September 2, 2001

2:26 PM

The Brazil Rendering System, a render-farm arsenal of 3D Studio Max talent, has some unbelievably realistic pictures in its gallery. Some of these images took days just to render few 10 megabyte files. Stunning.
posted by bloggboy (14 comments total)

Took me just as long to once download a cracked version of the studio max programme and piece it all together, only for it to spit at me and stubbornly refuse to play out.

Fantastic pictures, some are remarkably realistic whilst, at the other extreme, some are just unimaginable. Jeff Mills once stated that "techno is anything that you can't imagine" and if the same was said for visual art many of these pieces would have no trouble passing such a test. Nice links ^__^
posted by Kino at 2:43 PM on September 2, 2001

Excellent. Some great examples here.

Tangent: As someone who only plays video games irregularly, I'm always interested when I see yet another statement about how great the rendering is for a particular game. Usually, I'm not impressed. While I understand perfectly (being a tech geek) why on-the-fly rendering of the quality of these images is a long way off for your average consumer game (and system), I nonetheless look forward to the day when these examples are standard frames from realtime game rendering.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:56 PM on September 2, 2001

That'll be the day i disappear from the face of the Earth and move full-time into some plush digital virtual-apartment before stepping outside to check out the virtual 'chicks'. Or perhaps i'll just make a few of my own and, erm.. stay in for a while.
posted by Kino at 3:14 PM on September 2, 2001

That'll be the day i disappear from the face of the Earth and move full-time into some plush digital virtual-apartment before stepping outside to check out the virtual 'chicks'.

New from Sega, after Virtua Fighter and Virtua Cop: Virtua Life, available for any OS, anywhere, anytime. Warning: side effect may include loss of reality. Reality is usually unrecoverable after deletion. Just a warning.

(Side note: Sega.com is down as of the time of this comment's posting. Interesting?)
posted by philulrich at 4:11 PM on September 2, 2001

*drool*

Note to self, re: New Plan.
1) Obtain mad skillz.
2) Obtain mad expensive hardwarez.
3) Obtain mad expensive softwarez.
4) Spend rest of life making amazing picturez.

I wish I could make stuff like that. Every now and then I'm inspired to make some amazingly cool render. So I fire up POV-Ray, start typing out some scene code... and realize that I have neither the tools nor the skills to make anything even remotely as cool as what I'm imagining...
posted by whatnotever at 4:29 PM on September 2, 2001

Ha.. that might be why why dreams are cheaper than caffeine whatnotever.

(Side note: Sega.com is down as of the time of this comment's posting. Interesting?)

Yeah, interesting the thought that a virtual universe which loads of people had dismissed the analogue world in favor of spending their lives hooked up to could go out of action at anytime, philulrich. Oh hang on, that's already happened hasn't it.
posted by Kino at 4:44 PM on September 2, 2001

Mo, I don't think you're going to have to wait as long as you think. The graphics in UT on a GeForce 2 put the graphics from the movie Tron to shame -- and that movie didn't come out all that long ago.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:07 PM on September 2, 2001

In Italian, "sega" is slang for the masturbatory act ("farsi una sega").

Just thought that was interesting in light of this thread.
posted by Superplin at 2:52 AM on September 3, 2001

^__^ Especially when you consider how my name means film or cinema in German, and Italian too i think? Oh man, as i ponder the connection between film and VR i've just had a vision in my minds eye of hardcore porn in a virtual reality setting and it was rather disturbing.
posted by Kino at 10:12 AM on September 3, 2001

The graphics in UT on a GeForce 2 put the graphics from the movie Tron to shame -- and that movie didn't come out all that long ago.

Actually, it came out nearly 20 years ago.
posted by kindall at 10:36 AM on September 3, 2001

Look, kid, 20 years ain't all that long. (Says the 47-year-old. grumble damned punks grumble...)

The point is that I lived to see a computer I owned create better graphics interactively in real time on my desktop than I had seen on a movie screen. That means Mo probably will live to see what he's hoping for. TRON-level graphics made it to the interactive desktop in less than ten years from when the movie appeared. (Quake is approximately comparable; better in some ways, worse in others.)

A lot of that is because of Moore's Law. The graphics in Tron were created on a Cray; which sounds impressive until you realize that the computer on which I'm typing this is faster and has more memory and disk space than the Cray which did that work. It cost many millions of dollars; this computer cost about $3K all told.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:50 AM on September 3, 2001

When the year 2000 came around i took to writing the date on certain things with a syntax of '002.000'. I'm not sure what exactly inspired me to do so, but i think it had a lot to do with the thinking behind Stevens Tron remark.
posted by Kino at 11:00 AM on September 3, 2001

And thinking about it, i'd like to see the calender change so each year is divided and measured in a thousand parts, rather than 365.25 days, but i doubt any of us will live to see something like '002.001.741' happen.
posted by Kino at 11:11 AM on September 3, 2001

20 years in computers is like 140 years to you and me. So, yeah, it was a long time ago.

Many of the Cray supercomputers that were manufactured in the 1980s are still in service. I read of one that still sees daily use -- as a print spooler.
posted by kindall at 11:58 AM on September 3, 2001