arblick spule wrote:
> <-Feel free to ignore if I sound drunk and in the wrong newsgrooop...->

I don't think that matters much here, as long as you aren't belligerent 
and caustic :)

> 1) Ambient occlusion

Somebody made an AO patch once, can't remember who, or whether it was 
ever released to the general populous.

> 2) Environment mapping
> 3+)Separate output layers (reflection, occlusion, depth, object ID, blah, blah,
> blah)
...
> 2)  Environment mapping would allow me to only shoot the bare minimals (IE the
> walls) and then render my character (a miserable robot) without having to use
> 1800 light sources!!!
> 3)  The rest would really be useful but I don't wanna bug anyone. (8~}

Well, there are ways to do texture-baking in POV. The easiest is to use 
Rune's illusion.inc, which lets you map prerendered images onto your 
scene's geometry. You can literally save hours of render time by using 
it, but it needs proper HDR support. I sent Rune a modified version of 
his file, but realized after I had sent it that my enhancements didn't 
work correctly, as POV was mishandling the HDR format. I really need to 
get back to him about that. The downfall to using illusion.inc is that 
only the surfaces that are directly in front of the camera get rendered.

There is also the possibility for true texture-baking to meshes using 
Mega-POV. This might be accomplished by reading a mesh, gleaning all the 
necessary elements from it (vertices, triangles, UV coords, etc.), 
setting up camera pigments to view individual triangles and then 
rendering the result with an orthographic camera. In fact, I would like 
to formally challenge anyone with too much time on their hands to 
accomplish this. It can be done, I know it can!

> I say don't too caught up with the purist way of thinking.  POV is made by
> people -> people tell it what to do -> if you don't want all the "fudges", don't
> use them! -> but POV devs - don't shy away from these little gems, please!!!

I don't worry about "purist" methods myself, as my computer is too 
intolerably noisy for me to let it render for hours, weeks or days on end.

Sam

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