In 3D World magazine Febuary on page 41 is an article on Professor Henrik Wann Jensen who has created a an innovative rendering system that can render that can ray trace a Ford Mustang car containing 1.8million triangles with 8 ray bounces on an entry level computer, and its fully textured....Now this i found amazing... if you read on it also states thats with HDRI and AO and it renders all this in Real time..... I WANT THIS IN POSER.....
i think EF should sign this man up immidiatly....
it is a very interesting read, i have yet to have a look at this professors site but you can at
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/

am i the only one who thinks this would be cool????? (and save me the cost of upgrading)lol

Woo and the guy is danish even :D

I want this, too! I guess I should write him and encourage him ;)

Kewl.  If this is follows the normal pattern, it'll be 10 years before we see this in any apps.  Not so kewl.  :(

About all the Main 3D App's C4D,LW etc etc Even TrueSpace have real time Renders now.

You need a killer 3D card, where talking $$$.

Here's a good list of what 3D Card will do what.

http://www.reallusion.com/iclone/ic_requirements.asp

3D Cards

http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html

RorrKonn
http://www.atomic-3d.com

That's AWSOME !

And please let's have THIS in instead of the face room:

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nice6NYb_WA

Main page:
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/~blanz/

Yes they may have real time renderers, but this man has created a rendering system that does things our machines take many hours to produce on an Entry level laptop.... NO super graphics card... the man is a genius

Shedofjoy

Which 3D Card is he using ? Is he using openGL ?

RorrKonn
http://www.atomic-3d.com

From looking at some of his papers, there is definitely GPU and CPU involved.

No way (and I mean this as someone who knows) can you do this completely in software (i.e.: only cpu) - impossible at this time.  Maybe on a quad cpu quad-core with 256GB memory, but not on an 'entry-level laptop'.

Every gaming machine around uses the GPU at full throttle with tricks to get what they get - using the lowest polygon models and least taxing 'realistic' methods possible.  This is pure hardware screaming - and they would buckle under the list you gave.  And the solutions that I've seen for professional grade 3D CG software (Maya, Max, XSI, LW, C4D) were either using a special render card or OpenGL code (i.e.: GPU) to achieve their results.

What number is this issue of 3D World?  I'll need to pick it up when available and read through to catch the sticky bits that might not have been elucidated.

ETA: Don't get me wrong here.  Real-time rendering is currently very possible - but it is only possible through hardware - and that means taking advantage of most newer model graphics cards with good GPU and OGL support.

If anyone has a spare copy of any Poser 5 through 7......mail it to him as a gift!  Once he's hooked, he'll be obsessed with doing a plug-in for poser and then we get the benefits!  Bypasses the ordinary pipeline altogether!  Then we can rule the WORLD!  DOOM!  DOOM OF RUBBER PANTS! BWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHH! :lol:

I knew that 'Invader Zim' video would have bad effects on me.

it might not be real-time rendering for a complex scene with dozens of figures and textures, but it would be nice if it didn't take a month of render time (distributed over a big render farm with 100 or more persons working 24/7) to do 15 minutes of screen footage, which is the current state of affairs. "real-time rendering" would only be applied to a video game, where the users have extremely low standards of realism.

With the Porn Industry taking an active interest in Poser, we'll probably have RealTime redering soon than we think.
Nothing like a vested interest with a lot of money joining up with an app with a lot of Chuzpah!
DPH

If you notice the detail in the article, this is real time rendering for the specific purpose of portraying cars. It is not a real time renderer per se, it cannot be used to render any scene, only a scene involving a car.

It is based on complex mathematics of how a metallic painted surface reacts to light and uses 'tricks' and 'shortcuts' to give a realistic real time portrayal. 

However, with the continuing advances in processing power, true 'real physics of light' real time rendering is only a matter of time :-)

I think that the future is something of a hybrid. Some 3d programs can up poly and down poly an object fairly quick.  You also can bet that not everyone will have a psycho death 3D card.

If the software can recognize that the cards limits have been reached and continually down poly a scene as hi res objects are added it will still allow for a workable scene. If it can handle the whole high ploly scene on screen in real time it will, and if it can't it just down polys it and requires you to render.

The difference with games is that they are developed with the hardware limitations in mind. If we did that with poser we would never have to worry. We would also never really be happy with the results.

PS3 for instance has several dedicated processors. Each processor is dedicated to a particular type of calculation. It would be unfair to try and compare what PS3's upper limits are vs a program like Poser on a general CPU & GPU. If your computer had a processor dedicated to calculating hair and one for physics and.... you would be seeing more real time results. But that would require Poser to be offered with specific hardware. Also keep in mind that games do not run on top of a bloated OS so the overhead is significantly less.

Poser has, for the price, some pretty amazing features. It does have some bugs that need working, and I have my share of complaints. But its not Maya, Max, C4d. It was never meant to be. It may be headed there I don't know. But if it does go there I'm sure the price will also.
(I wouldn't mind seeing some tighter integration with Shade!!!! I want Poser to read Shade files natively!!!)

I'm fairly certain that real time rendering wont be coming any time soon. I'd love to see it, but it isn't going to happen yet. When it does it will hit the high end apps first. When you see video card companies making Maya specific cards (or MAX or C4D or Renderman....) then you can expect to see it trickle down to us. Basically I think in the future 3D cards will be built with specific renderers in mind. (not just Open GL and Direct X)

(By the way I'm a bit sick so if this doesn't make much sense its because I cant focus for more than a few seconds at a time)

It depends on what you mean by soon. Intel currently have a 1000 core chip running in their labs, they hope to have this out in the market place by 2010. Dedicated graphics cards are probably on their last legs, with multi core cpu's there simply won't be a need for a dedicated graphics card.

If you assume that software does develop such that Poser can make use of 1000 threads or more, then without any clever new rendering techniques, even Poser would be able to render roughly 1000 times quicker than a single processor if it could use a 1000 core chip.

Computing power is about to explode, whether software keeps up is another matter :-)

The 'reacts to light' is the key here.  Jensen is deeply involved in what's called "Photon Mapping" or application of more realistic lighting models for rendering.  There is a recent external renderer called Maxwell that uses these principles - but it is very slow, or it should be said that the better the results desired, the longer the render.

I think Intel is pushing an archaic technology beyond its limits. :)  The first speculative alternative was 'quantum computing', but I think that this is so theoretical (and impractical), which is typical of most considered applications of quantum principles to real world solutions, that it will never occur - and a little fantastical in its touts (precognition, for instance).  This goes along with the idea of FTL communications and transporters as other such quantum exploits.

On the other hand, a team at MIT is considering a viable (and seemingly practical) application of quantum principles towards a new type of computing technology - spintronics.  Instead of using charge to set bits (electron present or absent in a transistor gate) and moving electrons around in the process, this technology exploits what is known as 'spin' , a quantum attribute of a subatomic particle (electron in this case).  I won't get into the details of the theory and application, but they state that this would allow microprocessors capable of processing thousands of times faster than today's.  As with any such technology only being experimented upon in university labs or research centers, don't expect to see a spintronic-based computer any time soon! ;)

See IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2007 magazine, pg. 15 for the article.

You could have V4 walk across the floor in Poser import to C4D or any other app that has real time render with a Poser import plug and have a real time Render today, Right ?

RorrKonn
http://www.atomic-3d.com

Depends upon what you mean by 'real-time render'. :)

The enhanced OGL support in C4D R10 gives very nice 'renders', but they are still only editor displays not really renders.

There is a third-party plugin for C4D that displays a window for a real-time render.  It is something like the little preview render you get in Vue.  In either case, I wouldn't say 'real-time' as in the renders aren't happening n-times a second - more like n-seconds at a time.

My idea of real-time rendering is a process that can render a displayed scene at more than several frames per second so that if you were rotating the object or the camera, it would keep up.  For a complex scene graph with high-end materials and complex illumination models (HDRI and AO), this is really not possible without a bank of computers behind the LCD/CRT.  Otherwise it begs the question - "Why haven't all of the big studios invested in and started using such an amazing technology already?"

TS,iClone advertises Realtime Renders.

Of corse everyone definition of real-time renders may very.

And no there no HDRI, but there fast.

Been a while, C4D 9 days, CGTalk forms was rasing cane about not having HDRI,Did 10 get HDRI ?

RorrKonn
http://www.atomic-3d.com

HDRI has been in C4D since R8.5 (several years ago).

iClone is a game-style renderer - it uses the GPU ex-calibur (!!!).  Direct from their System Requirements:

iClone requires a 3D accelerator (3D graphics card/integrated chipset), DirectX 8.1 (9.0 or above) and Pixle Shader 1.0 to be capable of completing the 3D rendering. In general, ATI Radeon 8500 and nVidia GeForce 5200FX are the baseline.

Looking at the graphics card tables, your mileage will vary depending upon your graphics card (newer nVidia cards are superior, as expected).

ETA: As I said, you can't do real-time rendering of the complexity puported without engaging the elicit support of the GPU (and CPU).  Sorry, I've seen enough to know better. :)

My bad, I meant Vray HDRI

http://www.vrayrender.com/

I just went to there site and now  there selling Vray + car insurance and airline tickets.

what this has to do with 3D is beyond me.

iClones kool,

I understand 3D cards,openGL.and what it takes to get real-time renders

u can run iClones on a gforce2 card but some of the stuff don't work like shiny, transparent etc etc.

The bigger bader 3D card you have the more FX you have.

Machinima stuff might not have all the extra stuff HDRI can do.

But you can still get Machinima out of TrueSpace,iClone,C4D etc etc.

Is all I am saying.If ya want a quickie Real-time Machinima video then it's doable.

RorrKonn
http://www.atomic-3d.com

the issue of 3D world that has this article is issue 87- february on page 41.... it quotes right next to the 1.8 million poly mustang that has hdri and ao that its done on an entry level laptop... That means no extra graphics card no quad cores...
This 3D guru apparently has changed the way in which the computer does all the calculations so that it can do it.... how i dont know i am only the messenger of the article.....
lets hope that 3D World isnt just over embelishing on what this man can do....