You know, for all 3D experts that keep coming here and telling Jim and Prolific how to do their job, why is Jim the only one doing anything that looks this good?
There are no plans for Maya (why would anyone use this to make something in DirectX that must run 60fps on a GeForce 2 MX?) or 3D Studio Max (excellent animator, horrible modeler) to be used in the creation of the 3D coral.
You are missing something for instance bump map.
http://webreference.com/3d/glossary/bump.html
Lets say to create a 2000 polygon sphere apply a bump map and you could make the sphere look like a dimpled golf ball that would nomally have 200,000 polygons. From the CPU end it is rendering a 2000 polygon sphere the graphics card does the rest of the work.
Now you are just being insulting.
You are talking to 3D artists who have been doing this for 15+ years. I think it is hilarious how everyone keeps coming in and saying that bump mapping technology will solve the world's problems. Well, no, not if your model sucks. Bump mapping is an addition, it is not its own solution. And animating a bump map is more intensive than moving geometry around. You are talking pie-in-the-sky numbers here.
2,000 polygons for a sphere? Jim is using 994
vertices for SEVEN FISH!!!
Thes are the things that will let a Pentium 4 render images in real time that look alotbertter than pixars work in "Finding Nemo".
Pixar films take weeks or months to render on server farms of 200-300 computers. Before Monsters, Inc., NOBODY had done hair that realistically before. It took days to render sequences with Sully in them.
Reichart said:
Assuming a screen res of 1024x768, and assuming the coral is about 30% of the area, then we would be talking about 260K polys. But the simple FACT is that this will not require a 1:1 ratio. Usually photo-realism can be done using between 10:1 and 30:1 ratio. Or 26K on the high side, and less than 10K on the low side.
Actually, I have had 3D coral on the brain lately. Daunting is not the word for it. When I look at a small anemone suitable for the False Percula Clown we have in the tank right now, I see ~600-900 vertices at least. And that's just one anemone! How many polygons can we push around here? Jim initially said that the the 3D background would take up "about 5 fish" worth of geometry. In my estimations, we're talking about 30 fish worth of geometry for an undemanding 3D scene.
Hmm...