 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. --- 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. --- [1] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=590 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=590 [2] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=737 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=737 [3] http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=17 http://www.oyonale.com/image.php?code=17
- ofalkaed 4y 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.

techknight 4y 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 https://imgur.com/ffS4pds

daneel_w 4y ago

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

zokier 4y ago

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

foobarbecue 4y ago
Hah! Wow, now I can't unsee it!
themodelplumber 4y 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...
- ofalkaed 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

One of my favorite (quite dated, now) 3D art pieces, was "Worth Enough," by Radoxist: https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-73247873 https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

cjsawyer 4y ago
Blast from the past! I’m not sure where I saw it originally but clearly remember liking it.
- qwertox 4y 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]