We are happy to announce the availability of the beta version of MegaPOV 
1.2.  As with the last release this is going to be a short beta test 
phase to check for possible problems not found during development and 
internal testing.

You can get the new version from:

http://megapov.inetart.net/

What's new in this version:

- Area light trace level control
- Bicubic interpolation for image maps
- New features in the mechanics simulation patch
- Custom tone mapping feature
- Radiosity improvements
- Several bug fixes

Please report problems found while using this beta version to 
povray.unofficial.patches.

Note this version is based on the latest official release (3.6.1) and 
not on the multithreaded official version (3.7) currently in development 
and beta testing.  A POV-Ray 3.6.1 installation is required for using 
MegaPOV.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 03 May. 2005 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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I'm glad to see that MegaPOV continues to progress; the tone mapping and
radiosity improvements are especially attractive.

This beta (or the windows version, at least) seems to have the same problem
that the official 3.6.1 release has with macros that change the values of
arguments passed by reference - sometimes the macro arguments are not
altered. Will this be fixed in MegaPOV 1.2, or will it wait until after
official release 3.7?

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Tom York wrote:
> I'm glad to see that MegaPOV continues to progress; the tone mapping and
> radiosity improvements are especially attractive.
> 
> This beta (or the windows version, at least) seems to have the same problem
> that the official 3.6.1 release has with macros that change the values of
> arguments passed by reference - sometimes the macro arguments are not
> altered. 

That's very likely since MegaPOV 1.2 is based on POV-Ray 3.6.1.  There 
isn't any bug report concerning this i know of - if there is indeed a 
problem with this please post a minimal test scene and explain what 
should be different.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 03 May. 2005 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> We are happy to announce the availability of the beta version of MegaPOV
> 1.2.  As with the last release this is going to be a short beta test

I am happy to tell you that, while I haven't run any specific tests of any
new features, (Linux) MegaPOV v1.2 rendered a somewhat complicated project
of mine (memory stamp 150M, 25k objects,
arealights/radiosity/photons/media/...) without a hiccup.

Great work, thanks a lot!

--
jussi

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"jute" <nomail@nomail> wrote in
news:web.42a54f90d96b0b668b1af6ef0@news.povray.org: 

> I am happy to tell you that, while I haven't run any specific tests of
> any new features, (Linux) MegaPOV v1.2 rendered a somewhat complicated
> project of mine (memory stamp 150M, 25k objects,
> arealights/radiosity/photons/media/...) without a hiccup.

Similar result here. I also tried out some of the adaptive radiosity 
features on an existing project. They're fast. Very fast!

Tom

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Hi Christoph,

I've been reading through the online documentation for the new additions and
they look really good!

One thing I couldn't find was the description for adding mass-specific
forces. I assume that you declare a list of vector-functions and then index
the appropriate one in the mass declaration, but do these functions take
any special parameters?

I'll go and play with the radiosity settings now ... :-)

Mike Andrews.

Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> We are happy to announce the availability of the beta version of MegaPOV
> 1.2.  As with the last release this is going to be a short beta test
> phase to check for possible problems not found during development and
> internal testing.
>
> You can get the new version from:
>
> http://megapov.inetart.net/
>
> What's new in this version:
>
> - Area light trace level control
> - Bicubic interpolation for image maps
> - New features in the mechanics simulation patch
> - Custom tone mapping feature
> - Radiosity improvements
> - Several bug fixes
>
> Please report problems found while using this beta version to
> povray.unofficial.patches.
>
> Note this version is based on the latest official release (3.6.1) and
> not on the multithreaded official version (3.7) currently in development
> and beta testing.  A POV-Ray 3.6.1 installation is required for using
> MegaPOV.
>
> Christoph
>
> --
> POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
> HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
> Last updated 03 May. 2005 _____.//^>_*_<^/.______

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Mike Andrews wrote:
> 
> One thing I couldn't find was the description for adding mass-specific
> forces. I assume that you declare a list of vector-functions and then index
> the appropriate one in the mass declaration, but do these functions take
> any special parameters?

No, the sample scene glow_sim.pov demonstrates use of custom forces.  It 
is quite similar to using attachments.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 03 May. 2005 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Tom York wrote:
> 
> Similar result here. I also tried out some of the adaptive radiosity 
> features on an existing project. They're fast. Very fast!

Note while it is possible that the radiosity patches enable you to do 
much faster renders in some cases there is no magic in there - faster 
renders often also mean lower quality results and you still need time 
for good quality.

The effect of the adaptive error_bound is a bit similar to minimum_reuse 
- but less prone to blatant errors and better to control.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 03 May. 2005 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> Note while it is possible that the radiosity patches enable you to do
> much faster renders in some cases there is no magic in there - faster
> renders often also mean lower quality results and you still need time
> for good quality.

Hey man ... what ever you can take away from my SDT (Scene Developement
Time) ... please take it :D

currently playing with radiosity show_samples and max_trace_level 1 for
area_lights.

--
jussi

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