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Messages - Steve

Pages: 1 ... 131 132 [133] 134 135 ... 138
1981
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Shadow Bug...
« on: April 01, 2008, 02:05:10 am »
The Shadow Bias setting is mpt currently used by the Art ray tracer.  The concept doesn't extend well to ray tracing since movig the shadow backwards only looks OK from the front.  It could appear very much worse from the point of view of a reflection.  I use other techniques to try and avoid the problem here (but I suspect that they are the cause of the shadow problems shown in other posts.)

1982
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Shadow Bug...
« on: March 31, 2008, 02:51:29 pm »
This rendering artifact is caused by an inconsistency in the geometry and shading of your object.  Ray tracing is based on modeling a physical world.  The only 100% correct way to do ray tracing is to model all triangles as flat faces.  When smooth shading is used (like in Anim8or) you are essentially lying to the ray tracer.  The surface is not smoothly curved and yet you want it to appear that it is.  So ther ray tracer distorts the normal used for lighting.  This is inconsistent.

The scanline renderer is able to avoid much of this problem by moving the shadows backwards into the object.  It is not perfect and works OK as long as you can't see the back (like with reflections).  There is even a parameter that you can set to control how far to push the shadows.  That hack doesn't work so well for ray tracing.

The best way to avoid these artifacts is to use more faces on curved surfaces (by subdivision or simply setting the polygon count higher for a parameteric object like a sphere).

1983
You're right, ART doesn't support the alpha or depth channels yet.

1984
No, shadows of transparent objects are still black.  That may be supported in an update but I still have a bit of code to write for it.

1985
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Torus not recognized
« on: March 30, 2008, 09:12:06 pm »
Check the scripts directory and the "Preload SCripts" settin gin the Configuration dialog.

1986
Good ideas.  I'll see if I can get at least an ortho camera in in the next v0.97 preview or so.

1987
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Tool Tips
« on: March 28, 2008, 04:49:00 pm »
Sorry about thism Blank.  Tool-tips are supposed to default to on but it doesn't seem to be working.  Maybe I should make them always stay enabled!

1988
Flametiger74 - Please don't continue with this discussion in thes thread.  Post this to a new topic.  This thread simply anounces that v0.97 is available.  It is not for bug reports. 

1989
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: texture messed up
« on: March 28, 2008, 04:14:12 pm »
Yes, there is a bug in the ray tracer.  I'm looking for the cause.  More examples would really be helpful.  Siragin, can you e-mail me your .an8 file?

1990
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Trouble with atributes
« on: March 28, 2008, 04:11:04 pm »
You need to click the "New" button and type in the name of the attribute that you want to add.  Then click "OK" and select the type, set the value, and you're done.

Attributes are a general mechanism to add things that aren't directly supported by Anim8or.  There are many applications that read and write .an8 format files.  Attributes allow those apps to export models to Anim8or to be edited and read them back in while retaining arbitrary other information that they may need.

I used them to extend materials for the initial ray tracing renderer.  Yes, I know they aren't as convenient as built in buttons.  But since the ray tracer is still getting new features attributes are a fast way to support them.  Writing the dialog code is very time consuming so this allows me to get the ray tracing preview out much sooner and to not waste time rewriting the material dialogs each time the ray tracer changes.

1991
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: A Not so recent bug.
« on: March 28, 2008, 12:32:54 am »
Well, I guess I'll finally have to multithread Anim8or.  That will probably solve this problem.  Now I have to learn how to do that.  (Darn Vista! What a pain it is.)

1992
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Light Settings-Max Rays
« on: March 27, 2008, 03:19:09 pm »
You can choose the number.  It is controlled indirectly by the aa setting.

Each ray intersection sends a ray to each light to see if it's visible.  If you has 1 million pixels and 16 samples per pixel they you will get at most 16 million smaples per light assuming no reflections or transparency.  The background doesn't need to sample the light so it could be fewer.

BTW if what you want is to take more samples per light for each ray intersection instead of just one, it's better, say, double the number of samples per pixel at the start than to quadruple the ligt samples but not increase the samples per pixel.

1993
flametiger74, are you referring to the different sampling methods in the AA setup dialog?  Those are simple different strategies for sampling the image when computing a pixel's value.

Anti approximates the light that reaches a pixel by evaluating multiple places within that pixel and blending the values together.  Sample methods are different ways of placing the samples.  All of these methods except Random first divide the pixel into a regular grid of NxN.  Then:

Regular samples a fixed set of regular positions, one per cell.

Jittered picks one random location in each cell.

Multi-juttered further subdivides each cell into another NxN sub grid.  Then it picks a random location in the a sub grid location but always choosing a different sub grid cell for eack main cell.  This is probably the bes method for sampling most images.

Random is just random locations.  It isn't really that good because it creates too much noise for a given number of samples.  But some people like it because it looks a bit like film grain.

1994
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Really wierd render bug
« on: March 27, 2008, 02:27:17 pm »
Heh, heh.  There are a bunch of canned images that I built into Anim8or when I was first working on the ray tracer.  They are supposed to be disabled in release builds but apparently it didn't happen.

To render these tests on your computer, click the Options->Debug->DebuA command.  Each time you do that it will cycle to the next build image.  (You need to do a render to see it, of course.)  You will need to exit Anim8or and restart it to get back to normal.

These tests are old.  They might not work and don't cover every material.   But you might have fun looking at them :-)

1995
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: A Not so recent bug.
« on: March 27, 2008, 02:22:51 am »
I think you misunderstand most of what is happening.  I will try to clarify:

Turning off render preview will not have much effect on the timing for well written graphics drivers.  That's why it's on by default.   However some drivers are VERY slow at copying raw pixel bits to the screen using OpenGL - particular some low end, integrated grahics drivers - so I added the ability to turn it off.  You SHOULDN'T see much difference on NVidia cards :-)

If your computer DOES speed up a lot when you disable render preview, then you have a BAD driver.

The reason that Anim8or seems to lock up during a render (it doesn't really - it's just fully busy doing the render.  It ignors all the thousands of Windows messages it gets per second because some drivers are TERRIBLE at this and slow down horribly even they aren't doing anything - thay just are inefficient - So I ignore almost all Windows messages when rendering.  You should still be able to ESC out of the render.  Anim8or is not frozen by any means -- it's just ignoring you :))

You should NOT see much of a speedup changing the priority.  Anim8or will normaly get 99% of the CPU time.  In fact I am thinking of lowering the priority so other Windows tasks won't get starved for CPU cysles.  Windows isn't a very good OS at switching between tasks.  MACs, for example, are much, much better at it.

Your graphics card is a very good one for Anim8or.  I have an 8600 on one of my computers at work and it runs Anim8or quite nicely.

Hope this helps clarify a few things (to you and others).

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