> > if POV were able to cope with multiple image channels,
>
> What is that supposed to mean now - at least it has nothing to do with
> the rest of the thread (which is about patterened finish attributes).

Either you have no experience of the texturing techniques I refer to or you
are being deliberately obtuse in not recognising what I am talking about
when I discuss mapping different images to different channels.  Yes, of
course I refer to patterned finish attributes, and bump channels as well as
colour channels.  Mapping images to these channels independently is, I hate
to say it, much more sophisticated than POV's approach.  Yes, you can do
the same thing in POV if you do a lot of fiddling, but with the feature I
outlined, specifically being able to map images independently to different
channels within a finish or normal block, the creation of multi-channel
textures in Photoshop, for example, would be as simple as it is in
expensive packages like Maya.

I also stand by my claim that this wouldn't slow down rendering beyond
eminently usable speeds, since it doesn't do so in other renderers.  Yes,
it would require a call to an image map for the specular value at a certain
point on an object (for example) but that's no more effort than making the
call to determine the colour at a point of the object; therefore it
shouldn't take any longer to render a single colour object with
image-mapped specular channel than it would to render an image-mapped
object with a single specular value.  The advantage is of course in
combining the two, in which case you could have, for example, a
colour-textured metal object with the effect of greasy fingerprints
independently produced in the reflection and specular channels.  Using UV
mapping on an object would allow a lot of control over exactly where the
fingerprint appears.  This kind of thing is trivial to achieve if the
channels can be mapped independently but very difficult with POVs current
texturing method.  Combining POVs physically realistic rendering, which is
undoubtedly powerful, with a more robust texturing scheme as used in other
modelers would result in much wider flexibility in achievable materials.

L
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