Christoph Hormann wrote:

>> The downside of all this is of course speed: it takes quite long for 
>> WinOSi to produce good quality image even from a simple scene.
> 
> That's an understatement.  Renderers taking this approach take extremely 
> long for any non trivial scene - a typical complex landscape would take 
> years (!!!) to render in a quality comparable to a POV-Ray render.

What do you mean by "a typical complex landscape"? Textured isosurface + 
media + global illumination? It would be nice to be able to make some 
comparisons between different methods. I'm not sure if WinOSi supports 
heightfields now (or media). It does support surfaces of the form 
z=f(x,y). Of course, landscape images are only one small area of 
raytracing. There are N other types of scenes where forward raytracing 
is the only way to get correct results.

>> BTW, are there forward renderes other than WinOSi available?
>  
> Such renderers are quite frequently used for generating reference images 
> in research - for example to demonstrate that a certain other technique 
> can generate accurate results much faster.

Do you happen to know any which have a webpage?

Severi

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