Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Doing animation to flopticals, and Re: Imagine Message-ID: <1990Dec15.042510.14514@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 15 Dec 90 04:25:10 GMT References: <86758@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <61534@masscomp.ccur.com> <1990Dec13.201243.4265@wam.umd.edu> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 65 walrus@wam.umd.edu (Udo K Schuermann) writes: [about Imagine performance:] > Benchmarking will be difficult because lighting, positioning, and the > properties of objects can affect the rendering time greatly. Here are > a few bits, though, which may be useful to you: > My system: 68030/68882 @ 32MHz > I have a scene with a very large diamond (12 faces) has a disturb > texture on it (to produce obvious flaws in the mostly transparent > material), three spheres, a multi-color pyramid, and all this on a > black ground with a thick grid mapped onto it. A torus with an explode > effect on it goes into several hundred facets that fly outward. > The scene requires about 15 minutes in Scanline mode at 352x470 > interlaced HAM. > Another scene with a crystal sphere, multiple reflective objects, > others with roughness and some with brushes wrapped onto them, as well > as three light sources, takes (again at 352x470) about 40 minutes in > full trace mode. I'm still a bit confused. Are those the times to render a single frame of the animation, or to render an entire animation? In either case, how many frames of animation did you create, and what was the missing (total or frame) time to do the animation? > Summa summarum: Full traces with refraction, object reflection, and > cast shadows require more time, and for these 20 minutes is only > possible if you have relatively simple scenes. An unaccellerated 1000, > 500, or 2000 will not be too impressive. Probably so since the unaccelerate machine should take at least six to twelve times longer, and possibly much more if you're using an FPU as well, but one of the joys of multitasking is to put something like this in the background and let it grind while you put your system to other uses. The limiting quantity here seems to be chip ram, so the obvious question: is it possible to render to fast ram, or better, directly to a file, to prevent a squeeze in chip ram over the long period of an animation? Is it possible to checkpoint and restart an animation to avoid a restart from scratch due to power problems or system guru's during software development? These are some of the features that would make such a system "fully professional". On a separate subject, one of the real roadblocks to doing animations these days is the high cost/low availability/marginal quality of single frame videotape recording. Frankly, recording a single frame to a videotape is an abuse of the technology. Is anyone doing work onto other media, such as floppy optical storage, that would allow an animation to be created and then dumped to videotape at normal recording speeds? This is a tough problem, since, as the CD versus CD-ROM converstations finally convinced me, it is laser videodisks that use a recording technology similar to FM radio in how it encodes the signals, so a digital floppy optical recording couldn't be just blindly dumped to tape, but would require a digital to analog step in real time. Input? Kent, the man from xanth.