Chan's Personal Blog

The last assignment I had in my graphics course involved working with a 3D raytracing program called Pov-ray. The program is used to generate 3D scenes by combining geometric shapes with textures and lighting. The results are fairly amazing as you can make photo realistic scenes if you're good enough. The best part of this program is that it's open source and completely free!

In either case, this is the scene that I created. I think it's not too shabby considering it's my first attempt at this.



It took me about two days to do this. I made a high resolution version of this scene, and it took one of the lab computers about 7 minutes to render. This is why video games don't use raytracing for graphics. It's very realistic, but it's also very slow.

Companies like Pixar, which create computer generated movies will use a raytracing program like Pov-ray (but way more sophisticated) to do all their movies. A full movie will take a server farm (many many many computers hooked up together) about 3 weeks to render the whole movie. You could imagine what a pain it would be if you made a mistake on a section of the film, and had to redo it. That's weeks of CPU time down the drain.

So, this brings home the point of why video games can't be as realistic as this. You wouldn't be able to get real-time graphics. The computer graphics that you enjoy in video games are approximations of textures, lighting, and shapes.

In either case, I find myself now looking at rooms and decomposing everything into geometric shapes, and observing the textures and how sunlight interacts with it. In the back of my mind, I'm plan how I would do a room like I'm seeing in Povray. The physical universe that God created is absolutely stunning when it comes to graphics, and a 3D program does a very bad approximation of the real deal.

On a side note, when I was a naive high school student, I had just started playing around with computer graphics using Microsoft Paint. When I saw amazing 3D scenes, I always assumed that brilliant artist did it all by hand in Paint or Adobe Photoshop. How wrong I was. It turns out it's way easier to model everything in 3D, and then generate a scene.