Sven-Erik Andersen <sea### [at] mailcitycom> wrote:
: I have just finished the update on the NewIOR.inc file. It now contains over
: 2850 different minerals with their IOR-values compared to the about 180 of the
: previous version. The file is available at my website at
: http://seasoft.tecbox.com. Hope it can be of any use to you.

  I don't want to undervalue your work (because it's certainly notable),
but I just wonder if that's a bit too much.
  If the iors vary from about 1.33 (water) to something like 2.4 (diamond),
2850 values between those two make quite little steps. If one mineral has
for example ior 1.95 and another has 1.96, does it make any difference in
practice? I think the image will not differ very much.
  Of course the ior values are very handy as a documentation. For example
if I want the ior of quartz (which I don't remember), I can get it from there.
The problem is that an include file with 2850 iors (I think the are #declared?)
is pretty big and takes time to parse.
  Perhaps a list of iors could be handier than an include file? One could
search for the mineral of choice and use its ior value in the scene directly,
thus saving the overhead of parsing the gigantic include file for every render
because of one or two values inside it.
  Also think about the memory consumption (I think all identifiers are
allocated into memory whether they are used or not (how could povray know if
the identifier is used later or not?)).
  An ordered list of minerals and their iors could be good.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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