Anthony Appleyard posted at 3:52PM Fri, 13 May 2016 - #4269065

But why is the astronaut's shadow on the ground so dark, but the front side of the astronaut, which is equally hidden from the sunlight, is nearly as bright as in a CGI image rendered in "no shadows" mode?

There are two things going on here. The first is exposure-related. The suits are white. The moon's surface is dark gray. If you look at that large rock on the left that the stand-thingy is on, you'll see the same effect. The rock is slightly lighter than the rest of the surface and on its shadowed side you can just make out some of the detail of the rock, but the shadow on the dirt is nearly pitch black, like Charles Duke's shadow (the flight was Apollo 16, by the by). The white suit is simply reflecting more light.

The second issue is that the photo has been manipulated and its exposure adjusted. John Young was panning across the scene while Duke stopped to watch him film, and the frames of that film were cleaned up and composited into a panoramic image, of which your image is part of. This is what the original imagery looked like, with the frame showing Duke:

You'll note the lens flaring, blowouts, and other image artifacts that were corrected (such as the removal of the image number at the bottom and the focus crosses from the camera.)

Oh, and that this is in colour (note that you can see the gold in the visor reflection).

Thank you.

The indexing problem is a known issue that is the result of sloppy database planning and integrating it into the software. Put simply, if you have only a few runtimes active in the library, you probably won't have an issue. If you have a big library, the search function won't work properly.

If you only read threads here, no, you won't see much. There's significantly more over at RDNA.

Razor42 posted at 12:15PM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236157

Theres hardly the esteem in cracking a pair of panties for a 3D dolly as there is in say a blockbuster game, movie or program.

Unless the DRM is constantly modified for each item, they don't have to do it for each item. They just have to get the algorithm once and then automate the process. So it won't matter if it's a pair of panties or the latest figure which the company itself is crowing about being widely used.

Besides, you're not understanding the mindset for a lot of these guys. They don't care what product the DRM they are hacking is protecting. All that matters is that they're showing how easy it is to defeat DRM.

moriador posted at 12:53PM Tue, 20 October 2015 - #4234415

But let's not blame the Puritans for everything. Long after their revolution in Britain was ended, the Victorians evolved their own peculiar brand of prudishness -- covering the legs of tables and chairs because they were legs. Even saying the names of the body parts was shocking, which is why we often say "white meat" and "dark meat" when referring to the breast and legs of chicken. Victorians made even the Puritans seem sexually free. Interestingly, for the Puritans, it was a matter of Biblical morals. For the Victorians, at least in Europe, much more a matter of manners. And lest we think manners could never be that important, during a time of enormous growth of the middle class, including the rise to great riches for some, there had to be some way to maintain a sense of class distinctions in a culture that was built on social hierarchy. A way to keep the upstart middle class feeling inferior even when they had more money. For the Victorians, manners served that purpose. And even today, in Britain, the word "class" refers to more than just a person's social and economic position -- but also his/her deportment: his or her manners.

It wasn't just that. A portion of the Victorian conservatism was in reaction to what their parents and grandparents had done in the Georgian and Regency Eras. Gambling, casual sex, alcohol, they were so into it they wouldn't have felt out of place today (although we'd probably look sideways at the rampant boozing). But that period was also the era of revolution, when populations struck against what was described as the morally bankrupt aristocracy. and it wouldn't be hard to associate those two things. The Victorians, in England, entered an era where they were for the most part isolated from conflict, they had created the most widespread empire the world had ever seen (and odds are will never see again), society had settled down, and there was a feeling that if society struck to the straight and narrow they'd avoid the messes and chaos that had broken out elsewhere in Europe in their lifetimes.

rokket posted at 12:31PM Mon, 12 October 2015 - #4233311

If I recall, there was also discussion about making breasts in the breast plate, and how it would not protect the wearer.

This has been a subject for people making traditional armour (plate or whatnot) forever. Basically, molding breasts (with cleavage) into a breastplate is stupid for anything that should actually be used in combat because any strikes aimed toward the center of aren't deflected away but toward the center of the chest (ie, right at the sternum and heart). The general agreement is that if some kind of modification is actually needed for a woman, the best option is the "monobreast" design (no individual breast shape).

I'm often mistaken for gold and can form in anoxic marine conditions!

Wait, what? It's Talk Like a Pyrite Day, isn't it?

It certainly causes problem. I'm beta-testing and there was this weird interaction where an AI spontaneously formed and threatened to exterminate all humanity but then got distracted playing Plants vs Zombies and promptly became obsessed and vowed to eliminate the threat of bucket-wearing zombies from the planet and then started researching genetic engineering of cabbages online but it was erased when I had to reboot the computer for a video driver update. So there's that potential issue.

estherau posted at 10:30PM Sun, 13 September 2015 - #4228174

I'l let you know if I hear from PIXAR.

There's two issues here. The first is rendering the film. Apple has never been involved in that for Pixar. Originally they used Sun servers, then in 2003 switched to Intel, and more recently moving to NVIDIA GPU from the Xeons.

In doing the work up to the actual rendering they've used Apples.

So when you talk about "making the movie", what precisely are you talking about? The actual rendering, which has never been on Apples, or the keyboard and mouse work that is sent to the rendering, because there they've used Apples.

estherau posted at 9:38AM Sun, 13 September 2015 - #4228057

but all the expensive nvidia cards say they actually are mac compatible http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/motion-graphics/nvidia-aims-change-way-animation-studios-post-houses-work/ Im just going to ask pixar (if they'll talk to a pleb like me) so I will get back to you if and when the guy writes back. Remember pixar do their own proprietary software and they probably do use a lot of different tools. They don't need to buy macs because the already have and use macs. And they can use whatever they need to render after they set up their animations. You often just guess and say well it must be this way because that's what makes sense to me, but I don't think you've done your homework either or have all the facts. At least I'm writing to the pixar guy to try to find out the truth without guessing.

They'd be using something like the Quadro VCA for their rendering. (http://www.nvidia.com/object/visual-computing-appliance.html)

chaecuna: We all well know that Poser users diss anything Studio related

I don't think the interface is terrible. There are two controls, maybe three, that need a serious update. All this ignores hotkeys, of course.

First, the camera controls. That really has to be updated. Does anyone actually use that little face in the middle to select a camera?  And the little white buttons you have to hover over to see what they do isn't intuitive in the least. Those two raised palms aren't obvious either. The trackball and the pointing fingers for left-right/in-out are okay and I use all the time, but the rest? Yeesh. Otherwise, I use Netherworks camera control panel to select and modify the camera settings. So the obvious solution, at least to me, is to merge the two: keep the trackball and the left/right/up/down/in/out control (perhaps updating them), replace the camera select with either a button panel or a menu dropdown, and right click and flyout menus off the selected camera (as used by Netherworks) for the camera options.

Second obvious one is the light controls. There's probably as many opinions on how to update that as there are people, but there are obvious shortcomings. The lighted globe is, again, not terrible in that it allows you to quickly adjust lights and where they are pointing, but there are obvious shortcomings.

1. There's no differentiation between types of lights. If you click on one of them, unless that light source happens to be in the field of view or you look at the parameters, you can't tell if it's a spot, a point light, an IBL, or an infinite light.

2. If you have a bunch of lights with the same orientation (say a row of spotlights on the ceiling of an interior scene), they'll overlap and you can't select a specific one from the light control, but have to select the one you want from one of the menus. If there's a bunch of lights close together, it's still unnecessarily difficult to get the one you want.

I'd say drop the thing entirely. Really, the only thing's it's good for is infinite lights. IBL controls using it are pointless, it can't be used to place point lights (and having an "orientation" on a point light is a stupid concept anyway), and its controls are nearly useless for spot lights.

A replacement could be a light panel consisting of four buttons (infinite/spot/point/IBL). If no light of a given type is present, the label is grayed out or whatever to indicate it. To select or add a light of a given type, click the button that opens a flyout menu where you can add, delete, select, or modify lights of that given type.

The third control I'm "Enh" on is the Dots. Not terrible, but someone can probably come up with something that works better.

The problem is that Cycles isn't implemented equally in all three forms. If you want the simplest solution with the most features for the greatest number of users, you go with the CPU.

Another thing to bear in mind is which features are available. In the most recent released version of Cycles, subsurface scattering is only implemented in CPU, experimental on NVIDIA cards (and may not work) and unavailable for ATI cards. Poser still, primarily, deals with figures. That have skin. Which has subsurface scattering. Having a "realistic" rendering engine, which Cycles is supposed to be for, that can't do realistic skin is kind of counterproductive.

Note that I am actually excited about Superfly/Cycles coming to Poser 11, but it will need to have an interactive mode in order to be useful for me. I also hope they change their mind about GPU rendering (or at least add it to the next Poser Pro)

So which group of people do you want them to shortchange? The ATI people or the NVIDIA people? (Both of whom, incidentally, get shortchanged compared to people using the CPU renderer, although the NVIDIA group slightly less so).