One of the fastest (if not ‘the’ fastest) 3D renderers in the world, V-Ray for free open source Blender 3D brings the power and speed of V-Ray Raytracing to one of the most powerful modeling and 3d animation systems available.
V-Ray for Blender is currently in
development

What happens when you combine the world’s most powerful rendering engine
with the world’s most beloved open source 3D content creation suite? You get V-Ray
for Blender! Artists around the world are salivating at the mere thought
of taking their Blender scenes to the next level with the worlds fastest
photo-realistic rendering system.

Developer: Andrey M. Izrantsev
(aka bdancer)

Image by Bertrand Benoit

Image by Bertrand Benoit

Image by Bertrand Benoit

Image by Bertrand Benoit

Image by Bertrand Benoit

The images presented on this page show a selection of the types of art that can be
created using POV-Ray.

Pebbles
by Jonathan Hunt

This POV-Ray picture of a beach of pebbles was generated entirely using POV code. No modelers were used at all. The image features radiosity and focal blur to give it that realistic feel, and took 4.5 days to render on an Athlon 5600+.

Study in atmospheric media and in different ways of “planting” using the trace command.

A work in progress rendering of an Autobahn.

My lame attempt at a tree macro resulted in some nice bonsais

If I should say a single term which expresses “Spirit of Asia” best, I would take “spirituality”. All today’s world religions date from Asia for example. For my entry I chose a visualisation of Chado, the (japanese) way of tea, a Zen Buddhism concept.

In a place where time stands still, a lonely beast takes guard over the sacred water; it is the last creature of its kind, living proudly within the realm of fantasy and reality.

This image won first place in POVCOMP 2004.

March-April 2001 IRTC Winner.

The average office

Art memories after Jan Vermeer – Girl With A Pearl Earring (1665-1666).

A surreal take on ‘Christina’s World’

Highly reflective multi-colored glass baubles inscribed in gold lettering with the text ‘Season’s Greetings from the POV-Team’. Artwork by Jaime Vives Piqueres and the POV-Team.

Still life featuring pitchers and glasses.

Work-in-progress rendering of a Nissan Micra modelled in Wings 3d (see this newsgroup thread).

Made for the IRTC (topic “future”). The horn is from Renderosity freestuff. Background made with galaxy.inc by Chris Colefax and sunflare made with nkflare.inc by Nathan Kopp.

Xfrog plants, commercial car models, CSG, road modeled in Rhino

Intruders floating around in a bloodstream.

Just a little average kitchen.

Poser zebras and CSG-built room.

Morningtime: a swarm of butterflies is warming up near a small arm of a river. Generally butterflies are only able to fly at a body temperature of 30°c or above. Once they are flying, they can keep up their body temperature. Painted Ladies are the most widely distributed butterflies in the world and can be found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica. Occasionally the butterflies make mass migrations in search of a new habitat. And perhaps sometimes a swarm can be seen at a sunlit meadow warming up …

In the middle of the night, they came. Probably the first sign of their arrival was the extra iron nail that Farmer Ged had absentmindedly left in the coop after repairing the chicken wire. Not that the nail was there, but that it was hovering 5 feet off the ground, spinning slowly …

Based on an image by Scott King. PodTree by Webdancer and waterlillies from toucan.co.jp. Rider and horse Poser 4.

For every point on a torus one can draw four different circles through it that all lie on the surface of the torus. Two of these four circles are called Villarceau circles. The four narrow pairs of bands in this image follows such Villarceau circles. All the shapes in this image are made with Constructive Solid Geometry operations with tori only (except for the ground plane of course).

Dragonflies modeled in Rhino and isosurfaces for the water and the twigs. Postprocessed focal blur.

Representative building created from old cooling tower. This image shows top part of main hall containing moving platform for spectators and iris door closing the tower. More images, including exterior ones, are on my website. This is my school project.

A sharp decay in lifetime expectance of the lizard (barely visible on the right) is caused by an eagle. The scene is located within a gorge (a natural decay by itself) and there is a rock wedged between the gorge walls, which hinder the rock from further decay in height.

Wildlife inhabiting the boundary zone between land and sea.

Poser rabbits, commercial car models and CSG

An isosurface shape inspired by M.C. Escher’s “Sphere Spirals” (“Bolspiralen”) woodcut print from 1958. The edges of the four spiraling bands on the sphere can be formed by an inverse stereographic projection of eight infinite logarithmic spirals in a complex plane tangent to a Riemann Sphere onto it’s surface. I found some useful information about this shape here.

Taking advantage of POV-Ray’s clever memory management for copies of meshes, this one has more than 12000 oak trees. The trees are made with Forester Arboretrum by Stephen Dartnall. Sky is scattering media.

An imagined canal in Venice, Italy, enhanced to glow as if constructed of neon lights.

Serious test for the “micronormals + focal_blur” technique

Follow the link above to see how this image was created.

Poser character, Xfrog plants, CSG, props modeled in Rhino

Isosurface landscape

The “hills” and the “tubes” that follows the smooth “grooves” in it are made with 2 isosurfaces. The basis function for the “terrain” in this image is a “sombrero” function that has been displaced vertically by a noise function. The grooves are made by subtracting the function for the “tubes” from the function for the “hills” with the help of a “blobbing” function; the hyperbolic tangent function. The tanh() function has a S-shape that is similar to the shape of the Sigmoid function. Here are two relevant links: [1] [2].

Randomly generated landscape

This image was rendered by Mark Shuttleworth whilst orbiting earth in the International Space Station. If you are interested you can read the full story about how it came to be.

This image won the IRTC competition of November – December 1999, “Gardens” topic.

This image is a memory from my childhood which, casually, happens on the kitchen. This imaginary snapshot is taken few minutes after a “headfirst” fall, many years ago.

Winner of the “First Encounter” round of the IRTC (November-December 1998)

That wasn’t the ventilator. He knew that sound. Automated Patrol Droids? At least two of them. Billy had been avoiding them for days. Through his headache the noise was like a quarter million bees, all gunning for his blood. The sounds continued the increase in volume. He tightened his grip on the wrench, and shifted his body slightly. And knocked over a quarter-filled bottle of booze. It tingled loudly, but not loudly enough to be heard over the droning of the APUs. Mentally cursing his luck, and loss of lubricant, Billy curled into a ball and hoped they wouldn’t find him. A shadow passed over the spilt booze …

This image was created for the IRTC’s Decay round, showing architectural decay using POV-Ray’s multi layered procedural textures and lit with radiosity without using a traditional light source.

M.C. Escher’s “Cubic space division” (“Kubische ruimteverdeling”) lithograph from 1952 inspired me to make this image. The shape of the cross sections of the “bars” in this image is formed by the function for a superellipse. And the cube-like shapes at the intersections of the girders are formed with the function for a superellipsoid. I “disturbed” the 3-dimensional grid by using a function that rotates the shape according to 3 noise functions; one for each of the x-, y-, and z-axes. I wanted all the shapes to be joined smoothly, so I added the functions for the “bars” and the “cubes” with the help of a “blobbing” function; the Sigmoid function. The Sigmoid function has a S-shape that is similar to the shape of the tanh() function. Here are two relevant links: [1] [2].

This image is a result from my early experiments with isosurfaces. It shows a single isosurface shape. The chaotic “forest” in this image is formed by giving 4 different noise functions as arguments to a torus function. The fourth function, which is given as the minor radius to the torus function, also controls the colour of the pigment. (The major radius is set to a constant value.)

Entry for the IRTC, “Fantasy” round.

An algorithmic blob study

Classical stillife with apples and scale

A cube of rhythmical dancing blobed silver spheres. For an animated variation of this scene view my animation pages.

A cellular automatation simulation

The attempt to create 3D version of the painting by William Marlow. This is a collective project initiated in March 2003 and which involved people from different countries.

A jagged desert landscape. This image is used as an illustration in the german computer magazine c’t.

Poser characters, lots of meshes and CSG (including the makepipe macro). Exists also in a night version and as a 360° panorama.

Poser characters, cars and buildings modeled in Wings3D

A silver duo of twisted rings.

A jar filled with metal marbles. Lighting using HDRI.

African Masks: from Zimbabwe (near) and Dem Rep Congo, Songye tribe (far)

A famous (and expensive) tube audio amplifier modeled with Moray and rendered with mlpov using the kitchen HDRI probe.

Xfrog trees and plants.

Spanish patio created from memories of similar places

POV Planet was inspired from the transformers home panet of cybertron and the idea of a totally robotic civilisation.

Some of today’s greatest inventions were just dreams people used to laugh about some time ago.

It’s a detail view of the reflections on a blob hyperboloid.

Poser cat and CSG-built buildings

Entry for the IRTC, topic “Gardens”. I expended about 2 seconds to arrive to the conclusion that more than 2 or 3 of my trees on the same scene, is too much for my RAM and/or patience. So, I needed a good excuse to use only a few… the solution arrived later, when I finished my job and walked to my car, parked some streets away, just in front of a lonely orange tree on the sidewalk. I know it’s not a “real” garden, but what is a garden? Just that but with much more terrain and plants, isn’t?

Poser cows and lots of CSG

High walls with rectangular structured surface surrounding a water pool.

(technical): I used splines for the tubes/wires and media for the glow. High-quality focal blur with low-quality area light. The render took at about 1 month on a powerful FreeBSD machine. I used POV-Ray 3.5 and had it running a lowest priority (nice -19). (non-technical): A blueish glow over several patterned tubes.

Winner of the March-April 1999 round of the IRTC

When you were young, you’ve been told that color screens worked with a lot of little phosphorescent red, green and blue elements, and that a cathodic ray was scanning repeatedly the screen to quickly lighten the little things. You grown up, and it’s time to tell you the truth : let me introduce to you Roger, Gary and Bob …

Made for the IRTC (topic “loneliness”). Trees are made with Forester Arboretrum by Stephen Dartnall, sky with stsky.inc by Jaime Vives Piqueres, bush with maketree.inc by Gilles Tran.

A dollhouse within a dollhouse within a real house… meant to represent the world of a young girl’s imagination that exists within the real world.

Produced for the “Frozen Moment” round of the IRTC, this image depicts the shadow of a young girl emblazed on a wall from the blast of the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki Japan, August 9th, 1945.

An art gallery where the pictures are a little more real than usual.

The meeting of upward and downward tendencies. Out of the serie of psychedelics op-art.

]]> http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/qwest-for-the-most-realistic-renderer-photorealistic-3d-renders.htm/feed 1 http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/2010-the-beginning-of-the-virtual-3d-human-and-android-decades.htm http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/2010-the-beginning-of-the-virtual-3d-human-and-android-decades.htm#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:59:14 +0000 Admin http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/?p=134
Imagine, as a movie director being able to use any past actor with just a click of a mouse. The fact is, the technology is pretty much already here. At least for the visual part, we can scan and digitize actors into their virtual 3D counterparts and reanimate them to do and say what we wish. Unfortunately, audio synthesis has not progressed as fast as 3D digitizing and so for now it is not yet possible to use the voice of Marlon Brando or any other of your favorite actors’ to say anything you wish using their voice. There is ongoing research into this and from a security perspective, the technology could be quite dangerous, imagine not knowing if the other person on the other end of the phone call is really the real owner of that ‘voice’ you’re hearing.

Recently some university technology research has been showcased whereby mouth movements can be recreated and morphed and spliced back into videos, putting words into the president’s mouth. How much longer can we trust what we see of any recorded media? The Japanese are working on creating real life-like humanoid Asimov passing robots, no doubt a lot of the intrigue comes from “Fembots”, and perhaps in this area of research just as with the battle between betacam and VHS, once again the more primal urges and instincts in man will be the driving force of this android human technology.

Through a series of articles, I will be re-assessing the capabilities current technology to create believable realistic virtual 3D worlds and programmable life-like human robots.

See “Age of the Androids” series of articles …
Or
Creating your own Virtual 3D Worlds series …