From a new print advert by Microsoft:
"Windows vs Walls. This epic struggle explains why we make what we make and do what we do. The thing that gets us out of bed every day is the prospect of creating pathways above, below, around and through walls. To start a dialogue between hundreds of devices, billions of people and a world of ideas. To lift up the smallest of us. And catapult the most audacious of us. But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other. To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff. On our own or together. This is more than software we're talking about. It's an approach to life. An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way of life. Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.'
I guess they must be done with imitating Seinfeld a show about nothing, so they are apparently taking a new approach, badly imitating Apples adverts, first with the "I'm a PC, and I've been stereotyped... get over it" to this new Print Advert that smacks of Apples Think Different campaign, but of course done with It's own brand of cluelessness... heres to the crazy stupid ones; Microsoft
I thought Microsoft was at least trying to consolidate to ONE message, which would have been a nice change, even if It's message was, "hey were not a big ass evil corporation, were just a bunch of nerds who don't get people, but we try!" that still would have still been better than the hodge podge of messages they are now putting out. Microsoft is having a serious identity crisis. What are you Microsoft? a huge corporation without a mission statement = none stop entertainment.
Mojave, Seinfeld, I'm a PC, Windows vs Walls..... what a mess
I'm going to go off on a rant now as is my right as a slightly informed human being
It's interesting to see how both companies are very much like their respective creators, despite all the people that make up the companies.
Microsoft being the money grabbing autistic misfit who thinks people want their lives cataloged sorted and ordered by size. You only have to watch Bill Gates for a few minutes as he rocks back and forth talking about connecting people and how everyone wants 'insert stupid idea here' , to realize while being very IQ intelligent and ruthless, the man does not occupy the same reality as anyone else. Depending on what his REAL goals were in life, he's done crazily well, can't fault the income figures, well these days you can but he's not exactly actively running the company any more is he, monkey boy Balmer is, and monkey boy is as big of a social misfit as Gates but with a monkeys brain opposed to Gates's planet sized intellect.
I don't believe for a second Gates has any interest beyond making stuff ONLY HE think's is cool and making tons of cash... which is fair enough if he'd just come out and admit it, but he's a squirmy little lying scheming vindictive back stabber
At this point I'd like to point out some things about Apple and the way they behaves borders on insanity sometimes too, such as It's insane secrecy and own self importance. But they do at the end of the day put out stuff that makes my life MUCH better, so they can act as self important as they like, because.. well... they fucking earned it! as Microsoft continues to put out stuff that actually quite dramatically sometimes make my life much HARDER.
And some (not all) of the things Apple put's out are clearly things Steve Jobs just thought would be really 'neat' and wanted to play with... but unlike Gates, Jobs shares reality with a greater majority of people on this Earth, so when Jobs makes something cool for himself, It's often pretty damn cool for everyone else too.
Microsoft has only ONE angle it could ever possibly win at. The angle of supporting everything, supporting any device, any manufacturer, any phone, not locking people into formats or vendors. About openness, about CHOICE. But they still seem to be dominated by the old school of thought that they must own and force down the throats of others their own convoluted standards or the slightly bastardized microsoftized standards of others... and that is, because after all is said and done, they are still money grabbing unscrupulous self interested liars and thieves at the core
End Rant
Oh and just to hit the message home, someone just sent me this video link:
Link: www.youtube.com
It really needs no commentary
Playing with photos and Photomatrix Pro:
Ok so I take several photos at different shutter speeds and fstops, it seems like when you open the RAW file in Photomatrix Pro it exposes/view all of the images at some set value which is correct!!!
So for example these two:
Look the same, but they were taken are very different exposure settings, this is revealed by reducing the exposure on thei mage in post revealing that the one imagecaptured details in the lighter areas where the other didnt:
Same two images but with the exposure reduced in post. This is how image programs should behave!
Now for example lets open the same 2 images in photoshop and you will see my issue:
The one appears much brighter as photoshop views then relatively not absolutely. Which makes sense for the majority of things.
The problem is when assembling several exposures into 1 HDR image, at some genius point it shifts all the image brightness values to a centre point, an image preview white point or something, effectively turning the values into relative opposed to absolute.
Relative is nice for viewing images as you don't have to worry about exposing it properly in the viewer, however it makes HDR images USELESS! for rendering/image based lighting. It should be down to the viewer/reader to expose the image correctly but instead it appears to physically move light values around in order to bring it to a centre point for viewing.
I'm still not sure what's going on, I'm now getting the feeling that the image data recorded is kept accurate in linear pixel values and It's just the viewer converting it... It's hard to tell as I have found NO software that lets you sample a pixel and tell you It's real inear luminance value, they all tell you the relative value I think.
What I want to be able to do is take a 3D render and take a photograph and sample the actual surface luminance and check they are correct, check the sun is the right luminance, check the wall is the right luminance value for the size of room and the provided lighting.
Ok so I take several photos at different shutter speeds and fstops, it seems like when you open the RAW file in Photomatrix Pro it exposes/view all of the images at some set value which is correct!!!
So for example these two:
Look the same, but they were taken are very different exposure settings, this is revealed by reducing the exposure on thei mage in post revealing that the one imagecaptured details in the lighter areas where the other didnt:
Same two images but with the exposure reduced in post. This is how image programs should behave!
Now for example lets open the same 2 images in photoshop and you will see my issue:
The one appears much brighter as photoshop views then relatively not absolutely. Which makes sense for the majority of things.
The problem is when assembling several exposures into 1 HDR image, at some genius point it shifts all the image brightness values to a centre point, an image preview white point or something, effectively turning the values into relative opposed to absolute.
Relative is nice for viewing images as you don't have to worry about exposing it properly in the viewer, however it makes HDR images USELESS! for rendering/image based lighting. It should be down to the viewer/reader to expose the image correctly but instead it appears to physically move light values around in order to bring it to a centre point for viewing.
I'm still not sure what's going on, I'm now getting the feeling that the image data recorded is kept accurate in linear pixel values and It's just the viewer converting it... It's hard to tell as I have found NO software that lets you sample a pixel and tell you It's real inear luminance value, they all tell you the relative value I think.
What I want to be able to do is take a 3D render and take a photograph and sample the actual surface luminance and check they are correct, check the sun is the right luminance, check the wall is the right luminance value for the size of room and the provided lighting.
Just been tweaking and materializing a sofa I got from Evermotion:
Doing some material tests, so I created this weird widget for testing them... he's friendly honest, Introducing friendly material test widget guy:
Faking Color Dispersion, this is done by rendering it 3 times with slightly different IOR value. Then puting each render into R, G and B channels in photoshop.
1st = one pass, 2nd = 3 passes joined, 3rd = Post Effects
In future vray versions for C4D you should be able to do this effect in 1 render using Blend materials... which would be nice as this naturally takes 3x longer to render! and is a fiddle
The GI is quite low and is only using GI caustics so It's quite blurry.
Reference Photo:
($16 million for the above, my render cost considerably less)
And here a bigger render:
And in green:
The fancy bloom/drity lens effect is done in post by Maxwell's Simulens, render done by Vray
Faking Color Dispersion, this is done by rendering it 3 times with slightly different IOR value. Then puting each render into R, G and B channels in photoshop.
1st = one pass, 2nd = 3 passes joined, 3rd = Post Effects
In future vray versions for C4D you should be able to do this effect in 1 render using Blend materials... which would be nice as this naturally takes 3x longer to render! and is a fiddle
The GI is quite low and is only using GI caustics so It's quite blurry.
Reference Photo:
($16 million for the above, my render cost considerably less)
And here a bigger render:
And in green:
The fancy bloom/drity lens effect is done in post by Maxwell's Simulens, render done by Vray
Working on re-rendering some old engineering visualizations:
Struggled to clean up the CAD model for the above cog. It's much better but It's still got glitches in it. Render took 30 Minutes at 1920x1200 with brute force.
And some Post Work for a different look:
Struggled to clean up the CAD model for the above cog. It's much better but It's still got glitches in it. Render took 30 Minutes at 1920x1200 with brute force.
And some Post Work for a different look:
