No, thank you Quest for bringing up this wonderful topic for us to all digest and extrapolate. We also all know where you stand on this matter. I actually do find Vasquez and Ang's viewpoints interesting, though, and feel very similar in many ways. Humankind stems from atrocities and horrific acts of violence, but that's hopefully not where we are going. Think of it on a long-term scale as humanity's growing pains, but instead of the cells aching it's us, the individual people. Just perspective, and of course it doesn't make anything feel better...?

Hmm, I'm curious but why would you need more than one texture on an object for a low-poly situation? If you were doing multipass rendering such as Unreal 3-esqu, you'd have a color map, an ambient map, a specular map, a bump map, and a displacement map, but Unreal (for example) is very far from low-poly work such as WoW sports. Are you trying to do this in Bryce, or in WoW? If your question is Brycean, are you using the Material Lab to mix the texture together? If you have access to Photoshop or PSP, you can blend any number of textures together any way you like using layers and such. One cool thing about Bryce's exporter (the only cool thing?) is that it WILL export all your maps separately. So you could export these maps and then bring them into post-production for making changes, then re-import the map back into Bryce as an image texture...

My point was that living in fear is stupid and weak. There are three major roles to play in response to such things which follow the outlines of melodrama : The Hero, the Villain, and the Victim.

As a post-abuse person, one can either cry about it for the rest of his/her life (Victim), go on to commit more abuse (Villain), or move on and possibly help others move on (Hero).

We live in a nation of Victims, people cowering in fear because they are too weak to make any changes and require the Victim mindset to make themselves feel important.

I merely disagree with this mentality and prefer the third alternative, that of the "Hero".

Quest, you make no sense, but I will tell you my point again since you missed it : you are simply adding to the Victim viewpoint, generating and recycling fear, and I know that "OT" means Off-Topic but don't see that this gives you any reason to spread more fear and victimization. And I don't do drugs, whatever you may think.

Message edited on: 03/04/2006 19:26

I'm curious how exactly this has anything to do with graphics design? Are you making a balloon-flyby of a sex crime in progress, and needed this site for research? What's scary about sex-crimes is that in every other part of the world, throughout history, people have had sex, but in America it's nearly illegal. In America, if you have sex with a person two years younger than you it can be considered criminal. Yet nobody thinks to question this? I am disgusted by the victimization that America puts itself through. Everyone is so afraid of the most pathetic things. It's as if living ear a sex-offender would somehow put your child in greater risk? Like an act of nature or the effect of gravity on proximity? That's ridiculous! Teach your children to defend themselves, and teach them to beware of strangers. That's it. There's nothing scary about it. What's scary is how weak-minded and afraid everyone is. Is this a nation of total pansies? This sounds harsh, no? Well it has as much to do with Renderosity as the entire rest of the conversation, and I enjoy playing devil's advocate, but alas I also have children and am merely voicing an alternate viewpoint.

So you didn't actually get any money up front? Bang-for-the-buck, $7,700 would barely cover the cost of Maya, and Lightwave is far, far cheaper. So what happens to the rest of your profit?

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2151/bsp.html

It's the Spy-vs-Spy effect as well. Once everyone gets happy with 64-bit processors, the 128's will be out. and although few people are paying attention, the newer Cell processors (not to be confused with cellular!) make dual-core and hyperthreading and 64-bit phenomenon really unimportant. The PS3, a gaming device, is faster than most PC's in the world by itself!

The only programs I've used that use 64-bit pipelines are Photoshop and Maya. I noticed no RENDERING speed increase in either, but didn't go out of my way to benchmark it. One thing that I did notice was that Photoshop took a lot less time loading/saving and adjusting to changes with large (500MB+) files, which was nice...

A benchmark site :

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/processorsmemory/0,39024015,39189912-8,00.htm

And another on PCstats.com :

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1469&page=16

When it comes to actual hardware, the fastest PC's available (publicly) are the Boxx Apexx4's. They skip the Ahtlon/Pentium debate and go straight to the top, the Opteron, and are also very, very expensive. Check 'em out :

http://www.boxxtech.com/products/Apexx4.asp

I'm saying that without even trying one, I'm quite certain these machines would REALLY give Bryce some Lightning! Enjoy...

Message edited on: 02/21/2006 14:06

hey, when you're right, you're right...! (I love saying that!) "And I hope it feels good. There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing ouy the shortcomings of others." - Randall from "Clerks"

thank you for your reply Pumeco, you have made me feel much better about feeling like an idiot here!

Rayraz, i don't appreciate you mocking or slandering my work. i find it offensive, and take pride in knowing something you do NOT know : I am not left-handed! you contradicted yourself in the last two posts heavily, and considering your inability to communicate effectively i'll go ahead and withdraw from this conversation. sarcasm, insult, and unkind words leave me agreeing with the general consensus about Renderosity, but i won't blame you for everything, just for those things i just mentioned. Pumeco, there's not any way i can think of to get you to upgrade to a more advanced renderer or package, but i'll tell you that your renders are nice! still, there'e nothing there that you need pro-render for : it's just straight Bryce, and still looks like Bryce, and although they are clean it's obvious at a glance that it's CGI. i am not trying to discourage you in any way, and hope you continue progressing! i believe i came across too aggressively, but still managed to unify the Bryce community to be pro-Pro-Render... sometimes it takes an outsider to unify insiders?

real light cannot be REPRODUCED, Rayraz, but is simulated all the time. I am simulating it as we speak on several different projects. as i mentioned, only the output resolution differs from real-life. simulating real light isn't the question : accuracy in this simulation IS the point. the "mystical bs" was indeed said, by me, as an adjective for how PJF appears to feel about realistic lighting. to understand the nature of debate is to understand that i am what I say, and am without equal in this arena. perhaps your renderers are untrue to reality, especially when acceptable rendering speeds are a must, but this reality is in fact not reality at all, but your subjective experience my friend. I have been rendering photon-mapped scenes for years with complex scenes, which take mere minutes (less than ten!) with mental ray. the compass picture, for example, in my gallery took less than five minutes using image-based lighting and global illumination. but see now I digress. my aim wasn't to discourage Brycers, or slander Bryce itself, but to point out that Pro-Render isn't what it says it is. perhaps i wouldn't have been so anti-PR had it been called something like, "SuperTA" or something less misleading. my problem is this : everything Pumeco has done with PR can be done without it, inside Bryce, using the settings they already gave us. so for him to claim he actually DID anything, or to tout PR as some kind of renderer (which is implied by it's name, regardless of intent) is pretty weak. it would be like me saving my Render Global settings in Bryce or Maya and then trying to play them off as "something new and something I MADE". "Hey, I've been perfecting my render options for years, and now I'm saying it's a PRODUCT!" i would be the laughingstock of the Maya community, which I already may be but that's another topic! it's simply settings, people. there's nothing new going on under the hood with PR, nor does it make TA any easier to use, NOR does it make better renders than Bryce could already do, at all.

PJF certainly did imply such things, Rayraz. more than that, he outright stated that real light can't be simulated on a computer. scroll up. i'll not be forced into some kind of mental submission with the oldbies around here, but do you see what my entrance into this thread has done?

i've made all you "oldbies" actually stick together on this issue! and after all the trash you've talked about Pumeco through the years... all too easy.

anyway, no, I don't think 1,000,000 photons would be enough to create realism at the resolution our EYES work at. not even close. lucky for us, we're dealing with computers with much more finite resolutions, rayraz, so that many photons isn't necessary. the proof is in the pudding. look at all the wonderful, beautiful renders out there! some are from Bryce, no less... but the most photorealistic ones are, guess what, from photon-mappers.

this wasn't intended to turn all the brycers defensive, which is very easy in these forums due to general underdog insecurities, but to point out that there are many issues with pro-render TECHNICALLY that make it unfeasible as a tool. consider it as a paint-brush with one of those stray bristles you just can't get rid of.

and i'll have you know that i'm an excellent Brycer myself! i merely brought up important questions. i feel I've had them answered, and the general answer in this thread to my questions has been :

"So!"

Message edited on: 02/16/2006 06:32

is that a call to end this discussion, AgentSmith? i hope it's not too abnormal to have disagreements online here? PJF, I meant that REAL radiosity is indeed just like real light, because it actually is real light. i didn't mean that various 3D versions of radiosity solutions were perfectly accurate. it's good that you read up on radiosity and GI, but alas reading up on them doesn't equate to having used them for years my friend. i am ignorant of nothing, and have been studying photons and photon-mapping as it were for years. you seem to think that real light acts in some mystical and unforeseeable way, my friend. that it's not caculable by mathematics, and that photons don't follow physical rules which are in fact computable. this mystical world of light seems very poetic, but doesn't reflect the reality of things at all. photon-mapping in mental ray, for example, is as accurate as you like it to be. you merely turn down the settings for previewing your scene, then crank them way up when you approach final rendering. So, for a scene with only one light such as a lamp, that bulb actually DOES emit a certain range in quantity of photons. if we say a lamp emits 1,000,000 photons per second, for example, with a jitter of maybe +/- 100,000 to account for fluctuations in power consumption, then how is this not calculable in a scene? do you think a REAL lamp is unmeasurable in those aspects? this is exactly what photon-mapping is. also, you mention that the photon map has to be combined with ray-tracing for cross-referencing? poppycock. you can turn off ray-tracing but turn on "Direct illumination shadow effects" and use ONLY photons to light a scene. NOT like real light? how so? do you think that the millions of R&D that mental images spent perfecting their software was wasted on this mystical, incalculable thing called photon-mapping? do you think for one second that Maya, XSI, 3DS, and mental ray are unable to perform this higher-level of math with great ease? photons emit, decay, bounce, refract, reflect, and carry color with them all along the way, changing wavelengths as they go. anyone who's ever seen a prism knows this. and in all your readings did you miss the part where they stated, "photon mapping is exactly what is says it is : photon mapping"? Well, now you have "read" it, an so you will know it. radiosity simluations only work backwards in Bryce. i highly suggest reading up on mental ray, everything you stated in your last post has been completely contradicted in fact and in function by this program. using Final Gather produces emission of light from any surface, based on a huge quantity of possible attributes. Image-Based Lighting is achieved this way, where the light and dark values of an image are sampled to control the radiance. when used in conjunction with photon-mapping, how is this not accurate and "like real light"? you're saying there is no spoon, because you are only using your eyes, and not your finger to touch it! and lastly, "If the pictorial results from using Bryce True Ambience (and other "quicky" workarounds of Distributed Ray Tracing that might save from "having to program anything") can be as realistic as those produced by other rendering processes, then that's fine with me." Well, to sum it up : it can't. Bryce simply can't be as realistic as the others, and can never animate those "pro-renders". not to say it doesn't have value, but what you're all trying to say here is that your '78 Ford Pinto is going to keep up with a 2006 Skyline. MY point is that you can take the Pinto to the store, on a date (what?!?), or to the movies, but you certainly can't take it to the races no matter how many "Pro-Racer" decals you slap on it.

well I have to disagree with you in a very large way on this one, PJF. many programs, most especially mental ray, Renderman, and of course Maxwell deal with light the same way that "real-life" renderers (our eyes, cameras) do. the physics behind photons, radiosity, and the "mechanism" you speak of have been calculated for decades, merely awaiting fast enough PC's to deal with them... the same holds true for ray-tracing algorithms, which were developed by hand in the '70's originally. take a Google at mental ray sometime, or Maxwell, and you'll find that radiosity is indeed just like real light. an object radiating visible light produces radiosity, thus the prefix. you will note that ray-traced "light" doesn't act anything like photons do. as for your disclaimer about what "professional" is and your indifference to it, my point was that for someone to make a profession out of Pro-Render would mean that their lifelong accumulation of final projects (money-projects, that is) would be limited in proportion to it's vastly, vastly slow render-times. so, a V-ray or mental ray user would finish several thousand more projects in their lifetime, and in turn pull in several thousand times the revenue. as a career choice, or a "profession", the math simply doesn't add up for Pro-Render. of course, one could just play it all off as Pro-Render being FOR rendering, such as Pro-choice people are FOR choice or, prohibition is FOR hibition whatever hibition might be!

i see then, rayraz. so as a parallel, for example, if Bryce were defamed for the possibility that it might not render a truly realistic Bryce canyon, nobody would really worry about it? point taken! I've never really thought about it that way...