11/20/2008

Finding perfection

Long time no see, but this one made me really laugh !

Picture yourself creating a test scene with Lightwave 3D, which Autodesk didn't buy yet. You plan to test the exact behaviour of Lightwave's Incidence Angle gradient texture layer.

Picture yourself creating a Box. The default one, using numeric values, a perfect cube, each side is 1 meter long.

Picture yourself placing this Box in a layout, where your "Classical camera" has a perfect FOV of 90°, rendering to a perfectly square 900x900 bitmap.

Picture yourself placing your Box at coordinates (0,0,0) and your camera at coordinates (0,0,-1) - so that your camera perfectly sees the whole Box - and only the whole Box.

Picture your Box having a perfect white surface, with 0% diffuse and 100% luminosity - and a pure perfect red backdrop.


Picture yourself rendering the camera view. The result is a pure perfect white image. No red pixel, perfect. There's no point for me to show this image - it's plain white.

Now, picture yourself converting the Quads of your perfect Cube to perfect Triangles, using Triple.

Picture yourself, confident, rendering again - with exactly the same perfect setup. Ah, perfection is coming again... but... wait... no... look carefully...

Perfect holes.