Orb of Detection (fanart)
Calamarain
idea of what to do with the thirteen images :) Might even get the last
two done by this weekend, but don't hold your breath.
Anyways, I present to you, the Orb of Detection
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45951975/
Deviantart's thumbnailing is being a bit odd, so you need to click on
the Full View thing to see it. If it goes down - I'll host it elsewhere
:)
Enjoy!
Roger Barnett
-----
http://angband.calamarain.net/ - Tales From The Pit
The Angband Webcomic
-----
Calamarain
> Anyways, I present to you, the Orb of Detection
> http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45951975/
>
> Deviantart's thumbnailing is being a bit odd, so you need to click on
> the Full View thing to see it. If it goes down - I'll host it elsewhere
Bah, OK, deviantart screwed up quicker than normal
Alternative copy hosted at
http://light.bluelinux.co.uk/~rpb28/orbofdetection.jpg
Marcus
> Bah, OK, deviantart screwed up quicker than normal
>
> Alternative copy hosted at
> http://light.bluelinux.co.uk/~rpb28/orbofdetection.jpg
>
> Roger Barnett
It detects chessboards?
Calamarain
There was a more detailed explanation of it on the deviantart page. I
didn't think a tomb was appropriate for it, so I thought I'd make it
more true to the spirit of archaelogy and Nethack - they travel all
over the world looking for things, so the orb has to reflect the
world... but still just be one big game. It reflects /detects the
entire world... and a game :)
Kent Paul Dolan
> Anyways, I present to you, the Orb of Detection
> http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45951975/
Oh, nice. I fudged on a bit of extra left side generic
"world" to make it fit my screen aspect ratio
undistorted, and it managed to kick the two
cuddling nude lesbians right off my wallpaper slot.
That's probably your most sheerly _pretty_ effort
yet.
xanthian.
I cannot _begin_ to tell you how happy my fiancee
is going to be about the wallpaper replacement,
when she wakes up in four or five hours from now.
At age 53, she feels very threatended by nude
teenage female images. Go figure.
Kent Paul Dolan
> http://angband.calamarain.net/ - Tales From The Pit
> The Angband Webcomic
I just noticed this with one of your recent postings.
Good stuff, great sense of humor, I added it to my
"five days a week" comic bookmarks. I _really_
liked your "Characters" page, too.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>
>Marcus wrote:
>> Calamarain wrote:
>> > Bah, OK, deviantart screwed up quicker than normal
>> >
>> > Alternative copy hosted at
>> > http://light.bluelinux.co.uk/~rpb28/orbofdetection.jpg
>> >
>> > Roger Barnett
>>
>> It detects chessboards?
>
>There was a more detailed explanation of it on the deviantart page. I
>didn't think a tomb was appropriate for it, so I thought I'd make it
>more true to the spirit of archaelogy and Nethack - they travel all
>over the world looking for things, so the orb has to reflect the
>world... but still just be one big game. It reflects /detects the
>entire world... and a game :)
Is there an option for better/more antialiasing or just smoothing in
your renderer? The high-detail reflections in the metal chesspieces
look a bit gritty.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Time's fun when you're having flies" - Kermit the Frog
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
Seconded - good fun! Thanks for pointing it out, too.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
It's time to light the candles!
It's time to chant the rites!
It's time to summon Satan on the Muppet Show tonight!
Kent Paul Dolan
> Is there an option for better/more antialiasing or just smoothing in
> your renderer? The high-detail reflections in the metal chesspieces
> look a bit gritty.
How are you looking at it? I'm using a really good widescreen monitor,
and what look like "jaggies", say in the base of the bottom left rook,
are really jumps across milling edges in the metal chess piece.
That base _isn't_ smooth vertically.
xanthian.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
>
>> Is there an option for better/more antialiasing or just smoothing in
>> your renderer? The high-detail reflections in the metal chesspieces
>> look a bit gritty.
>
>How are you looking at it? I'm using a really good widescreen monitor,
>and what look like "jaggies", say in the base of the bottom left rook,
>are really jumps across milling edges in the metal chess piece.
Full res, 1920x1200 screen. Take the second nearest metallic pawn,
where there's a lot of back-and-forth reflections between the various
chesspieces. Nice blue, then over-gritty detail as different pixels
diverge the traced light rays by a large difference. Multiple-ray
supersampling of those pixels would probably help, rather than
antialiasing, come to think of it. It's been a while since I played
with fancy renderers.
I hadn't noticed that detail of the bases, it's nicely done.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The answer to the second question," said Merry, "is that we could get off
in an hour. I have prepared practically everything. There are six ponies
in the stable across the fields." -- J R R Tolkien
Calamarain
Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> Calamarain wrote:
>
> > Anyways, I present to you, the Orb of Detection
> > http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45951975/
>
> Oh, nice. I fudged on a bit of extra left side generic
> "world" to make it fit my screen aspect ratio
> undistorted, and it managed to kick the two
> cuddling nude lesbians right off my wallpaper slot.
>
> That's probably your most sheerly _pretty_ effort
> yet.
>
> xanthian.
>
Thanks :) Glad to have fans. Two more to go, and I've got ideas for the
Staff and the Scepter as I type this. Fingers crossed, I'll have one
more done by the end of the weekend.
Calamarain
Thankyou :) There's plenty of back archives to read as well, somewhere
in the region of 240 strips up there too.
Roger Barnett
-----
http://angband.calamarain.net/ - Tales From The Pit
The Angband Webcomic
-----
Calamarain
Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
> On 5 Jan 2007 06:27:30 -0800, "Kent Paul Dolan" <xant...@well.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
> >
> >> Is there an option for better/more antialiasing or just smoothing in
> >> your renderer? The high-detail reflections in the metal chesspieces
> >> look a bit gritty.
> >
> >How are you looking at it? I'm using a really good widescreen monitor,
> >and what look like "jaggies", say in the base of the bottom left rook,
> >are really jumps across milling edges in the metal chess piece.
>
> Full res, 1920x1200 screen. Take the second nearest metallic pawn,
> where there's a lot of back-and-forth reflections between the various
> chesspieces. Nice blue, then over-gritty detail as different pixels
> diverge the traced light rays by a large difference. Multiple-ray
> supersampling of those pixels would probably help, rather than
> antialiasing, come to think of it. It's been a while since I played
> with fancy renderers.
Yeah, I allowed up to six reflections to keep the render time low(ish),
but I might do another one with up to ten or twelve reflections allowed
to see what happens. I also had the renderer on the basic antialiasing
setting, rather than the higher level ones - which may give better
results.
Or I could just cheat, and use GIMP to blur it a little bit, which
would give a nice result.
> I hadn't noticed that detail of the bases, it's nicely done.
>
> Cheers - Jaimie
Yeah, the base is actually two cylinders, one is half the height of the
other, but only about 5% larger in radius, just intended to add a
little bump.
Kent Paul Dolan
> Take the second nearest metallic pawn, where
> there's a lot of back-and-forth reflections
> between the various chesspieces. Nice blue, then
> over-gritty detail as different pixels diverge the
> traced light rays by a large difference.
Well, sure, the body of that pawn is a truncated
cone, the body of the rook next to it is a truncated
ellipsoid, things are going to go straight to hell
in that case anyway.
> Multiple-ray supersampling of those pixels would
> probably help, rather than antialiasing, come to
> think of it. It's been a while since I played with
> fancy renderers.
Well, multiple-ray pixel supersampling _is_ just a
technique for anti-aliasing, there's no magic
involved.
I'm not sure you can get much better than what you
see there. I pulled the image into GIMP and blew
the pixels up 4x4, and they _are_ antialiased
already. If the part annoying you is the vertical
narrow triangles on the pawn body, well, there are
some severely contrasty lines there all jammed into
nine pixels of width, tapering to one pixel, them
sampling both the reflected adjacent chess pieces
and their edges, and the sky behind them. Those
triangles are doing the equivalent of a vanishing
point persepective, and that's notoriously hard to
do acceptably well for a contrasty surface like a
checkerboard.
xanthian.
And may I tell you how disappointed I was when I
went to the Bryce site for prices. One could easily
sink USD$1000 into that tool and all its optional
add-ons, and still not have some of them. In one
case, the add-on to render a single fancy dress cost
USD$10. I'll stick with POV-Ray for a long while
longer, I think.
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>I'm not sure you can get much better than what you
>see there.
You may be right - as you say, it's not a scene amenable to smoothing
out! We'll see if Calamarain gets any different results.
I am just being picky, it's a nice composition.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Choose the Dark Side... now why would I do a thing like that?"
-- Obi-Wan Renton
Calamarain
> And may I tell you how disappointed I was when I
> went to the Bryce site for prices. One could easily
> sink USD$1000 into that tool and all its optional
> add-ons, and still not have some of them. In one
> case, the add-on to render a single fancy dress cost
> USD$10. I'll stick with POV-Ray for a long while
> longer, I think.
Yeah, that's the downside. I only got Bryce 5 in the first place
because it was on special offer via deviantart. I thought POV-Ray was
just a renderer though, and not for editing meshes and objects?
Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:
>>
>> And may I tell you how disappointed I was when I
>> went to the Bryce site for prices. One could easily
>> sink USD$1000 into that tool and all its optional
>> add-ons, and still not have some of them. In one
>> case, the add-on to render a single fancy dress cost
>> USD$10. I'll stick with POV-Ray for a long while
>> longer, I think.
>
>Yeah, that's the downside. I only got Bryce 5 in the first place
>because it was on special offer via deviantart. I thought POV-Ray was
>just a renderer though, and not for editing meshes and objects?
It's still just a renderer, but most design programs will export to
POV or something you can convert to POV with freeware.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The problem is not that the world is full of fools, it's that lightning
isn't being distributed correctly." - Mark Twain
Kent Paul Dolan
> I thought POV-Ray was
> just a renderer though, and not for editing meshes and objects?
POV-Ray is a design and render tool, the upside/downside
being that you design a scene as software, rather than as
meshes. POV-Ray uses constructive solid geometry to design
its objects.
The good side of designing as software is that you can be
absolutely accurate in your figures, the downside is that you
aren't doing WYSIWYG design, you can only check your
work by rendering (but you can do that pretty fast at lousy
resolution, then do a nice, high resolution render when you're
done).
xanthian, software geek with no drawing skills whatever,
guess which way I like to make pictures.
Calamarain
>
> The good side of designing as software is that you can be
> absolutely accurate in your figures, the downside is that you
> aren't doing WYSIWYG design, you can only check your
> work by rendering (but you can do that pretty fast at lousy
> resolution, then do a nice, high resolution render when you're
> done).
Quite. It's why I like Bryce, although it's a bit limited if you want
anything other than primitives and custom terrains, the editor is
superb for manipulation and seeing the way things work.
> xanthian, software geek with no drawing skills whatever,
> guess which way I like to make pictures.
Similar :P The entire contents of my gallery are 3d art and fractals.
Though I may be getting a graphics tablet. Also, why do you think I did
an Angband webcomic? :P Not much drawing skill required apart from the
occasional special effect.