Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom> wrote in news:chrishuff-
6D4### [at] netplexaussieorg

> You can't. You could render an image with an orthographic camera pointed 
> at a plane with that pattern instead though...this was the common 
> technique before the function image was added.

Yes I know, but how about a patch like

height_field { // ...
  pattern 2000,2000 { // ...
    save_data ""  load_data "" // #1
  }
  save_data ""  load_data "" // #2
} 

simmilar to photons/radiosity ? This is another thing that might strongly 
seed up rendering, and probably is easy to implement.

#1 is for every pattern (not only in HF) - just saves array of 2000x2000 
colors
#2 is for every HF (even for   tga "texture.tga"   etc) that is usefull for 
smooth HFs - it saves normal informations. Informations are stored before 
appling transforms so it is easy to transform HF and load data.

Any comments ? Is it worth coding ?

I.e. simple scene with 3000x3000 HF with complex pattern function (for 
generating interesting moutains) in 640x480 took about 60 s to parse and 
only 10 to render (on Athlon 1,7)

-- 
#macro g(U,V)(.4*abs(sin(9*sqrt(pow(x-U,2)+pow(y-V,2))))*pow(1-min(1,(sqrt(
pow(x-U,2)+pow(y-V,2))*.3)),2)+.9)#end#macro p(c)#if(c>1)#local l=mod(c,100
);g(2*div(l,10)-8,2*mod(l,10)-8)*p(div(c,100))#else 1#end#end light_source{
y 2}sphere{z*20 9pigment{function{p(26252423)*p(36455644)*p(66656463)}}}//M

Post a reply to this message