Go Back   AC3D Forums > General > AC3D Work In Progress / Showcase
Register FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 6th September 2007, 07:38 PM   #11
lisa
Senior Member
Professional user
 
lisa's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Posts: 917
Default Re: Constitution Class Starship

You can download the source code to povray here:
http://www.povray.org/download/

(It's about half-way down the page.)

To anwer the question of how computationally expensive: very.

Actually, emissive media is not so bad, but photons\transmitting media can be very slow if you're not careful.
lisa is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 7th September 2007, 09:26 AM   #12
Cynic
Member
Expert member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 71
Default Re: Constitution Class Starship

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisa View Post
You can download the source code to povray here:
http://www.povray.org/download/

(It's about half-way down the page.)

To anwer the question of how computationally expensive: very.
It can't be too intensive. I remember it or something like media being used in the game Turok: Seeds of Evil. It was used around the emission of a particle beam rifle.

I suspect alot of what I want to do is going to require some thorough planning and playing with the math. Not a problem, since I like manipulating equations.
Cynic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 7th September 2007, 05:11 PM   #13
lisa
Senior Member
Professional user
 
lisa's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Posts: 917
Default Re: Constitution Class Starship

Turok works quite differently than POV-Ray.

Because POV-Ray is a raytracer, each pixel in the final output is computed by shooting a ray from the screen and then seeing what it hits. The media command works by sampling the density of the media at steps along the path of the ray and adjusting the color of the final output pixel. In order to calculate the pixel color accurately, the ray must take very tiny steps. This means, that a ray that would have only had once bounce--or a couple of bounces if your object is shiny--may now need hundreds of steps if you have a large media container. Photons work by shooting out a dense cluster of rays from the location of a light, and then storing the ray intersections in a volumetric map. Just like rendering the media, media allows the photon ray to continue without bouncing, instead subsampling and storing an intersection at tiny intervals along the ray. When you render with both media and photons, this can mean thousands of calculations per pixel, which slows down the render considerably.

Turok, on the other hand, is a polygon renderer. Most of Turok's "glow" effects were a combination of particles and vertex lighting. To create the glow, large numbers of self-illuminating particles with a very soft alpha map surround the glowing object. Sometimes games change the blend mode when they render the particles, which makes them look even brighter. This effect can be made to look a lot like the results you mught get from pov's media, but it works completely differently. The particle method renders *much* faster, but it won't do things like pick up individual "light beams" in the glowing area... although, of course, this can be easily faked with more particles.
lisa is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 8th September 2007, 03:05 AM   #14
Cynic
Member
Expert member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 71
Default Re: Constitution Class Starship

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisa View Post
Turok, on the other hand, is a polygon renderer. Most of Turok's "glow" effects were a combination of particles and vertex lighting. To create the glow, large numbers of self-illuminating particles with a very soft alpha map surround the glowing object. Sometimes games change the blend mode when they render the particles, which makes them look even brighter. This effect can be made to look a lot like the results you mught get from pov's media, but it works completely differently. The particle method renders *much* faster, but it won't do things like pick up individual "light beams" in the glowing area... although, of course, this can be easily faked with more particles.
Thanks for the insight! That give me an avenue for progression.
Cynic is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off



All times are GMT -4. The time now is 09:46 AM.


AC3D Forum
(C) Inivis Limited 2020