Old, so old...
Jan. 6th, 2004 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI can feel I'm aging rapidly. In another moment my teeth are bound to fall out...
I've spent the morning researching open- (and not-so open-) source 3D graphic engines, to see what is available for free or licenceable in a reasonable way. What I've seen is flabbergasting. Take "Radiosity Rendering" for instance. Radiosity rendering works by figuring out what all of the visible energy (ie light) sources are for a scene, what all of the absorption and radiation spectra are for each surface in the scene, and then computes what the fixed-point emission spectra is for all surfaces. This means that yellow walls have a golden glow when seen under sunlight, for instance, and a nearby white teapot will be slighly yellowed by reflections from the walls.
This was the latest thing in high-end techniques back in 96 when I was last researching graphics algorithms, and it was very compute intensive. I remember simple rooms that took upwards of 3 hours to render. Nowadays I'm seeing engines that do on-the-fly incremental radiosity calculations for large scenes with moving lights, without any precompute, and at interactive walkthrough rates... Suddenly I feel myself hopelessly behind the times and obsolete, AGAIN.
Thats the thing about the software biz. You have to run at full speed just to stay where you are.
Oh well, enough bitching. Back to my research...
I've spent the morning researching open- (and not-so open-) source 3D graphic engines, to see what is available for free or licenceable in a reasonable way. What I've seen is flabbergasting. Take "Radiosity Rendering" for instance. Radiosity rendering works by figuring out what all of the visible energy (ie light) sources are for a scene, what all of the absorption and radiation spectra are for each surface in the scene, and then computes what the fixed-point emission spectra is for all surfaces. This means that yellow walls have a golden glow when seen under sunlight, for instance, and a nearby white teapot will be slighly yellowed by reflections from the walls.
This was the latest thing in high-end techniques back in 96 when I was last researching graphics algorithms, and it was very compute intensive. I remember simple rooms that took upwards of 3 hours to render. Nowadays I'm seeing engines that do on-the-fly incremental radiosity calculations for large scenes with moving lights, without any precompute, and at interactive walkthrough rates... Suddenly I feel myself hopelessly behind the times and obsolete, AGAIN.
Thats the thing about the software biz. You have to run at full speed just to stay where you are.
Oh well, enough bitching. Back to my research...
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 08:25 pm (UTC)*yummy*
*wink wink*
:)
no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 08:45 pm (UTC)