Am 01.11.2016 um 09:38 schrieb [GDS|Enropy]:

> Once this feature is in I want to look at true displacement, which will be
> a ton of work and I won't be able to fund it alone. I think TD would buy a
> lot for both the package and the community as a whole.
> 
> There was at least one PovRay modification that supported  true
> displacement, but the way it was accomplished was to make Pov conform to
> some degree with the Renderman SL standard, and if I recall correctly it
> broke entirely with the way pov handles materials (not the pov term, but
> general).
> 
> It is dead but the source lives on courtesy of Archive.org:
>
https://web.archive.org/web/20090103185310/http://www.aetec.ee/fv/vkhomep.nsf/pages/povman2

From what I can see in that project's documentation, it only implemented
surface shaders, not displacement shaders.

Support for true displacement is extremely hard to implement for
arbitrary primitives. Probably the only reasonable way to get there is
via tesselation, i.e. converting arbitrary geometry into meshes.

Parallax mapping might be a reasonably good alternative for various use
cases.


> - A reasonable alternative to GPU raytracing is "progressive raytracing", a
> quick google search even gets you articles stating that this is far less
> complex to do than GPU but is much faster than normal RT and is advocated
> as either an alternative to GPU RT or an intermediate point between normal
> RT and a GPU implementation.

Progressive tracing should be easy enough to implement once the internal
architecture has been sufficiently cleaned up. MCPov had it, and it's
firmy on the ToDo list for UberPOV.

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