Monday, September 24, 2007

crappy cgi

As I have stated previously, the world is full of horrible, shitty, or crappy CGI. Only few examples of decent cgi exist. One example of crappy cgi would be this marvel by NASA, who for the gazillion dollars they spend on launching space debris and killing shuttle crews, could really do better. One can notice in the full-sized image linked above how ugly the cracks look because they're made of triangles instead of splines. Because that's how all 3D accelerators and 3D softwarez work. Even if by the sampling theorem I accepted triangle-based rendering, by the same theorem they should have made the triangles' projections comparable in size to one fucking pixel not 30. While I'm at it, one can also see how the lack of anti-alias filtering creates too sharp a transition from crust to lava, which looks unnatural. I won't comment on the ejected dust, because that's been probably done in a hurry and besides, dust is difficult to render. I will comment on the fact that, when the image is scaled down and proper filtering is used in the process, the impact area actually looks OK. Cause the triangles are now small enough. However, if proper filtering isn't used in the process, as is currently the case with Firefox when scaling down the large version, it still looks crappy because of alias noise. There. It's fucking mathematics and it's why the first digital audio recordings were crap and it's why so much CGI is crap. Oh, and the stars are too big.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You should drink some coffee first before posting. You'll feel better.