Well folks, I think I've finally done it. I've managed to successfully 
alter my luminous bloom code to accommodate POV-Ray's new .hdr file 
format. This will probably work only with the beta versions.

The attached image shows the effect. Notice the phong highlight, how it 
produces a bright, diagonal glare. The color of the highlight really 
shows up nicely. Look at the other portions of the image. Areas which 
would normally show a lot of glare now produce only a minimal effect.

The scene's objects have really low diffuse values. The yellow light 
source has an intensity of about 20, and the phong highlight has a value 
of one.

Unfortunately, .hdr images tend to render more slowly than other 
formats, and it really affects the final render time when many of them 
are averaged together in this kind of implementation.

I hope to release both new luminous bloom versions soon.

Sam

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Attachments:
Download 'lbtest_hdr1_27.jpg' (55 KB)

Preview of image 'lbtest_hdr1_27.jpg'

Here's another example of the HDR glare effect. At the top of the lamp 
shade you can see visible stair-stepping on the pixels. This happened 
during the first render pass. It would seem POV-Ray still has trouble 
antialiasing super-bright pixels. The light source inside the lampshade 
has an intensity of five.

Sam

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Attachments:
Download 'lbtest_hdr1_38.jpg' (47 KB)

Preview of image 'lbtest_hdr1_38.jpg'

This looks like something that POV-Ray could do very fast as a
post-processing step once some kind of post-processing support is added
(and this is, in fact, what I have suggested as an alternative to the
two current antialiasing methods, ie. pre-clamping and post-clamping,
both of which have their problems.)

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Warp wrote:
>   This looks like something that POV-Ray could do very fast as a
> post-processing step once some kind of post-processing support is added
> (and this is, in fact, what I have suggested as an alternative to the
> two current antialiasing methods, ie. pre-clamping and post-clamping,
> both of which have their problems.)

I'd probably focus my efforts on such post-processing effects, once the 
official version of POV-Ray supports them. It would be nice if the PP 
step was multithreaded :)

So, how is development of an extensible version of POV-Ray going, 
anyway? There was talk of the ability to add new features with a 
plugin-like system, but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

BTW, I was able to reduce the aliasing by adjusting a single value in my 
code. It will be the default from now on.

Sam

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