Lindsey Williams speaks scary stuff.

Thank you a lot.

Here is a little challenge. If you could harness power of GPU.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vrlJFOCbsM&feature=related
Fletch is right, Google should hire you.

Great job Whaat! It looks even better I could expect.

Nice start.

At KT forums there is a nice basic material setup for diffuse and specular maps, made by Patrick. It is easy to use with Arroway or any other texture source that do provide diffuse and specular maps.

(www.kerkythea.net)

Cheers!

Also " and ' are know to cause problems with SU2KT. Use plain a-z and 0-9 and _ or - then you safe.

Instancing can really made a difference. It's like micropoly displacement, when you get used to it, you cannot live without it.

That was not my intention. I tried to emphasis that render engine comparisons are fairly pointless - but seems to have failed. Anyways what can be done with different render engines is interesting to see, that is what I understood you did, and did it well. But was it interesting to see that small changes in the scene and image cropping can made a huge difference.

@majid said:

frederik wrote :
I assume that you've used the SU2KT when you originally exported this scene, Majid, right..??
If so, you should try to export it as OBJ and import it to KT, and you'll notice that the vase will be smoother...
Reason for this being that SU2KT doesn't export vertex welding and smoothing surfaces will appear more angular.
majid:
thanx , good advise . i'll try the way

Also with .obj export you can do loop subdivision in KT! Helps a lot with low poly SU models. I just wish that vertex welding issue would be fixed soon in SU2KT.

@frederik said:

@unknownuser said:

... mainly because Podium is not using the exact same Kerkythea engine as in KT.

TBD - you know that the core is identical, but maybe the settings are different, which's then showing in the result...
Nevertheless, I said that it should be very close to identical..!

I think difference do come from five different element, missing parts; handrail and 2th floor windows & interior and some missing stone decorations, different grass (or it's mapping), different tone mapping, different image size/ratio and far different render method. Podium uses Photon Mapping, if I have understood right, and with KT Kwistenbiebel used new MLT/BPT, that was not cooked long enough to clear noise. MLT/BPT is actually best suited for difficult indirect lighting conditions, that have hard to produce caustics, blurry reflections... what ever.

Sorry for bad photoshopping, but had to add those missing handrail&window parts and change image size to reveal how great difference those do made. I remove this if needed.

edit: oops... now I see I missed 1st floor handrail too.

I have to add that it's fairly pointless to made deep conclusions with these kind of comparisons, there always so much differences with render engines - even scenes and camera settings can be different, unintentionally. Passion towards one engine can lead different results. Anyhow, it's always interesting to see what one can do with different render engines. Usually in the end - conclusion is clear - use one that you happy with.

Why automate? It can save time, if it works reasonable well. I would not expect that automated mapping can do all what you can do with manual photo match, but I am fairly confident that if make3D would be made as plugin it would find users. Anyhow... code is there.

"Make3D converts your single picture into a 3-D model. It takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional "fly around" model, giving the viewers access to the scene's depth and a range of points of view."

Make3D --- convert your image into 3d

(make3d.stanford.edu)

@unknownuser said:

BTW, I have not been able to find any reference that this GFX card can be modded to a Quadro card.

It cannot be. For my understanding at the moment only ati cards can be softmodded to "pro" firegl.

@unknownuser said:

Ok TBD you wanted an update... the computer is lightning fast, that is until you apply a transparency to a material or go to xray mode. I have tried turning off fast feedback and even turning off hardware acceleration with no success. It appears to be slower than my old machine when in xray mode, however I have not done a side by side yet (my wife is working too).

Any ideas?

Perhaps some nvidia driver issue? 8800GT is fairly fast, but I think whole 8x00 series OpenGL support is ...what to say... a bit lacking. I wonder if the reason is to support Quadro FX sales.

Some luck indeed. Pretec says thet it's drive is water, fire and bulletproof... I would not suggest testing if your bulletproof USB drive is really bulletproof.

@syburn said:

Hi, How to get a decent relflected image in my reflected surfaces. I often only model stand alone elements and furniture etc so there will be no walls or ceilings etc.

You can use simple studio light scene or like here or HDR lightning. Just find, buy or made suitable spherical hdr image for the sky. There are also some pre made HDR globals at Kerkythea repository.

This simple render was done with HDR lighting and one IES light.

Great balls of fire!

What about components made of 1/4 parts, like this glass. Object has parts that are not wanted to subdivide and also open edges of sub-components needs to be left without subdivision.

Glass_A1.skp

@whaat said:

I don't understand this workflow. How do you create your high-poly models in the first place? If you are creating them with software other than SU, it only makes sense to use the same software to reduce the poly-count prior to bringing the model into SU. I am sure Max and Blender can both do this.

Some free models, for example 3d scanned ones, do have really high poly-count. I can imagine using some of those in SU, but after some scale down.