"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote:

> For instance, Maxwell has a feature
> where one can change the lighting setup *** after *** rendering so that one
> can test various lighting situations in real time.
> That's really something worth investigating for POV-Ray 4. IMHO this is
> much, much more important than SDL.

> G.

You are raising quite a good point. I do not know how it is done either, but
the way I’d do it is to save all of the info in separate places, much
like layers in 2d editing. So, store ray-object intersection in the bottom
layer, then pigment on another, normals on yet another, light on a fourth
etc. Currently POV outputs the “flattened” picture, but if it
returned the various elements instead, or simply gave access to them, one
could try some weird effects very easily (for example swapping the normals
layer with ambient layer). But most useful would be to alter the values on
one layer by simple multiplication, e.g picture is rendered and ambient
layer contains values fit for an ambient of 0.6, multiply layer’s
values by 1/0.6 to get the ambient 1 layer. The result would be practically
instantaneous, with no need to re-render the whole pic. Or one could alter
the light position and other settings and  only update the light-related
layers, without need for recalculating everything else. It could be truly
useful in cutting down the time spent waiting for test renders to finish.

*Wakes up* :-/

Still, a beautiful dream.

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