descent into a sphere

Just an experiment with animation in povray. I'm not sure if I consider this finished or not, a lot more work could be done on it.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• povray
• animation
• sphere

[33ordie]

I'm still amazed that even today, you can't do this realtime with the software available. What we see is 1 light source, shadows (stencil shadow would do) and of course CSG. But, CSG today is still so slow... But this sort of 3D stuff I absolutely dig, even if simplistic.

[TheUnnamedGent]

I would be surprised if it wasn't possible to do this in real time. But I don't know how to do it. I would expect that you could create even better stuff in real time. But that doesn't stop me having fun in povray.

[33ordie]

The problem is not the visuals, you can do stencil shadows and spheres and cubes in realtime. The problem is the boolean operations needed to modify the objects. for example, when you split the sphere into a grid, and that it updates the size each frame. With CSG, this is impossible to do smoothly (30 fps) in realtime. Yet, a GPU powered CSG lib would probably do it, but that is still a dream, not reality.

[TheUnnamedGent]

Wouldn't you just mesh-ize everything (triangulate everything?), and then pre calculate the mesh for each frame. Then you could easily animate the resulting meshes in real time, allowing you to move the camera where ever you liked during the animation.

[kchapfi]

what'd you use? 3ds Max?

[TheUnnamedGent]

Povray 3.6.

[33ordie]

Well the point I'm trying to make is that we can do it with pre-calc tricks, of course, but how about absolute realtime mesh transformation using CSG functions in playable 30+ fps? This is yet to be announced.

[jamesusespivot]

cool!

[absulitcr]

wow great!!!

and is a cyclic animation too!