New toon

Jacking in?

Is this where they fight *snicker* Cyber Peacock? *chortles*

I miss Megaman X *sigh* Where's my SNES?

That's -all- Megaman does. That it! There is no more!

Dude.

It's interesting to note with just about every raytracing scene you'll ever see with lightsources viewable by the camera always have 'lense-flare' added… thoes circles that you see on film when the camera look at the sun. This is an artifact generated by the refraction of the light comming straight through the lense used in normal film, and is considered by filmmakers to be an imperfection and annoyance. In the world of CG, it has to be added after the raytrace rendering because it makes it look more natural and realistic.

Raytracing is another facinating science... but that's another post for another day.

-Kevlar

protect motherboard from the evil hacker! yar!

Both "Computer generated" and "Raytracing" (as they are used) are simple buzzwords.

And no console or hardware can perform true raytracing in real time (as of yet).

As an experiment!

Open up your 3dsmax (or whichever high end 3d app you have) - make a box, flip the normals. Put a sphere (as many segments as you like!) in the middle.

Next, stick a camera object in the box and switch to that view.

Add a light (omni light, whatever your app calls it), set it to cast shadows.

First, render with the shadows set to shadow mapping (which basically generates a texture and then plasters it across whatever surface it's supposed to be on) - notice, unless you up the resolution, you get jaggies.

Next, set the shadows to raytrace - and render.

Ooooo, that took forever, didn't it? That's because, raytracing, as the name implies, traces rays, and uses those to determine shadows/reflections (that's all ratracing is used for in 3d, pretty much).

Now, if it took over a minute (or indeed, over a second) to render a single frame, with less than a thousand poly, no textures and one light, isn't that a fair indication that your hardware (unless you happen to be running a nice dual xeon rig with a FireGL card, or Quadro) wouldn't be able to render this in real time?

That notwithstanding, it's very easy to 'spoof' reflections and sharp shadows without resorting to raytrace.

And on a slightly different note, anyone remember ReBoot?

Woosh.

Eleventy and Twelvety etc. is a different way of expressing numbers beyond one hundred, by continuing the tens and hence 'ty' prefix.
So far I have only come accross it in Tolkiens work, such as Bilbo Baggins celebrating his eleventy first birthday in the Lord of the Rings if I remeber correctly.

I think it's rather cool and quirky, but I doubt that it's ever going to be adopted.

As for the actual topic, I don't have a clue, although monster rancher wasn't that bad considering it's target demographic.

The new transformers cartoon is a crime though, a crime!

:)

Quote: from Protagonist on 7:16 am on June 7, 2003[br]So far I have only come accross it in Tolkiens work, such as Bilbo Baggins celebrating his eleventy first birthday in the Lord of the Rings if I remeber correctly.

Actually, I was just quoting a few lines from one of SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy skits.  The one with "Keanu Reeves."  :wink:

I was referring to raytraced shadows, which, as I mentioned, are traced with rays. Which means no matter how close you get with your camera, you'll never see any pixels - except maybe on the object's material, 'less you're using procedurals. Which are ugly as fuck anyway.

Most often in games, reflections will be environment maps, which, as you mentioned, distort oddly, or flat-mirror types. Notice, in many shots on your average PS2, Xbox or Gamecube game, you'll see some damn nice, realistic looking reflections on uneven surfaces. If you pay close attention, you'll notice only static objects are reflected. Any dynamic, animated object isn't, unless they have a second instance of the model flipped upside down and ignoring z-buffers.

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:werd: