tc-rtc.co.uk : Picture rating system

Member : DrNo

Title	:	Fall comes up
Name	:	Normand Brière
Country	:	Canada
Email	:	#############
Webpage	:	www.noware.ca
Topic	:	The Contrast (July)
Copyright	:	Agreed - 2008-08-17 05:02:19
JPG file	:	pw-1217473283-fallcomesup.jpg
Renderer Used	:	OpenGL (ARB fragment program)
Tools used	:	Homemade JAVA software + GIMP for text annotation
Render Time	:	1 hour
Hardware Used	:	Macintosh Core 2 Duo, RadeonX1600

Image description

There is no light without darkness, no beauty without ugliness, and no good without evil. Nothing can be revealed without contrast.

The reason why the Tao cannot be named: it is written in black on black or white on white. It is not invisible, but it is not visible either, because it has no counterpart to make it known. It cannot be perceived, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

However as long as humankind dares to think that the essence must be concrete, a vicious circle runs on destroying human mind. It becomes intoxicated with opposites, and moves away from unity.

The more people esteem talent, the more they create competition. Man even succeeded to compete against naturally flying living organisms, but not without a lot of effort and failures. Unfortunately, by overlooking his own spiritual nature, which never fail, the human society gets into the twists and turns of ignorance where the quest of knowledge negates itself.

Because filling the infinity is nothing but a waste of time where no actual evolution ever takes place. Little goes less, and then none. When such a vacuum occurs, what replaces it just may cause the disintegration of that society into irrelevancy.

Fall is coming up, the Yin and Yang symbol is about to fall down, and the spirit of Lao Tzu is about to fade out. What remains won't ever be more meaningful than chaos, unless human spirit comes back up again.

(Inspired by the Tao Te Ching)

Description of how this image was created

This scene is of course based on NY Central Park which depicts an obvious contrast compared to its surrounding environment. Some further elements related to the topic were difficult to integrate into the text, namely the flag, the negative glow of Lao Tzu, the bird and Leonardo's vehicle, both of them composing a blurry foreground. The Yin and Yang symbol in the scene reveals a contrast within a contrast. Finally, the title itself is a pun that goes a long way.

Technically, the scene may look like really big, but it's not. I made some buildings and some were downloaded from public domain, but there are not that many. What I did is pseudo-random duplication which doesn't take more memory space. The Yin and Yang is made of multiple instances of the same tree. The file size is about 65 MB, but the "expanded" version of the same scene would use several GB.

The main problem was related to the memory of texture maps instead. When the graphic card seems not able to contain all textures, it leads to a major performance drop due to nonstop context switches and page faults. Instead of seconds, it took roughly one minute for rendering one sample per pixel. This is far from the maximum speed it could go. So about 1 hour was necessary for 8x8 sub-pixel samples. Unlike ray casting, adaptive oversampling is impossible with Z-buffer rasterization, but fog layers, soft shadows, and depth of field are still possible.

General statistics
No of ratings	:	14
Min. overall rating	:	21 (10 / 10 / 1)
Max. overall rating	:	44 (12 / 15 / 17)
Sum of rating	:	543 / 840
Date uploaded	:	2008-07-29 04:23:14

Specific details

Note: The maximum value below is misleading as the voting system has changed.
If the member votes for all the entries and has created one him/herself, there is an
automatic 20/20/20 score added to the value (This encourages all members who enter to vote).

Rating type

Min

Max

Sum

Out of

Artistic

177

280

Concept

183

280

Technical

183

280

Overall

543

840

Comments by members when rating this image

1.	28-08-2008	Very busy! And for some reason, the buildings with vertical striations don't work for me.
2.	27-08-2008	Another interesting image that reflects the theme fairly well. I'm not sure I follow the bird and flying machine, but neither do they distract from the general scene. I like the Yin and Yang symbolism and also the city to the greenness. Technically, it looks fairly good. The fog is effective, as is the ghostly figure. In general the city looks good and it isn't immediately obvious that there are not many building models. The sheer number of buildings is stunning. However, the ground vehicles on the left look very flat, although it could just be the very wide camera angle, I'm not sure. Also, it is quite obvious that the same model was used for all the trees. It looks like someone took a simple brush in a paint program and just dragged it around. I'd recommend rotating the model randomly before it's placed, This will break up the regularity. Still, an impressive image and a good interpretation of the theme.
3.	27-08-2008	Impressive attempt at a city scape. They aren't easy to make it look real. Similarly with the park. Because you repeated one tree the park tends to stand out and look mechanical and not organic. Other than colour it's about the same as the buildings. I'm not exactly seeing how the ghost and flyer really fit into the whole scene and concept. A tighter idea may have been working with the park where the ying is nature and the yang is the city. You could have made it less grandiose and the result would have been just as evident. Unless you really wanted to tell of the human spirit thing but that's sort of muddying the more obvious concept.
4.	18-08-2008	Nice indeed. Very believable city and well-rendered atmosphere. One thing I believe could be improved is the single tree instanced to draw the Yin Yang sign. I think it needs a bit more random rotation and scaling as the repetitive pattern is a tad too visible.
5.	17-08-2008	The park is lovely...I think you did an excellent job of portraying the yin-yang symbol with trees and the pond. That is definitely my favorite part of the image. The rest of the image suffers a bit in the artistic area, though. The ghostly figure of Lao Tzu is impossible to make out--I would not have even known what it was without the description. The blurred flying figures at the bottom draw the eye to the bottom of the image, and they are also hard to make out. A lot of the buildings look like overscaled heightfields, and the number of buildings overbalances the park in the middle. I did like the focal curvature and the distant fog and mountains. However, it seems odd that mountains like that are visible from New York City.
6.	15-08-2008	Wow - I would never have believed this image is only 350 kB! The city is really well done (maybe a bit sparse), maybe detracting attention of the theme. Maybe a little fog (or focus blur) would help there.
7.	07-08-2008	Contrast? Bird's eye view with a fish eye lens?

Fall comes up