Roman Reiner wrote:

> Hello altogether!
> 
> I was wondering if it could be possible in any future version to use
> functions and patterns in the finish block. If so there would be much more
> flexibility in creating stunning material appearances. Other than that
> already supported image- and bump maps one could then in particular make
> use of ambient-, specular- and diffuse maps that come along with many
> texture packs and add a lot to the quality of the appearance of an surface.
> 
> There is already the possibility to work around that by layering two
> textures with appropriate (e.g.) reflection values on top of each other
> where the upper one uses the appropriate map as an alpha channel. But this
> gets ugly when several maps are being used and slows down the render and
> parsing time.
> 
> What do you think?

While normals and pigments can be represented with a short vector 
(pigments have 5 values, normals have three), finish statements involve 
a larger number of data (ambient, diffuse, phong (and its associated 
specs), specular (with roughness), brightness, metallic, etc).  That 
shouldn't be a show-stopper from a programming viewpoint.

Maybe this is planned for V4,maybe not.

Of course, if you download the latest sources and code up a working 
version, I'm sure the development team will at least read it.

Regards,
John

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